I know two little girls who are mad-crazy-keen about ballet. They begin dancing the moment they wake up, and they dance all through their day, and they don’t stop dancing until they go to bed. Actually, they probably don’t stop dancing until they fall asleep — I am quite certain they lie in the dark and practice their tondues under the bedsheets until sleep finally steals them away.

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And they would wear their ballet shoes every single day if they could. But they’re not allowed, because the ballet shoes get lost — absent-mindedly set down on the wrong shelf or accidentally kicked under the sofa or sinking slowly to the bottom of the toybox — and are nowhere to be found on ballet day. And so those most-beloved shoes get secreted safely away after each class and the disappointed girls must instead practice their dancing in their socks. It’s not at all ballerina-like!

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I’m always on the lookout to bring you great patterns that would make the most of single skeins of SpaceCadet yarn, and when I came across the Open House Socks by Kate Atherley, technical editor of Knitty and knitting editor of A Needle Pulling Thread, I fell in love them! They’re sweet, romantic, and cheeky all at once — and, as a bonus, each pair takes only about half a skein of yarn. They’d make a great quick-knit holiday gift — perfect for padding around the house on cold winter days. I looked at them and thought, they make me want to… dance!

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Wait… Make me want to dance?!? I thought immediately about those two little dancers… I could knit them ballet shoes! I could knit them lovely ballet shoes so they could dance all week whilst their real ballet shoes were safely tucked away. There could be no better Christmas present for them on Earth!

In the dyeing studio, I sat and thought for a while about the perfect colour. I could do them in the standard ballet-shoe pink-beige but… well, while these two are budding ballerinas, they are also little girls who love all the stuff that little girls everywhere love: sparkly and bright and fancy and pink. Plain ballet shoes would never do — if they were going to have custom knit ballet slippers, then they would have them in a pink to thrill their hearts. And I began mixing the dyes…

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I emailed Kate and told her my plan, and she wrote straight back and very kindly offered to help me adjust the pattern to suit these much smaller feet. What a lovely thing to do!

So once I’ve done my gauge swatch and worked out some calculations, I will cast on with this wonderful, crazy pink. And then I can’t wait to share with you my new works in progress!

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But shhhh… mind no-one tells the girls, ok?