Blogtober 2023 : Round up

Hellooo!

I know that Blogtober is over for this year, but I wanted to do a quick round-up of last month’s posts and photos – I did this last year and I really enjoyed looking back through the photos to pull out a selection to create some collages.

It’s been brilliant chatting to you every day, and I am really glad that I didn’t bore you with my everyday that wasn’t always that extraordinary – and thank you for your lovely words about doing it all again next year!  You’ve got a whole twelve months to recover and then I’ll be back with more daily ramblings … but first, the promised catch-up from this year and then I’ll leave you in peace for a bit!

I started the month thinking that I would just finish knitting my stripy Yarn Badger socks and that felt like a very achievable goal for the month – but then West Yorkshire Spinners launched their Future Dreams yarn supporting the Future Dreams breast cancer charity, and I found myself knitting socks for a charity photo shoot.  Not one but TWO pairs of socks, one of which became a brand new pattern – the baby Hope Socks.  The pattern raised £93 for Future Dreams in the week or so that remained of Breast Cancer Awareness Month since the pattern was released, and I am so grateful to everyone who bought a copy.  I’m donating £1 per pattern to Future Dreams as a permanent donation, but I thought it would be nice to share how it had done in October.  Thank you so much, that’s an AMAZING amount of money to be able to donate in such a short space of time!

I still haven’t finished the stripy socks! 🙂

The dog and I have seen ALL the weather this month apart from snow, but that’s probably not a surprise in the UK just yet.  It has rained and rained and RAINED, but we did have some sunny days too which were a joy to be out in.

The leaves are still turning their autumn colours and I hope they will stay on the trees for a while yet and not just drop without a blazing finale.

We had our first frost this month, but only one and it didn’t seem to damage any of the plants.  There have been so many berries this year!  I don’t know if that really is a harbinger of a hard winter to come, but I guess we’ll find out at some point!  It’s good news for the animals and birds that rely on the berries to see them through the winter, and I’ve already started finding holes in the grass where squirrels are burying nuts and seeds for later.

Our dog and the cats featured quite heavily in this month’s posts.  Partly because of all the knitting I ended up doing and partly because of the terrible weather, I wasn’t out and about as much as I was last year for Blogtober so you got plenty of posts about what our pets were doing!

They all seem to be rolling about in these photos! 🙂

You also got to see the world premiere of a new photographic exhibition entitled “Cat in …” featuring Astrid the tabby who found a variety of places to sit …

and then there was an eclectic mix of goings-on – my first taste of a Chinese Moon Cake, an International Guide celebration, planting a hyacinth bulb in a proper bulb jar and more photos of my lunch than you ever needed to see!

I did worry this month that I wasn’t going to be writing enough about “the extraordinary in the everyday”, but actually, I have appreciated every day.  There’s always been something to write about and it may not have been a new adventure every day, but life isn’t really like that, is it?  Writing a blog post each day has made me stop and think about what I have done or seen instead of letting the day slide past, and there’s joy to be found in even the most ordinary of things.

Thank you for sharing the days with me xx