Last night I took a break from Starsky to knit on socks. This cute pattern, ‘A Pair of Hearts’, was created recently by Donna of Random Knits and when she made it available yesterday I decided to cast on straight away.

So far an easy, fun knit. I’ve reduced the number of stitches to 56, and because the hearts are to one side of the foot enlarging or reducing makes almost no difference to the pattern.

I’m not usually this spontaneous. But lately I’ve got so many sock pattern lined up and I’ve been unable to decide which to start. It was going to be Froot Loops, then the Edelweiss Socks, then Coriliolisleiolis (or whatever it is) from the Cat Bordhi book. Each time before I got a chance to cast on something another pattern would come and grab my attention. And what I really wanted was something simple enough to be knit in waiting rooms or the car.

The other reason I was hesitating to start the Cori-ahstuffitletscallthem-Spiral Socks is that to use the New Pathways book you have to go to the back and do some sums and measurements to get your base numbers and I just hadn’t roused enough enthusiasm to. And you have to work out gauge, too. For every yarn you pick up. Urg.

But after knitting a few repeats of the Pair of Hearts socks (which I’m calling the ‘I Love Patonyle’ Socks) I realised that I could work it all out using Patonyle as a base yarn. More than half my stash is Patonyle, and if I pick up another yarn I’ll just compare the wraps per inch and adjust to compensate for any differences.

So I measured up gauge and whipped out my foot measurements and got stuck into doing the math. All was fine until I got to the toe length equasion, where I ended up with a 20cm toe. After some frustration and puzzlement, I finally worked out that a part of the equasion was in inches. It didn’t say it was in inches, and there are inch to cm conversions throughout the rest of the instructions to encourage you to let your guard down. As you can imagine, there was some cursing at this point.

When that was all sorted, I flipped to the sock pattern. Which told me to go to the back of the book for instuctions on a specific toe. Which then told me to go to the front of the book for instructions of a specific cast on. At this point I was muttering more curses, thinking I could get the book spiral bound, and wishing I had a truckload of post-it notes.

Following the instructions, I ended up with four needles bound together with six stitches with four stitch markers between them.

It was like knitting with a cranky echidna with piercings.

Toe up socks need not be this difficult and tortuous. I began to suspect this was some conspiracy to set new sock knitters on the 2 circs bandwagon, from which they’ll forever look down on dpns as backward and difficult.

Well, I’m not a new knitter, it’s downright impossible to get long enough 2.25 mm non-metal circs in Australia (and I still can’t bring myself to buy anything KnitPicks), and heck, I like knitting with dpns. So in the next round I got rid of the stitch markers and moved two lots of stitches to one needle. The increases are logical and I find it easier to remember where the start of a row is with three needles.

At last all was going smoothly. By then it was 11pm and my back was aching from hunching over the book and my work, so I packed it all away and went to bed, content in the knowledge those socks were behaving themselves – for now.

Hungry? Here are some cookies I made yesterday using a different recipe:

The beau found a couple of fruit flavourings so I tried them out in the icing. Wow. Those things are mostly alcohol! But they’re very strong, so I doubt you’d want to drink them.