Staying home



Hi!  How are you doing?  I hope you're coping with being safe at home.  Thank you very much for all of your comments on my last couple of posts - it's been lovely to hear from you!

We're into our 2nd week of national isolation here in the UK - some people have been at home for longer thanks to their age (has there ever been a less welcome time to hear the words "at your age"?!) or health issues - and I think it's starting to hit home now that this is how life is going to be for the foreseeable future.  Both the girls are missing their friends - we all are, in fact, but I think that it's hitting small daughter harder than any of us as she is usually surrounded by them at school.  We're keeping an eye on her.

So what's new?  Well, on Sunday I sat and knitted all day.  That's pretty much unheard of as there are usually too many other things that I need to do, but we've set ourselves up with a rota for cooking and cleaning (oh yes!) which means that I am not expected to be staff and everybody else gets a turn to see that there really are no housework and cooking fairies 😀.  Anyway, I had such a lovely time faffing about with leftover yarn instead of feeling that I should be doing something else.  I started making a sock yarn blanket with my leftovers using the Tin Can Knits Vivid pattern about a hundred years ago and I have got a fair few squares done, but as pretty as they are, as a lace pattern they're a bit holey-er (no, I don't think that's a real word but I am sure you understand what I mean!) than I would like a blanket to be.  I don't think it's just the current circumstances that make me want to wrap myself up in warm, cosy, hole-free knitting, so I set about thinking about another way to use up the scraps.



I've never been the biggest fan of mitred squares - I really really don't like garter stitch and so many of the patterns are knitted like that -  so I've been playing about on and off for quite some time with ways of making mitred squares that I do like.  Having said that I don't like them, I think it's the garter stitch that's always put me off; I do like see the stripes and how they turn a corner to merge together, and I like the way stocking stitch keeps the yarn looking pretty much how it did when it was knitted into socks.  That's what I wanted - a blanket that looks like the socks that the yarns were knitted into.  I like remembering who I made the socks for and which pairs they were.

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2020 Outside Gardening Knitting