Finished!

It seems like a surprise that December has arrived although I knew it was coming – we have just had November, after all! 🙂  We’re almost back at the top of the year (I always imagine the months arranged like the hours of a clock) and the nights are definitely drawing in now to confirm that we’re heading for the depths of winter.

I thought that today would be a good day to show you all the things that I have finished just recently so that’s what I’m going to do.  It feels really good to have cleared another few things off my WIP list just recently (I did really well at that during Blogtober!) although that’s just made room for more projects to go onto my needles so I’ll end up with just as many WIPs before too long!

First of all, I want to tell you about the donation that I made to the Trussell Trust from the sales of the Sofa Snuggle Socks pattern.  I told you last week that the total was at £333 which was absolutely incredible, and there have been even more sales this week so yesterday I was able to send a donation for November of …

£435

to the Emergency Fund Appeal to help keep the food banks going over the winter.  Ohhh, that is such a wonderful amount and again, thank you so much to everyone who has bought the pattern and enabled me to make this donation ❤️

An emergency food parcel is given out every 13 seconds and the Trussell Trust expect to give out 1.3 million food parcels between now and March, over half a million of which will be for children.  I hope that we have been able to provide a few of those.  I’m not going to stop making a donation from the sales of this pattern and I’ll update the amount on the blog page if you want to go back and look at it at any time.

On to more socks, and these are my husband’s Christmas socks, now finished (as is I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here! – I finished grafting the toes just as the winner was announced! 🙂 ) and blocked ready for wrapping up for Christmas.

I can’t believe that I took this photo in the middle of the day when the light was supposed to be at it’s best – it’s been a dull and gloomy week this week, but I hope you can still see that these are bright socks!

The yarns that I’ve used are West Yorkshire Spinners Signature 4ply in Fuchsia and Liquorice, and the pattern is based on my Basic 4ply Socks pattern but if you’ve spotted that they don’t look quite like my usual Basic 4ply Socks then you’re right – the socks that I knit for my husband have a short row heel as he likes socks that look like bought ones with different coloured heels and toes, and that means a different type of heel.  I don’t knit short row heels very often – they fit him very well but they don’t suit everybody and it’s not as easy to alter as a heel flap heel.  I also don’t think it’s particularly beginner-friendly heel so you’ll find my instructions for a short row heel in the first Winwick Mum Collection pattern book (it’s with the Mix and Match Heels pattern), but I don’t show it as an option on the blog for this reason.

Anyway, that’s another pair in my husband’s sock drawer and probably just in time as we’ve had to retire a couple of his pairs of socks as they’ve reached the end of their useful life.  I’m going to wait for him to tell me that he needs more black ones … I’m not going to remind him! 🙂

On to my next finished project and during Blogtober, I tackled a few WIPs that were hanging around and one of them was a cover for a vintage pouffe.  I was only a couple of rounds off finishing when Blogtober became November but I promised that I would finish it and then show you – and here it is!

I wasn’t quite sure what to do with the bottom edge; my original plan was to try to work some decrease rounds so that it would sit tight under the pouffe but when I asked Lucy about it (she knows more about crocheted fabric works than me), she thought that working a couple more rounds to increase the length and leaving it the same diameter would do the job and it seems to have done which is great.  I wasn’t really looking forward to wrestling with decrease rounds so I’m very glad that the crochet was happy to cover the pouffe without any extra attention!

What else?  Oh yes, these Sheepers slippers which I actually finished a while ago but completely forgot to show you.

Quite some time ago (March to be exact – how the year has flown!), Sheepers asked me if I would like to try out one of their DIY Slipkits which is basically a box full of sheepskin slipper parts that you put together yourself.  I’m always up for a DIY craft kit so this looked like fun!  You can have a look inside the box here.  It took me a while to get going with it, mostly because I’m a bit of a perfectionist and I got cross with myself over the rainbow embroidery which wasn’t doing what I wanted it to do, but then also because until I got the hang of it, it seemed to be quite difficult to stitch the slippers together.

There’s a definite knack to it which involves wiggling the hole bigger with your needle before you try to stitch the pieces together and once I’d grasped that, I was away and it really didn’t take too long at all.

They’re really neatly finished off with a narrow band that tucks inside the edge stitches and hides the join, and the slipper pieces themselves are very good quality.  There’s more than enough sewing thread to finish the slippers so there’s no worry that you’re going to run out which is always good – you do worry sometimes with kits that there isn’t quite going to be enough of the supplies but that’s not the case here.

Sheepers helps to supports the Polish Gorale slipper industry – the Gorale are a community who live in the mountains in Poland and make slippers in a traditional way – and I like products that help.  You can read more about the story behind Sheepers on their website here.  I really enjoyed making these, and although I might have to consider giving them a bit of a haircut (I keep standing on the fluff!), I can see that I’m going to get plenty of use out of them.

Finally for today, I know that there are lots of you who are making gifts for Christmas and I want to remind you about the fun IOU letter that you can download from the blog if you think you’re running out of time.  Yes, yes, it’s only 2 December but the time gets away from you (I am sure I’m not the only one who’s been frantically knitting on Christmas Eve and hoping that I finished in time!) and it’s OK to give yourself a break and hand over an IOU instead sometimes.

You can find it here or you can click the photo to go to the page.  This link is also on the Patterns and Printables page in case you ever need to find it again in the future.

Right, that’s me for today, I hope you have a lovely weekend!  I haven’t forgotten that I promised you a review of the two books I’ve been sent and I’ll get that out on the blog next week.

See you soon! xx