Unusually for me I am writing this a few days in advance - I normally more of a ‘seat of the pants’ newsletter writer. But as this email hits your inbox I will hopefully be rocketing up the A1 towards my beloved Lake District, gleefully following the green signs that joyfully proclaim ‘The North’ from about Peterborough onwards.
Right now though I am in the midst of family packing which is always a little bit stress inducing. Even though I must have packed for literally 100s of family walking trips at this point I stubbornly persist in the notion that it will take me all day to pack.
The reality of course is that I throw everything together in an hour and then spend the rest of the day anxiety-pacing and worrying that I’ve forgotten something crucial.
Packing the knitting
This is of course, of paramount importance as any knitter can tell you. Projects deemed suitable to pack must be fun, engaging and ideally small. But not too complicated or involve anything too fiddly.
Family walking holidays are a lot of fun but we tend not to make too many plans - being at the mercy of the notoriously fickle Lake District weather.
As a result my average knitting time can vary between non-existent and full-time while we are there.
From years of experience I now just save myself a lot of time and effort and just pack sock knitting. I give myself a week’s break from design work, unless there is something I am really excited about and I just pack a few skeins of colourful sock yarn and my sock needles.
One year I tried to pack my large scrap yarn blanket in progress. After some discussion (read: argument) I wedged it in the boot along with some other bags. On opening the car boot at a service station it fell out with little balls of yarn rolling everywhere - think tribbles escaping from captivity and you’ll have the general idea.
Needless to say I learned from that mistake and now my knitting is kept small, secure and able to be stashed under the passenger seat.
I will probably end up knitting plain vanilla socks in stripy yarn, but I do have a pair of Expresso socks on the needles currently for a friend - they work well with self-stripe yarn but have a bit of added cable fun.
If you are looking for a sock pattern or two the following ones are often top of my list for new projects:
Socks on a plane by Laura Linneman
Blueberry Waffle socks by Sandi Turner
Nice ribbed sock by Glenna C (Ravelry link)
Page And Ink Tarot
If you follow me on Substack or on Instagram you might have seen that I started a new thing this week, something that I’ve have been mulling over for a good long while now. Please note when I say mulling over I actually meaning, writing, deleting, over-thinking, then writing again.
I have been using tarot in conjunction with my journaling practice for about a year now and it seemed like the natural next step to want to talk about it a little more. Rather than try to integrate it into my Everyday Knitter community it seemed easier all round to create a separate Substack for the purpose.
You can find my first official Page And Ink post here:
And if you’d like me to send you my favourite 5 tarot journal prompts so you can try it out for yourself just tap the logo below and it will pop up in your inbox.
I’m going to leave it there for this week so I can resume my anxiety pacing and go and check we have all the walking socks. I hope you have a lovely weekend and that the endless rain we’ve had in a lot of the UK finally gives way to some dry weather.
Here’s hoping
A moment of laughter. Managed to trail a WIP yarn from car right across muddy farmyard car park and into their cafe - stopped the traffic earlier this year. Had to do the wind of shame much to the amusement of other customers. Suffice it to say hubby was in cafe ordering quantities of cake to avoid the pantomime
Hope the weather is good to you all and you get to enjoy your walking! Knitting socks, the perfect travel project. :)