Monday 24 September

Autumn has well and truly arrived in the UK. The trees have been changing colour since probably early August, but the weather has been sunny and sometimes quite warm. Now we have rain and wind and some more rain and some more wind, leaves swirling around and lights on most of the day. We lit the woodburner for the first time last night and it actually warmed up the front room beautifully. When it's really cold outside, the house gets so cold the woodburner can only take the edge off it. Last night we were all snugly though.

I have been knitting a lot lately. Somehow I got a lot more knitting done when the kids were home from school, not sure why but I wasn't complaining!

I finally finished my Shale Baby Blanket by Jared Flood which I'd had on the needles for a couple of years. He is probably my favourite designer - his patterns are often so simple but so beautiful. This one now lives on our sofa as a blanket to snuggle under.

After getting that off the needles I was really keen to knit another pair of socks. I'd knitted one sock almost to the end with this wool which is called Magic Ball, but I'd forgotten the pattern and I'd made a few mistakes, so I unravelled it and made this pair which is from Jane Brocket's The Gentle Art of Knitting. Pure coincidence that the colours matched!

I'm wearing them today for the first time and I've got toasty feet...

Then during the last few days of the Olympics I cast on for these, my Olympic socks

The stitch pattern was easy enough to memorise so you could knit them whilst watching the Olympics, the long rib sections are Greek pillars and the little cables are medals... Pleased with how these turned out and looking forward to wearing them.

And yesterday the latest pair came off the needles, this time for 13 year old

These are from Purls of Wisdom by Jennie Lord. 13yo wants to do a proper 'photo shoot' with them in the same way as the socks are modelled in the book, you can't see here that they have a lovely picot edge. The best thing is that we now have the same shoe size, so if she gets fed up with them (neither of the kids have ever really taken to handknitted socks before), I'll just wear them myself!