Blogtober 2024 : Day 5

Saturday!  Ooh, I love Saturdays, I’ve always considered them to be my Day Off and I don’t feel in the least bit guilty about doing or not doing anything that I fancy.

This morning, I’m having a brew and chatting to you before I do my stretches.  At the moment, I’m finding that it’s easier for me to do them when I’ve been up and about for a bit, but I am sure that will change as my flexibility improves.  I have decided that daily stretches are now an non-negotiable for me and whatever time of day I do them, I will find 20 minutes in my 24 hour day to make sure that I am keeping myself as bendy and strong as I can.  Feel free to join in if you think it’s something that you need to do too! 🙂

I’ve also realised that I need to be more careful about my knitting posture as I am very good at sitting in a comfortable position with my feet up for a long time, but that’s not actually what your body is designed for so I am going to be more mindful about how and I sit and how often I get up to move myself too in future.

With all this in mind, and of course knowing that I was going to be chatting to you today, I found myself disappearing down a rabbit hole of what I’ve been knitting at this time of year whilst I’ve been writing the blog.  Winwick Mum started in 2010 but the blog posts are Monthly Musings until July 2013 when I decided I was brave enough to start writing a bit more about my everyday doings, so that’s quite a few years for me to search through!  It’s interesting to look back, though, and I can see how my writing has changed.  Back then, I can see that I was still finding my feet in the blogging world and although there will have been something on my needles in October 2013 and that will have been socks, I didn’t document it at the time.  In fact, looking back through my original Ravelry account, even from 2010 my project pages are full of socks with the odd other project thrown in!

This is one of them … the Headscarf Hairband that I made for not so small daughter in August 2013.  She was officially small daughter then and she wore this for quite a while to keep her hair out of her face whilst she was playing.  In my mind, I could see Audrey Hepburn on a motor scooter with her hair tied back in a scarf and our reality was a small daughter bouncing around on a trampoline without turning herself into a wild and static-haired scary thing – not quite the same, but it did the job! 🤣  You can still find the pattern for this on my blog here – it was my first published tutorial!

2014 came around and by that time, after knitting a good many pairs of them, I was ready to start publishing my own sock patterns.  The first one was the Watercress Leaves Socks pattern …

closely followed by my first Basic 4ply Socks blog post and tutorial which I later expanded into the step-by-step Sockalong tutorials …

and then followed in December of that year by my Neat Ripple Socks – inspired by Lucy’s Attic24 Neat Ripple blanket.  I had met Lucy at Yarndale that year and asked her if she minded if I designed some socks based on her blanket and she said no, not at all; I knitted a pair for her as well, we got chatting, hit it off and we became firm friends.  Socks can do that, you know, I’ve seen it often enough in my Facebook groups too! 🙂

Source: Lucy of Attic24

The Neat Ripple Socks pattern is another free pattern on the blog, but because it’s one of my earlier patterns, it’s only available in one size.  I may go back to resize it at some point – I’ll add it to the list!

By October 2015, I’d started writing more about my current projects on the blog, and also the Yarndale Sock Line which was a charity sock knit I set up as I was going to the Yarndale festival as an exhibitor rather than a visitor for the first time.  Well, I say exhibitor but I wasn’t really that as I didn’t have a stand as such; Lucy was one of the original team who set up Yarndale and she had a meet and greet in the auction ring for the whole weekend, and I was in there with her.  Oh, it was wonderful!  So many conversations about socks, so many pairs of socks donated to people who needed a woolly hug for their feet (that was quite a job after Yarndale to send them all out!) – that weekend became one of the highlights of my year!

It was also year that Regia developed a new yarn called Pairfect and I tried it out on a pair of socks for my Dad.

Unfortunately, my Dad had died in September and couldn’t stay around long enough to wear them but I still have them.  They don’t make me sad, I think he would have liked them as he loved his hand knit socks and like my husband, rarely wore any others.  I had him well-trained! 🙂

Did I mention this had become a bit of a rabbit hole?  It’s when you start to look back that you recognise the value of personal blogs, diaries, project notebooks and websites like Ravelry.  I’ve have so many, “Oh, I’d forgotten about those!” moments even just up until October 2015!

One more year then I had better stop for today as we all have things to do … October 2016.  This is a pair of boot socks that I made for my husband, thinking that he had lost one of a pair when we’d been away for the weekend over the summer.  I don’t mind quite so much if bought socks go missing but hand knits?  Oh my life, I will turn the world upside down to find them again!  (The missing sock turned out to be in one of his walking boots but he got another pair anyway).  I was knitting this pair on the way to the British Knitting Awards in London – you always need socks to knit on a train!

One year, my husband was away for work and came home with just one sock out of each of two pairs as he had managed to leave the others at the hotel.  He wore black socks for work with coloured heels and toes and if you’ve knitted black socks, you will know that nothing says “I love you” in quite the same way – I was not pleased at all!  Fortunately, we realised what he had done quite quickly and I phoned the hotel to ask if there was any chance that they had gone into lost property.  I am not sure if housekeeping staff generally keep socks but because these were hand knits, I was hoping that they might have been rescued.  It turned out that they had, and a few days later, they were returned to us along with a small bag of chocolate footballs – my husband had been staying at Hotel Football in Manchester and we were very grateful for their conscientious housekeeping staff, and the chocolate gift!

I’m going to stop now and I’ll finish off my look through the years another day, but I have so enjoyed doing this!

Have a fabulous Saturday, I’ll see you tomorrow! xx