Plagued with latter wit

I don't know what I was thinking the other day. I told you all about the excellent service from Modern Knitting and about how the postman is wise to my yarn-buying ways but I failed to give you a picture of the yarn.

This is the Tropical Fish:



and this the Fuchsia:



Luscious.

The Tropical Fish is probably going to be the Spiralling Socks from the latest "The Knitter"; the Fuchsia, I'm not so sure about. All suggestions gratefully received.

I just thought I'd try to find you a link to the Spiralling Socks, unsuccessfully, as it turns out. However, while making the attempt, I came across these Celtic Spiral Socks. That's a Ravelry link, so if you aren't on Ravelry, you need to sign up immediately, or you could just go directly to the pattern chart. Obviously not suitable for this fancy yarn but very striking, nevertheless.

I am, however, getting ahead of myself. I have completed the first Jack Sparrow II for #1 son:



I made even more modifications to the pattern. I still used a toe-up construction, because that's what I like. I know there are some people out there who cannot abide the toe-up sock, nor the magic loop (you know who you are) but you will just have to bear with me on this one.

One of the joys of knitting toe-up is that you have plenty of time to work out what your gauge is before you get anywhere near needing to know this information. Twelve rows before it was time to begin the heel, I started to increase one stitch at each end of every other row on the sole stitches. I increased a total of twelve stitches, which is an arbitrary sort of a number but happened to be the number of stitches I was going to leave unwrapped in the centre of the heel.

I worked a short-row heel as normal on half the original number of stitches. Then I began to work in the round again and decreased away the twelve extra stitches, one at each of the heel on every other row.

Here it is complete:



The addition of those few stitches just adds sufficient room to make it unnecessary to be pulling and tugging and squirming about to get the sock on the foot.

Temperature here at the moment is 91F/33C, so it's a completely academic question - there will be no wearing of socks in this household for quite a while yet.