Monthly Musing – April 2026 – Sockalong thoughts
I took my car for a service this week and it made me think about the Winwick Mum Sockalong.
You might think that’s an odd thing to be thinking about at a garage, but nearly 11 years ago I sat in a garage waiting room with my laptop on my knee, writing tutorial posts for the Sockalong which were set to be published on the blog within a couple of weeks. It was a different car and a different garage but a similar time of year – and with the Sockalong 11th birthday on Sunday 3 May, the connection is always there for me when my car needs a service.
Isn’t it funny how we do things sometimes with absolutely no idea of how they might affect our future? I had no inkling whilst tapping away on my keyboard, surrounded by cars and with the smell of engine oil in the air, that what I was writing would change not only my life but also the lives of thousands of other people who quite probably had no intention at that moment in time of knitting socks. All I thought I was doing was writing down how I knit socks because I was frustrated that people had told me it was too hard; I thought that if a few people read the tutorials and found them useful then it was worth the effort. It turns out that more than a few people have used them – so it was definitely worth the effort!
This time of year, the Sockalong tutorials are always on my mind. I love that they have their own birthday and it’s something I can celebrate every year. I love that they are the anchor of everything to do with Winwick Mum, and whatever I might write about on the blog, it’s the Sockalong tutorials that I see as the foundation of all my sock-related posts. I really love the conversations that come out of the annual sock count – and there’s more on that coming up tomorrow. None of these things were remotely on my radar, and I might not have believed you if you’d told me that they would be in the future. Sometimes, we just need to let things unfold in their own time.
I didn’t sit in the garage writing this year. Big daughter came to collect me in her car – the same big daughter who was still at school when I first posted the Sockalong tutorials – and we sat and had lunch together whilst we waited for the garage to ring with updates, and we talked about her plans for her own business. It’s exciting to see where all of this is going to take her in the future, and no doubt there will be things that come about for her that we have no idea about right now. Who knows – we could be looking back in another 11 years and talking about the results of a decision she made the day my car went into the garage!
