July already!

And here we are, past mid-summer and rushing our way to the school summer holidays ... even though if you have school-aged children like me, they might have thought they've been on holiday since March! 

How are you doing?  Are you still OK, safe at home and perhaps venturing a little further these days?  We've been out and about a little bit, but not much; it still feels strange after all this time that it's becoming acceptable to do that and of course, we are still very wary as this virus hasn't just gone away.  I think it will take us a while to feel that it's OK to be outside again.

We've mostly been carrying on as before - work from home for my husband and me, studying from home for small daughter and big daughter has spent most of the last week on Cloud 9 ... 

we've been celebrating as she has graduated from university with First Class Honours!  We are absolutely delighted for her as she has put so much work into her studies and really deserves the grade.  She was hoping to go travelling in September but that's been put on hold now so she's going to start the Master's degree that she was intending to defer ... so many plans have changed for so many people ... and she'll see how the world is faring after that.  

It seems very boring after that to tell you that I've been knitting a sock!  It's the second sock in the Novita Aran yarn that I started a while ago and then put down as I had other things to get on with.  I've still got other things to get on with but I picked this sock up again last night whilst my husband and I sat and watched an episode of Jack Taylor on TV. 

Let's talk about ... short circular needles

It seems like a very long time ago now that I picked up my first set of short circular needles, the promise of my sock knitting being "revolution-ised" ringing in my ears and proving to be absolutely true - for me, at least!  

When I bought my 30cm (12'") short circular needle, that was pretty much the sum total of what was on offer.  I wasn't presented with a range of other choices as easily as you might be today, and when my needle first arrived through the post, it looked so unbelievably tiny that I had no idea how it was going to replace my DPNs.  I just knew, though, that this was the needle for me and I was determined to get to grips with it.  There was a slight flaw in this plan as I couldn't work out how to cast on and make it join (this might sound familiar to you!) until I realised that casting on with straight needles not only solved that problem but also stopped the stitches twisting.  I put my DPNs to one side and the short circular became my needle of choice.

I used this short circular needle as one of the three methods shown in my Sockalong tutorials.  The plan with the tutorials was always just to get people started knitting socks and I showed the needles that I used and how I knit my socks, always intending that the tutorials would be a springboard to discovering more.  It has both surprised and delighted me that for many people, the basic 4ply Sockalong sock pattern along with the tutorials has been enough.  There are so many fabulous self-striping yarns around these days that you often don't need any more, and instead of delving further into more complicated patterns, people have stuck with what works for them, and that's just lovely!

What I have noticed, though, is that people are investigating their needle choices more.  That will be because, since I wrote the Sockalong tutorials, there really is more choice, and also because the way we get our information through the internet has improved too.  It's second nature to many of us now to simply put our questions into a search bar and hey presto, we have a hundred answers to scroll through!  It's enlightening - and sometimes overwhelming - so I thought that this morning, I'd add my own thoughts to one of the questions that I see most often: what's the best size of short circular to buy?

Needle brands: Outside - Addi, Centre - KnitPro Symphonie, Inside - HiyaHiya

Monthly Musing - June 2020 - Upside down

I’m sitting here looking at a blank page, wondering what on earth to write my Monthly Musing about.  The theme of my blog is “looking for the extraordinary in the everyday”; the idea is that it makes me look past what I’m doing all the time to see what’s special, what’s different, what I might miss if I don’t take the time to see it – but after weeks and weeks of the same four walls, the “extraordinary” of being in lockdown has become “ordinary” and things that really are out of the ordinary now but would have been ordinary before are sometimes a cause for concern.

 

Just this afternoon, I was standing outside the vet’s practice waiting for the veterinary nurse to bring some medication for one of our cats, chatting to a lady whose pet was inside with the vet and another man, whose enormous St Bernard dog was sitting companionably on his feet whilst they waited their turn.  It’s not ordinary to have to stand outside, no longer allowed in to see the vet or even into the waiting room.  Our pets go in without us (“I really don’t like that”, says the man, and I have to agree with him) and we are given advice from a half-open door.  We might not like it, but it is how it is.  Extraordinary becomes ordinary.