Blogtober 2022 : Day 2

The sun is shining through the windows this morning and with the day stretching out ahead of me, not so small daughter still sleeping and my husband already out of the house to meet a friend to go cycling, it feels like a real luxury to sit here in bed with a brew and decide what I’m going to do with the rest of the day.

Last night was a cosy night – we have one of those duvets that you can pull apart for Winter and Summer and we put both sections of it back together yesterday as we’ve been cold at night – oh, and the difference it made!  Although I will officially allow the heating to be turned on now that it’s past the beginning of October, we’ve been lighting the fires and that has been warming the house up so I am grateful for every day that goes by when it’s been warm enough without needing to turn the boiler on.  It’s crazy, isn’t it?  I think we are probably all like this every year but this year it feels far more urgent to save energy.  It’s important to get the balance right between saving energy and letting your house get cold, though, as it takes more energy to heat a very cold house and once it gets too cold it starts to get damp which brings a whole host of other problems, so if you’re one of those people who would rather put on seventeen layers of clothes than turn your heating on (assuming you have the choice), at least put it on the frost setting so that you avoid that if you can!

But wait – what’s that in the background of my photo?  Could that be knitting?  It absolutely could, and I’m going to give myself another half hour or so to listen to a podcast and cast on my Split Mittens before I get up and start to tackle the list of things to do that is getting longer in my head the longer I sit here.

You might be wondering what the turquoise thing is next to the yarn and the pattern and it’s this …

It’s a set of knitting needles by KnitPro called “The Mindful Collection” which were sent to me as they are just the right size for socks and possibly mittens, as I am about to find out …

There are eight sizes of 25cm short circular needle in the case and look!  It looks a bit like a flower now that it’s opened up – I imagine that as it’s a mindful collection then it must be meant to be a lotus flower and I think that’s very clever.

When I designed my Split Mittens, I used magic loop and that works very well as there’s a definite front and back to the mittens, but as there’s a needle of the right size in this set, I thought I’d at least get the cuff done if I can on a short circular as that’s always faster knitting for me.  There’s more in this kit than just the needles and I’ll show you that another day, but for now, I’m itching to cast on and see if using a short circular works with my chunky yarn!

These Blogtober posts are generally going to be shorter than my usual waffle (no bad thing, you might think!) and I’m going to stop here for today and then tomorrow, I can tell you what I managed to get done when I finally got myself out of bed!  Have a lovely Sunday! xx