Yarn: My hand-dyed gradient 4ply, approx 100g.
Needle: 2.5mm
After I dyed the gradient red/cream sock yarn, I couldn't wait to start knitting with it! So, I dug out a pair of 2.5mm circulars out, and cast on! I decided to put the darker red at the bottom as it would hopefully hold up better to wear and general grubbiness that socks have to deal with.
This was the first time I have done an actual afterthought heel. Normally I leave a line of contrasting yarn where I intend to put the heel, but as I didn't know exactly how long I was going to knit these socks (I wanted to use the whole gradient!) I had to do it properly.
Once I had finished the main sock body, I decided where the heel needed to be based on that.
Since I'm a bit of a stickler for my socks matching, I counted the number of rows so that I could replicate it for the second sock.
Yarn Harlot describes how to do the afterthought heel much more eloquently than I could.
And there you go. Gradient socks, uninterrupted gradient, genuinely afterthought heel.
A note about afterthought heels
Afterthought heels are especially useful if you want to preserve a stripe sequence or colour flow. Normally if you work a heel in a self-striping yarn as part of the knitting of the body of the sock you get an interruption to the stripes where the heel takes up some of the stripes. You can see this on the below picture where the brown stripes narrow over the top of the foot where the heel has been worked.
So, to avoid this, if you knit the heel afterwards you can be sure to preserve the stripes. The other way is to stop at the end of a stripe, knit the heel and then wind off the yarn to the next sensible place to start once the heel is done. This seems wasteful to me, and wouldn't work on a gradient like this.
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