More knitting, sewing and some bloggers

I knitted my mum a pair of socks - which I think she has secretly been wanting for a while now, but as you might remember, she has recently been in hospital again.  This time not with her heart, though they did revise her medication and we found out that her GP should have been monitoring her, and hasn't harrumph.  Anyhow, she is now coming to realise that rest, sometimes, she must.  And, to assist her with this unwelcome pastime I have produced a pair of lilac socks, which I think she'll love.

As you can see there is also a cream sock on the blockers, and that is mine.  It is such an easy pattern of six rows that I can mindlessly watch the telly while knitting.

Both these patterns are from the Interweave Press 'Favorite Socks - 25 timeless designs' book, (you'll have seen the others, here)  and are the third and fourth ones I've done from this one. There are many more that I want to do, too.  The yarn is Patons Fairytale 'Dreamtime' and is lovely and squishy, soft, though a bit 'splitty' to knit with.

I got the sock blockers from eebaay, and they came from USA, though I'm sure I have seen wooden sock blockers available in this country, somewhere on the world wide net, but, sorry, can't remember where.

And, folks, I have also been sewing.  We had a local competition with our rural last week, with a 'Toyland' theme.  In teams of four we had to come up with a knitted, sewn, embroidered and 'own choice' of items.  My idea for the sewing was to make a nursery book.  I chose the pattern from Simplicity for 'Baby's First Book' number S3709 and, though there were eight pages to do, I only managed four - you guessed it, I ran out of time, because I started late, doh!

page 1

page 2

                             page 3

                                                                                    page 4

I really enjoyed making this book, and did loads of things never before attempted, such as appliqué, satin stitch, covering my own buttons (the flowers - how easy was that?!) and the button-holing around the MY BOOK words. But, the amount of times I was changing my thread and bobbins, it got a bit confusing at times!

Speaking of confusing - I took a workshop today, on 'Building your own Blog' and have now introduced three more bloggers to the interweb, folks!  I won't link them here at the mo' as they might not want me to, but will if/when they give me their permissions.  It wasn't until I was making the lesson plan that I realised just how much I have learned over the past couple of years in blogland, and to be able to introduce people, some of whom were scared (I have another five people attending for the evening workshop, next week.)  And, then to see the lightbulb 'ping' on was gratifying.  I didn't even need to tell them to play around on it, they just wizzed ahead and, exactly as I had predicted, one said 'That was so easy!'  Yessssss.