Hem Success at Last!!!

They say that pride goeth before the fall, and that is certainly true here. It's amazing what a few hours sleep on the start of a four day weekend will do for the knitting soul {especially a four day weekend that's *actually* on a weekend}!!!

Man oh man, when will I ever learn to stop overthinking things and Just Do It? I was fighting with the hem on my SSS yesterday, and gave up before I got too frustrated {this *was* smart of me BTW}. Today I went back to trying again and tried about three different ways of doing the hem before I was ready to frog it yet again and to a provisional cast on. Mental note: Do a provisional cast on for any subsequent hemmed socks. The only thing I hadn't tried was to pick up the stitches through what I'm calling the "back loop" of my cast on. I thought it would look funny, or shift over the hem half a stitch. Firstly, the last attempt at a hem {before the back loop attempt} was picking up the stitches through the first row of knitting, which made for a REALLY obvious seam, and would probably be uncomfortable as all get out. That is what made me consider the provisional cast on. Then I had what I call a Harlot moment, and decided that the possibility of having the hem HALF A BLOODY STITCH off wasn't worth the provisional, and I should give it a try anyway. Well, you can all guess now what happened? IT WORKED!!! I promptly took pictures of the whole process, and am now documenting it here. No, I'm not trying to say to you all that this is the way you should do it, I have absolutely *no* visions of knitting grandeur here, I'm simply having a written record of how the hell *I* did it so that I can do it this way again when I make the second sock! However, feel free to go ahead and copy this for yourselves if you so feel the desire to follow a nut like me!

Here I used my 2.25 mm Boye dpn to pick up the back loop of my cast on. I had started my cast on where the red met the white and charcoal jacquard section. My first attempts were to pick up the red stitches, which were actually the "long tail" of my long tail cast-on.

Once the initial 4 or 5 picked up stitches were worked in, I could simply pick up the yarn through the stitches of the cast-on on my own. This made the rest of the hem a lot faster to work, except with the last few stitches which were a bit fussy, but nothing worth using my extra dpn for.

Here is the hem completely joined, and the first round of stockinette knitted.

This is a close-up of the now-joined hem. It's difficult to tell truly how flat this hem turned out, but I'm very pleased.