Crochet socks, the finale

Ta-dah!  Finished socks!  In all honesty, I have some mixed feelings about them.  Some is from the nature of the sock, some from my execution, but all around, I'm fairly pleased with them.  They are very warm, mostly fit right, and look pretty.  In a nutshell, the things that were just me:

• I should have used a slightly smaller hook.  Oops.
• Despite careful measuring, I managed to make the cuff both slightly too big and shorter than I wanted.
• I should have left a longer tail when I started - it would have made the seaming bit go much more smoothly.
• This is actually something I did right... but crochet socks fit better with less negative ease than one would normally build into a knit sock.  Probably because the stitches are more textured, and while it is just as stretchy as my knit socks, the more you stretch any fabric the more the stitches start to feel like little pebbles in your shoe. 

The main not my fault issue with these socks is the texture of the sole.  They do not feel like knit socks!  It's rather like walking around on one of those foot massaging mats that used to be so popular.  Some people will love it, some people will hate it.  I have mixed feelings about it, and actually rather prefer them inside a shoe to just walking around in socks, and have a definitely preference for the single crochet portions (the heel and toe) over the crunch stitch portions.  Advantages?  They are extremely warm, much warmer than socks knit with similar yarn, and really not that much thicker (they are still perfectly comfortable in my sneakers).  They worked up very quickly, and that included a lot of seaming.  A crochet sock in the round would be even faster.  Crochet as usual has it for pretty but easy to do stitch patterns - I liked what the crunch stitch did with my variegated yarn, and it was pleasantly mindless.

So, in summary, I like my crochet socks.  I will probably wear them frequently.  But I haven't decided yet whether I want to do it again.  What I think I REALLY want is a way to make a sock with a knit sole but a crochet instep and cuff.  Which I will have to think really hard about.  Maybe my Ravelry-fu is lacking, but I can't find any such pattern.  Sigh.