Cairi’s Sweetheart

Because who needs flowers and chocolates when you can have handknitted socks?

Pattern: Cairi’s Sweetheart, my own, available HERE
Yarn: Lorna’s Laces Shepherd Sock, “Valentine” colourway, two skeins. There was a lot of yarn left over! If you did one less pattern repeat on each leg, or have small feets, you could easily get away with using one skein.

When Cairi gave me two skeins of lovely Lorna’s Laces yarn for Christmas in a colourway called Valentine, it was crying out to be made into splendidly clichéd socks!

I haven’t managed to learn toe-up socks as yet, so I needed to find a pattern that could be knit “upside down”. Enter the Harmony Guides! I do whinge repeatedly about their lack of charts and tiny swatch photos, but they had the perfect pattern: “Inverted Hearts”. The original pattern had stocking stitch hearts with reverse-stocking stitch diamonds inbetween. I changed this to all stocking stitch and therefore all knit – no point doing purl stitches when you don’t have to! – and had “fun” rearranging the pattern to work in the round.

The rest of the sock is a very basic top-down sock. The heel is my new favourite one from last year and the toe is the bog standard wide toe that I’ve been doing for the past two years.

My feet feel loved at last!