First socks of the year

Before you start thinking "blimey, her needles must have had smoke coming off them", I must confess that both pairs were started last year, but finally had their ends sewn in this morning.

This pair I started last May, got halfway up the second one and then, well, just didn't knit on them any more.  Actually, that's a bit of a fib.  I did get up to the ribbing, did a few rows and then realised I'd knitted the leg shorter than the first one, so had to rip back, got cross with myself and then didn't finish them off.  They're done now.

The second pair were the ones where I found a knot in the yarn when I was a few inches up the second sock.  I put them to one side while I decided what to do - carry on or frog.  I more or less forgot about them and then came across them when I was tidying up last week.  I frogged the second sock as I decided a join would annoy me, so started again and just got on and knitted it, mostly while I was watching television and then at knitting group yesterday morning.  I finished the ribbing yesterday evening and cast off and then sewed in the ends this morning.

I've already cast on another pair of socks.

I did think about doing these in alternating two-row stripes (one stripe from one ball, one stripe from the second) but wasn't sure if that would work out, never mind the jogs when I changed colour, so have just gone with knitting them straight up, one sock from each ball.  This is yarn I've had in my stash for ages.  It must have been a bit shocked when it was actually taken out of the box it was in!

Am I in a sock-knitting mood?  Not particularly.  Simple, stocking stitch socks are my go-to project when I've got something going on in Life and need some easy, no-brain knitting.  At the moment, we have no running hot water in our house.  Our boiler's broken and when we switched on the immersion heater/water tank, it tripped all the downstairs electric sockets, so that needs to be repaired....... but finding someone to do what I hope will turn out to be a not-too-difficult job isn't proving easy.  Our boiler is elderly, but we'd rather it was repaired than replaced at the moment because we think a replacement will be a big job that'll involve ripping out part of the kitchen for new pipework.  Our house plans for this year are Spring - new windows; Late Summer/Early Autumn - new kitchen and boiler, so we'd rather keep disruption to a minimum, especially when upheaval such as building works upsets DD2 greatly.  We do have heating as we've got three oil-filled radiators that run off the mains, so it's inconvenient rather than a problem, but something we want to get sorted out as soon as possible.

Of course, with no hot water, the weather has inevitably turned colder.  There was a frost overnight and it was foggy this morning when I took Jess out for a walk (I've just looked out of the window and it's still foggy).  I had my camera with me, so I took some shots:

The sun, trying to peek through the fog

The first 'battalion' of geese that flew overhead

The second wave of geese

These geese fly over twice a day.  I think they spend the night closer to the sea on the marshes and then fly over to the Dedham valley to spend their days.  As the sun starts to go down in the late afternoon/evening, we hear them flying back again.

Frosty blackberries that never made it to maturity before autumn set in

I need to go and do some housework now.  I have a large-ish pile of ironing as well as some general cleaning and tidying, as well as tracking down a heating engineer!