Standard Socks IV

Now, if, like me, you're knitting socks with self-striping yarn, you'll find that you've got a problem at the heel. Here is what happens: when working the heel, you leave the front stitches alone, you knit the heel, then you join the heel stitches and the front ones and proceed to knit in the round. The problem is that when you finally join the stitches and restart knitting the front stitches, you are in a completely different section of the colour pattern of your yarn, so you get a (possibly quite ugly) irregularity on the stripe pattern exactly where your sock is the most visible. There are a few ways to deal with this problem.

• No fix (aka extremely lazy) solution: if the stripes on the yarn you're using are quite irregular, and even if they're not, you can always choose to ignore this problem and proceed as if it does not exist. 
• partial fix (aka the one I've picked) solution: pick a new strand of yarn to work the heel. You can use the same yarn (this is what I've done) or a different yarn with a matching colour. Very beautiful results are obtained when using a solid colour that matches one of the colours in the main yarn. In this case you can knit the cuff, the heel and the toes in a solid colour and the body in self-striping yarn. I've taken a photo from this project on Ravelry to illustrate this, I hope its owner won't mind (quite sincerely, I can't imagine why she/he would). Why is this fix only partial?, because, as long as you've a gusset, the extra stitches on the gusset will result on the stripes being a lot thinner than they should in this region. As you can see in the photo this is kind of a minor problem.
• total fix solution: use a different strand of yarn while working the heel and in addition follow a sock recipe without a gusset. There are a number of these available. The toe-up socks I've described on this post is a good example (you'll have to change it a bit: use the main yarn strand instead of the heel strand to work the full rounds in between the short-row sections, or, if you don't like the result, avoid working the full rounds completely simply turning instead). The good news is that the heel recipe I used there is perfectly reversible, i.e. you can follow exactly the same short-row procedure, whether you're working the socks cuff-down or toe-up.