Progress? Not sure yet.

Well, for about 10 minutes last night, I thought I was a genius super knitter. Then I was brought low by the heels of the ASA socks. Now I'm wavering on the brink of ripping the whole foot of the sock out and doing something different with the heel.

Our story so far: I got special dispensation to work on A Step Above socks last night while watching Angel (thank you, sweetie!). In 1 hour, I managed to make it all the way through the toe on the first sock, hurray! The variagation on the toes turned out very nicely. And it was good.

Fresh from this victory, I started removing the waste yarn to insert the heel. Oh man, oh man, oh man. I have made mittens & gloves, I've done an afterthought heel before. I am not frightened of waste yarn. But I had not counted on the difficulties posed by the short rows that form the triangles surrounding the heel opening. I struggled. I hunched. I cursed. I picked up about half the required stitches and stopped for the night. Here's the progress photo showing the half-picked up heel:

[Edited at 5:00, forgot picture link]

At this point, I'm just short of deciding that there is no way to successfully get all the stitches. I am thinking of ripping back to the heel (No, Slippy, nooooooo!). It really seems like I ought to be able to do the same short-row "hour glass" heel we did for the 2S2C project in July. Surely that would be better than the nonsense I'm inventing now. And not only does picking up the stitches suck suck suck out loud... I also discovered a very bad split **right** at the corner of the heel opening, where the stretch will be the worst. And I have also turned against the toe decreases. Toe is really no biggie, I can do it up again in an hour or so. But the other two problems may spell doom for the foot. I'm just totally pissed off that the super genius knitter feeling only lasted about 15 minutes, between finishing the grafting and about the 10th stitch picked up at the heel.

This morning I did my make-up knitting on OXO, completing a second repeat of the pattern. 20 cm to go!