I’m planning to knit a pair of socks with a peasant heel this winter. (One of the socks from the Knitting Marveous Mittens books, that uses a Komi colorwork pattern that continues down the heel and toe.) I think what I’m going to do to ensure the sock is the correct length is knit the heel before I’m close to finishing the foot. That way, I know how long the heel/toe will be, and can properly try the sock on before deciding when to start the toe decreases.

I really like my basic heel flap heels with gussets. (I wear out socks at the back of the heel, and can use the extra padding from a slip stitch heel flap.) But this technique looks like a real winner for colorwork socks.

The reasons I’d like to “do the math” are I don’t want to either break the yarn and have an end to weave in or to have two balls of yarn hanging while I knit the heel. With self patterning yarn, I especially don’t want to break the yarn because it interupts the pattern.

Granted, these aren’t big deals– they are matters of preference. So, my sock calculator is going to “do the math” by counting up the rows and finding the lenght based on the row gauge. That means, I’ll have to make people enter their row gauge so the program gets a *very good* estimate of the added length from both the toe and heel length. (For some other sock designs, a half way decent estimate of the row gauge is good enough so people only need to enter the stitch gauge.)