Monday, September 19, 2005

lovemeknot (socks)

Click on the images to enter the pattern.

A girl rests herself quietly in Tavistock Square, a little oasis of green in the middle of London, surrounded by blue plaques hinting of lives, loves and deaths of the infamous Bloomsbury set. She sits sinking her bare toes into the grass, ripping up daisies, pleading with them to provide answers for her heart. Like millions before her she plucks petal by petal off the flower head. "he loves me, he loves me not, he loves me..."

But our girl suffers from that endless uncertainty which comes with empirical research. One flower says yes, but the other said no, five out of seven said yes, but what if the sample wasn’t big enough? And there’s always the issue of whether the daisy came to her clean (maybe a petal fell off before she got to it). Often the flowers fall to pieces in her desperately questioning fingers.

Her mission plucks Tavistock Square clean of daisies. She rushes over to the next patch of green, and devours it too. Soon every daisy in the city has been torn to pieces and our girl is sitting on a bus fleeing the crowds of gardeners after her blood. So she takes out her trusted addi turbos, magic-looping her way to a pair of socks and, with them she hopes, the truth.

The hearts are illusion knitted. Now you seen them, now you don’t. As you point and relax your toes you’ll see them come and go. As they work their magic, recite your question. The design is toe-up, made to measure. The number of pattern repeats will therefore depend on the size of your foot. Once knitted, count the hearts on one (and only one) sock: odds say yes, even’s don’t.