Well I’ll be Darned

Well, that didn’t take long. I was just about to put my new stripey (pre-warmed on the Rayburn – lovely) socks on when I discovered that the heel of one already had a huge hole in it so I had to spend the next half hour or so darning…

(If anyone wonders why I can darn socks, it’s because I went to an old-fashioned Scottish boarding school and if you were caught going around in your socks without your slippers on you had to darn any resulting holes. I can’t say it’s been a particularly useful life skill up till I started knitting my own socks and finally had something it was worth the effort of darning. It does mean I religiously wear my slippers in the house though)

I’m slowly coming to the conclusion that 100% wool is not the best yarn for knitting socks – 20% of (gasp) nylon in the mix seems to make them much more hard wearing. The first ever pair of socks I knitted are still, just, going strong after more than three years, although one of them is apparently channelling Edvard Munch.

The other hole might just be due to the fact that I’ve worn nothing but wellies for the last two weeks now, and they are a bit hard on socks. Unfortunately, that looks unlikely to change…

Make Do and Mend

The problem with knitting your own socks, is you feel compelled to darn them too:

Clearly alpaca, while lovely and soft and warm, is not particularly hard wearing. My darning skills are about as effective as the council’s pothole mending ones but I’m hoping this way I can make them last long enough for me to knit the next pair.

And talking of potholes, look:

After two years when we’ve had nothing but road patching, last year’s mild winter has clearly left enough in the budget to put in some shiny new road! This stretch used to include a shocking section which was actually dangerous because it left you with a choice between swerving right across the road or risking coming off on what was basically loose scree. The other stretch they did wasn’t quite as bad – in fact I can’t really remember it being that bad at all, although I suspect my tolerance for potholes is quite high as I’m mostly able to go around them.

In the four years we’ve been up here, they’ve managed to do three sets of resurfacing on the Papershop village road, each amounting to about half a mile. So at the present rate of progress, they should have completely resurfaced it in, oh about another eight years.

By which time, if the last lot of shiny new road is anything to go by it should be time to start again:

It’s just like knitting socks, when you think about it.