(4.4 oz or 130 g yarn minimum (ankle length socks)

There is a saying “cobbler’s children never wear shoes” which perfectly describes many knitters - who create beautiful items and give them away rather than wearing them.
This is a pair of socks you should knit and wear yourself.

Last year I started knitting in low relief - I created two simple patterns - a cat and a heart which were shaped with stitches - so that the images had vector curves rather than blocks of square pixels. This technique has such great potential to make really graceful knitwear.

I’d also been working on socks - knitting a pair from a single ball of yarn (by knitting from both ends), two at a time - because that makes sense, and toe up - ditto. Finally I had knitwear for everyday use. I’d found a local maker of merino wool which, though their quality was iffy (the yarn had joins knotted together for goodness sake!!!) made for exceptionally warm socks. The problem was that the socks seemed to wear through in the heel much too quickly. I accept that part of this was probably my heel technique was not perfect - the stitches were too tight, but when I got round to darning the darn things I decided that doubling up the yarn around the heel would really help.

The eureka moment was realising that I could use the heart motif I designed last year as the increase around the heel. Over the last few weeks I have been knitting in any spare moment to make this design stitch-perfect.

In some ways I’m a little reluctant to share this pattern. Unfortunately it’s a very easy job for a publisher to pick a few popular designs and create a book by asking a designer to work out very, very similar patterns. Designers - if you suspect this has happened to you - check the email addresses of paypal purchasers against the name of the publishing house you suspect of taking your design.

The heart motif itself is available as a free pattern and I am happy for other designers to use in their own work as long as it is credited (creative commons).

Kalyna is the Slavic name for the Guelder Rose - a beautiful plant with pretty white flowers and bright red berries, whose bitterness adds depth to sweet flavours - in the same way as Seville Oranges in marmalade. Each berry has a tiny heart shaped stone.