I got off my lazy butt, and I wrote up the pattern for the “A Pair of Hearts” Socks. You can just click on that link, or you can find the pattern up there in the top right hand corner of your screen.
Warning: I read it over, and it looked alright to me, but it has not yet been test knit, so it may be chock full of errors. I’m hoping not.
The other little picture I showed you a glimpse of in my last post was Elijah‘s head! This is going to be another gift for a friend, as is Sophie. I will have to pry them away from Emily first, though!
Elijah has grown a little in the past two days.

Ysolda is a genius. The patterns are so well written and have very helpful pictures, I highly recommend them! Picking up stitches on stuffed bodies is a little fiddly, but very worthwhile.
I have also bought the pattern for Otto, but he’s a polar bear, and will be mine, all mine! (I guess that means I’d better knit Em a Sophie then, huh?)
Speaking of Sophie, it occurred to me when I was taking a picture of Elijah that I hadn’t actually taken a picture of Sophie finished.

So I rectified that little oversight!

Well, it didn’t happen in July, but on August 1, I finished the socks I have dubbed “A Pair of Hearts”.

And I’m very happy with them!
It is a pattern I came up with myself, and I’ll try to get it written up soon. They’re being modelled by Emily, because they’re a gift for someone, and my feet are too big!
Specs:
Pattern: My own
Needles: 2mm Crystal Palace DPNS
Yarn: Patons Australia Patonyle sock yarn. The yarn is so new I can’t even link to it, it’s not on the site yet!
A rep from ACS got in touch with me and asked if I’d like some of the yarn to review, and I jumped at the chance. Patonyle has been around for years, but was discontinued last year, much to the discontent of Aussie sock knitters.
They heard our cries of outrage, and are now rereleasing it, but this time it will be available in 100g balls instead of the old 50g balls.
And the verdict? It’s the same old Patonyle! (Is that a hallelujah I hear?) It’s an 80/20 wool/nylon blend, and it’s a workhorse yarn in my opinion. I have a pair of Patonyle socks that I dyed up in stripes back in April 2006. Those socks have been worn a lot. I even wear my hand knit socks outside, without shoes to take out the garbage and hang the washing. They’ve been tossed into the washing machine a thousand times, and even into the dryer a time or ten, and they still look great.
It has great stitch definition.

And it stands up to frogging well, too. I started a different design with the yarn, but it wasn’t coming out the way I’d hoped, so I frogged them and started over. The yarn behaved beautifully!

I’m told it will be available in Spotlight stores from September (unlikely at my crappy local, though!), and in LYS early next year, with a RRP of $15 a ball.
Unfortunately, the colour range is still the same, too, at least to start with. I’m going to toss these socks into a dye pot and turn them into something pretty, but I have been assured that the colour range is going to be expanded and improved next year.
Hopefully it will take dye just like it used to, which is another point in it’s favour! There is also a rumour that it will be released in an undyed version! (Is there any bad news about it?!?)
To celebrate finishing the socks, I cast on for something new.

Not socks, but it’s cuuuuute!

So far this year, I have had a vague aim of finishing at least a pair of socks a month. It’s not a firm goal or anything, but the realisation that even if I manage this, it will still take at least five years to work through my sock stash, has sort of kept me to it so far.
January’s socks were the Shibui socks, February’s project (just barely) were my Baudelaire’s, and March’s were Emily’s Monkey socks, although they weren’t finished until early April. April’s socks were the Anastasia socks for my Mum for Mother’s Day, and in May, I knit David some Opal 6 ply socks, and June’s project was the gorgeous Kitri Socks.
It’s 10.45pm on July 31. There’s still time to finish my Patonyle socks this month!

(If I get off the computer, that is.)

I got my computer back! And it appears to be fixed, hooray!
To celebrate, lets have some blogger fodder. I first saw this on Andrea’s blog, then on Lara’s, and it looked like fun, so I took the opportunity to throw some questions at David.
Me: What is your favourite thing about my knitting?
David: The output as it pertains to me.
Me: What is your least favourite thing about my knitting?
D: Having half of the couch off limits. (It’s not really, but I tend to spread my stuff around and he’s afraid he’ll sit on a DPN)
Me: What is something I have knitted, that you recall as good?
D: Any of my socks, which I wear every day.
Me: Do you think knitters have an expensive hobby?
D: Well, it’s not as expensive as some.
Me: You don’t have any hobbies really, do you?
D: Not really.
Me: Do you have a stash of any kind?
D: Yes, I have a stash of downloads I’ll never install and a stash of PDF’s I’ll never read.
Me: Have I ever embarrassed you, knitting in public?
D: No.
Me: Do you know my favourite kind of yarn?
D: Um, alpaca? You liked the Llama yarn you used.
Me: Can you name another blog?
D: Sandy’s Knitting. I know the blogger’s names, not the names of the blogs. Wendy Knits!
Me: Do you mind my wanting to stop at knit shops wherever we go?
D: No.
Me: Do you understand the importance of a swatch?
D: Yes, it’s very important to have a fashionable watch!
Me: Do you read Random Knits?
D: Yes.
Me: Have you ever left a comment?
D: Yes, usually in my own defence!
Me: Do you think the house would be cleaner if I didn’t knit?
D: [With a snort] No.
Me: Anything you’d like to add?
D: No.
It’s nice to know that he’s kind of paying attention! Maybe I should put the same questions to Em and see what she comes up with.

So I’ve been a little more absent than usual this week, because I’ve been without my computer since Tuesday. I’d hoped that all that extra time I was going to have because I wasn’t on Ravelry or reading blogs meant that there was going to be hordes of knitting to blog about.
Instead I came don horrendously sick on Wednesday, and spent Wednesday and Thursday in bed, sleeping and clutching my poor aching head.
I have no idea why I keep coming down with these illnesses this year.
There has been knitting though.
On Tuesday, I started knitting Ysolda Teague’s Sophie.
Tuesday night I got the head done and started on the body.

It’s a great little pattern, and super quick! Picking up the stitches for the body wasn’t too bad, either. But there she laid, until Friday when I finally picked up my knitting again. After that, it was zoom, zoom, zoom!
Saturday morning she looked like this.

Picking up stitches for the arms got a little fiddly, with the legs and head getting in the way, but once you get to the ears, the arms look like a piece of cake.

Yup. Then you have to knit those stitches in the round. They were laughing at me at Stitch n Bitch yesterday afternoon!
But it’s all worth it in the end.

All she needs is her face. I’ve used Sublime Cashmere Merino Silk DK to knit her, and she’s lovely and soft and cuddly.
I showed her to Twinkie, but she was unimpressed. That may be because she’s in disgrace right now, for eating Emily’s science experiment. Apparently the science teacher was not impressed by Emily’s excuse of “My rabbit ate my homework!”
But having a pet rabbit is a wonderful thing. Especially when they save your life when your house is on fire. Go Rabbit!!