The Mermaids are the only socks I love enough to have knitted three times, for myself. :-)

Cool Socks, Warm Feet is one of those books that really taught me a lot about sock knitting. It’s worth buying for the how-to section in the back of the book alone, even if you don’t work with a lot of self-patterning and self-striping yarns. The difficulty rating the book gives this sock is the highest in the book, “Sock Goddess,” but I think it’s far easier than that. I admit that seven years ago when I made my first pair of these, the Estonian Fishtail pattern gave me fits, and now I’m not quite sure why, except that maybe at the time I was caught up with always knowing where my EOR was, and there’s no way you can do that with this pattern, just no way. You have to wing it. And while the short-row heel is easy to splice in, the only toe worth knitting here is the spiral toe: it looks better, and I’m just not that invested in perfectly placing a wedge toe on a sock without a wedge in sight. :)