February 1st:
These socks don’t come off your feet when you sleep! :D Others, in my experience, do.

January 31st:
Finishing my second sock I was happy to notice that I only had to weave in 3 extra yarn ends (compared to your regular toe-up or leg-down socks) because of the changes I made to the pattern. The first sock had 5 extra yarn ends, and that’s not too bad either, in my opinion. The sock simply fits so well I think the end results are well worth the extra trouble.

For binding off I used the invisible bind off as described in The Ultimate Knitting Bible by Sharon Brant, and it seems to be working alright.

January 27:
I made a few observations about the pattern while knitting the first sock, and now that I knitted the second heel I did a couple of things differently.

First of all, after finishing the “hat” part, I moved the 16 stitches not used for the gussets onto safetypins right away, removing quite a lot of what I felt was unnecessary fiddling around with separate yarns.

Then, after I knitted the first gusset, I put the 2 stitches left from it onto a third safety pin and knitted the second gusset. When it was done, I moved the waiting 2 stitches back on a needle (thinking back on it, they could’ve stayed on that needle the whole time) and then I grafted the gussets together without breaking the yarn I had knitted the second gusset with. I used the leftover yarn from the first gusset to graft the two gussets together.

In the first sock I didn’t bother grafting the stitches until I had finished the whole sock, and it can be done, but the result is a little bit tidier if you do it before knitting the foot and the leg.

Then, starting from the top of the first gusset I knitted, I picked up the stitches along the edge of the gusset, knitted them, picked up 8 stitches from the safetypin, knitted them, picked up the stitches along the edge of the second gusset, knitted them, and continued in the round.

This eliminated the hole that appeared in the first sock at the base of the gusset, where I joined in the yarn to start knitting the foot in the round. Also, not cutting the yarn at the top of the second gusset also means less yarn ends to deal with when the sock if finished. It’s a win win! And I can think of no reason to start knitting the foot from the base of the gusset.

The pattern had parts in it that were a bit fiddly, but I found that changing the things I mention above made it a lot more simple for me. The result is a sock that just fits perfectly. I will definitely use this way to construct a sock in the future.