oh hey one more really stupid sock construction before i go: tablet woven heel band! this pair is a christmas gift for a good friend so i'm not modeling them myself, but the water bottle works ok. (i am not immune to a non-knitter who appreciates and actually wears hand-knit items, and my friend, god love him, lacks the good sense to tell me to quit giving him weird stuff, so here we are.)
i can't find the post now, but i remember seeing someone on here tablet-weave a color transition for... a sweater? a shawl? i don't even remember anymore. anyway, the idea was still knocking around in my head when i found the squircle sock pattern, which starts with a cuff in the round, adds a very long and narrow heel flap (only 6 stitches wide!), and picks up stitches on either side of it to work in the round again. this monstrosity replaces the original garter stitch heel flap with a short tablet-woven band grafted onto the back of the cuff. to "pick up stitches" along the side, i wove each section with some slack in the weft, using a couple dpns to keep things even (looking back, i don't think i actually used the weft loops themselves as the "slipped stitches," because you can already see the warp twists kind of coming undone along the sides of the dpn-less section in the bottom photo? i think i ran another bit of scrap thread through those loops, tightened the slack out of the weft, used the scrap thread as the slipped stitches, and then tightened those loops out too once i'd gotten a couple rounds into the rest of the sock to get the knitted stitches flush with edges of the woven band.)
things i would do differently if i made these again: tablet weaving is a twined weaving style, so it's a bit thick, and it gets even thicker when you have to weave in the ends. this pattern uses 18 tablets with 4 threads each, for a total of 18 x 4 x 2 x 2 = 288 total ends that need weaving in, which as you can imagine is Deeply And Profoundly Unfun. i might do a missing-hole tablet woven pattern (which the "dublin dragons" motif is supposed to be anyway, but i wanted three colors to match the flag stripes), or i might do a baltic pickup band instead, which should reduce the bulk a bit.
