A very good question

Pam asked a very good question in the comments of the last post. She wanted to know why the socks I made were so short. The reason is different for each pair, and I'll tell you why. Ben's socks are short because I hated the yarn and wanted to be done with them. So knitting from the toe up, I cast off as soon as I possibly could to get them over with. For my Parasol socks, it's a bit different. The pattern was written from the cuff down, and when you knit socks cuff-down you have to be very careful that you leave enough yarn to finish off the foot. Since I have large feet, I made sure to leave more than enough just to be safe. Thus, the short leg. For the ribbed pair pictured a couple of posts down, the blue ones that I'm obviously knitting toe-up, they will be much longer in the leg because I can complete the foot, then just knit away on the leg until the yarn is about gone. I'm working on the leg now, and I'd say they're at least an inch or two longer than the lacy ones so far, and still plenty of yarn to go. So those will be longer and more to Pam's liking. I personally don't wear knee socks, so they won't be that long, but they'll at least come up to the bottom of my calf. The ribbing is very stretchy too, and they look very nice when I try them on. That's another benefit to knitting toe-up: you can try them on for fit much more easily. Thanks for the question, Pam! I love to talk about knitting and try to get others interested in it. Socks seem like a pretty hard thing to knit at first, but once you learn the basics of their construction they are really quite easy and fun.