I guess I never photographed the finished state of the Austermann "Step" socks:



I used the "Gentleman's Simple Winter Sock" pattern from the new Nancy Bush book. The only alteration I made was to make the foot shorter to fit me. I've noticed that Bush uses slightly different heel turns on many of her patterns - on this one, you "neck down" the heel in the last few rows of the heel flap, and then you turn a standard Dutch heel, but wind up with very few stitches at the end. The good thing about that - which would be especially good if you were using a selfpatterning yarn with a shorter repeat than here - is that you don't have to do very many gusset decreases to get the socks back down to the proper number of stitches.

I didn't try to make the socks match; there was a very long repeat and I was concerned about having enough yarn.

Also, this is another ongoing project:



It's one of the robots from the Jess Hutch book. It's done in intarsia, which isn't my favey way of knitting ever, but it's a small enough project not to be annoying.

I love the "blurb" Jess put at the top of the pattern: "Knit yourself an army of cozy little robots." It's so paradoxical. "Army of robots" sounds like it could be nothing good, but the words "knit," "little," and "cozy" redeem it.

However, I prefer to operate as regards robots as if Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics were true, so I suppose an "army of cozy little robots," in that world, could be employed to, say, make and bring cups of tea, or put laundry away, or catalog my book collection.

The robot is tentatively named Fred; I have yarn in different but coordinating colors put aside to make him a companion named Ginger.

Another robot memory: when I was a sophomore in high school, my family took a vacation to Montreal. We had driven up through Ontario, and in that province, a particlar chain of gas stations was giving away little toy robots (sort of like Transformers but not and more cheaply made). My brother would have been about 8 or 9 at the time and he had lots of robot toys, and so was enthusiastic about collecting the gas station robots. Well, once we got to Quebec, apparently the gas stations in that chain were not following the promotion. (But we did not know that at the time). At one point, my father sent me (as the designated French-speaker in the family) to try to ask the adamantly non-Anglophone* gas station attendant if they had the robots.

So, picture this, on a chilly March (spring break) day in Montreal:

a fifteen year old girl with a couple years of strongly-Racine-influence French under her belt, trying to communicate with a grunting, bearded Quebecois:

"Pardonnez moi, monsieur...Avez-vous des petites robots? [trying to sound less American, I pronounced it more as 'p'tits r'bots']... Ils sont des jouets? Connaissez-vous?"

He stared stonily at me and so I went back to the car and said that apparently they didn't offer the promotion there in Quebec.

(*He may have spoken English but chosen not to. Or heck, maybe he was a recent immigrant from the Soviet Union or somewhere and spoke neither English nor French, but somehow my father got the impression the guy was Francophone only, and sent me out to deal with him)

Other Quebecois were more friendly towards my halting French; the woman who ran the hotel where we stayed (and who was the cook in the kitchen, at least at breakfast), murmured "ah, c'est belle!" in response to my carefully crafted compliment on how she prepared French toast.