The new Knitty is here! I'm a somebody!

So I've had not one, but two patterns become blog-about-able in the past week-ish. I'm practically giddy from all this revelation! The latest pattern is Celtic Triad, which appears in the newest issue of Knitty. It's a sock pattern, which takes advantage of my Hat-Heel Sock construction to put cables in nifty spots on the feet. I must warn people that the pickup parts are quite fiddly, and it requires that a lot of the cable crosses be done on the WS. So it's definitely not for the impatient. But I think the end product is pretty cool, so I hope there are some knitters who end up going for it. Here's what it looks like:

With the optional third cable on the top of the foot:

Without the optional third cable:

Now that it's out, I can also show you the first-iteration prototype I made for my husband a while back:

(Much to his distress, these were almost ripped to shreds at the heel by his old sneakers. Naturally, he stopped wearing the socks immediately after he discovered this problem, and also got new shoes. I'm currently in the process of ripping them out and re-knitting them. The socks, that is, not the shoes. :)

And I can also show you the prototype I made for my own feet. Or, rather, am making...I never really finished the pair.

This pattern was the first of a number of ideas I've had swirling around in my head for nifty things that can be done using the hat-heel construction, and I hope that it can start to demonstrate what's possible with socks that are made like this. While of course it's true that you can't have a pattern that goes all the way from top to toe on a hat-heel sock, you can do other cool stuff with a hat-heel that you can't do with a more traditionally-constructed sock, and this kind of cabling is an example of that. I'm going to keep testing out my ideas for what else can be achieved with this construction, and I hope other people are inspired to think of more.