What I made, by Sharon

This weekend we went hiking in Lederderg. we haven't been hiking since Scotland last year, and we were excited to go back to Lederderg, particularly since we went with Skip and Bee, for their first overnight camping hike.
I took House Targaryen socks, a pattern that is ideal, since it's intuitive, and after the first repeat there is no need to look at the instructions. 
We did the same hike that Leon and I did the first time we went, with the same number of otehr people camping near us (that would be NONE!)
We only saw two goats this time, and a lovely lizard.

The weather was perfect, warm but not hot, not too windy, and dry. It was a thrill to pack our tent on Sunday morning and have it be perfectly dry. No rain, no dew, no dampness.
It got just cool enough that, around camp at night I wore my Goats beanie, but mostly it was short and t-shirt weather. Camping in the summer is fun - one of the things I missed in Scotland was being able to make camp, and then lounge around knittin…

Why do I follow instructions, even when I know they are going to make my life difficult? I did it with Strathendrick, and now I've done it with Cathedral Wrap. I know that you can't knit something, in pattern, from both ends and graft it perfectly. I did a class on this at EYF. The instructions that Joji link to make this clear. I knew it when I cast this wrap on - with the instructions to graft it in the middle, in pattern. 

Knowing it's not possible to make this perfect, I decided to do a swatch to test out the technique: Yep, looks like crap on one side (the "wrong" side of this twisted rib) And a little better, but still crap on the "right" side. I had a look on the Ravelry forums, and there is no discussion about it, but I did notice that only one person showed the join in their photos - and theirs looks like this too. I though about doing a three needle bind off, which would be neat, but also interrupt the stretch of the scarf in a way that grafting …

I participate in NetGalley, a website that provides digital Advanced reader Copies to influencers like me in exchange for honest reviews. These are the two latest book's I've read from them:

The Military wife by Laura Trentham 

I read the first 50 percent of this book in a weekend. I couldn’t put it down. It was told in alternating chapters, some set in “present day” and some in the past. I was quite interested in the characters and the story. I felt like the writing was a bit clunky at times, but I could forgive that for the story. And then the second half just fell apart a bit. It moved from feeling like chick-lit to romance. The "past” chapters became infrequent, and when they repeated information that we had already been told. They also were not in order, so the past jumped around from more recent past to older past. The big secret felt like an anti-climax. The character development was patchy – there are marked inconsistencies in the story we are told about the char…

At the end of 2016 I discovered I had a kilometre and a half of left over sock yarn. Since that wasn't ideal, I've been working on reducing it. In fact, in the two years since then I've knit 1.36 kilograms of it, and given away 700 grams. Which means I should be finished, right? 

Wrong. I've been creating it nearly as fast as I have been using it. When I look at that pile of yarn in this original photo most of it has been used up - at least all of the navy has! But I've gotten new yarn, through swaps that turn whole skeins into LOSY, through friends, and by making leftovers from socks and shawls. I'm not complaining, when I started tracking the LOSY it felt like an unmanageable mess - the negativity might be reflected in that careless and horrible photo I used. 

Now it feels like a resource, for my sock yarn blanket, baby jumpers, monstersocks, and who knows what else - I certainly didn't expect to crotchet a bathmat out of it. It feels really good to start …

I didn't knit any socks in December AT ALL. The reason for this is that I have a lot of socks, and last year I apparently went a bit overboard. I knit 18 pairs of socks.

The breakdown was: 
4 x ankle sock for me
4 x sneaker liners for me
3 x for Leon 2 x slippers (one for me, one for my mother), 
2 x gift pairs (one for my father, one for my mother)
1 x baby socks
1 x knee highs 

Instead of telling you what I'm planning for the sock knitting year, I thought I'd give you a guided tour of our sock drawers. There are three of them:

This is my sneaker liner drawer. It looks messy, but that just because it's full. There are 2 pairs of commercial socks on the right - rainbow knee-highs for doing rope climbs at cross fit, and toe socks for when I'm running in toe shoes. Other than that it's about 20 pairs of handknit sports socks. 
These are my ankle socks, with a couple of pairs of knee-highs just visible at the bottom. I have another couple of knee-highs in my "house c…

I'm back at work today, and that was the first time I've written the new date. It was such a relaxing break - 11 days of cricket, knitting and reading. I'm knitting Jojo Locatelli's Cathedral wrap. Now that I've finished the lace ends, it's smooth sailing. That lace though! It's been a really long time (as in not in 2018 at all) but I figured it would be easy - after all, I've done a lot of charted colourwork with no problems, and that's the same, right? Wrong. 

Anyway, after I muddled through it was a very relaxing knit. The yarn is Oyster Yarn Maven a  merino / silk / yak blend, and it's just stunning to knit with. Smooth and soft and the most perfect shade of pink. Its knit from the lace ends, and then grafted together. I'm rather dreading grafting in pattern.

 I'm reading Whiskey Galore, the tale of a Scottish island that runs out of whisky during the second world war. Published in 1947 this novel is hilarious. I was originally planni…