Penny Blogs - An insight into the things in life that make me smile

Candy Cane Socks

January 11, 2022 by Penny Leave a Comment

I’m really trying in 2022 to keep track of all the various craft projects that I have in my stash and actually manage to finish. The first complete one of the year is something I actually started at the back end of 2021, but failed to finish in time for Christmas. I can’t exactly remember when I treated myself to this gorgeously festive Candy Cane 4-ply yarn from West Yorkshire Spinners, but it may well have been years ago.

It is years since I last knit any socks though and I was feeling a bit out of practice when I got my dpns out. I had previously got to the stage where I had one go to sock pattern that I know fitted my feet perfectly and I had an annotated paper copy in my knitting bag so that I could quickly knock up a pair without really having to think about it. In various house moves I’ve lost that pattern and I wish I could remember where it came from.

For these socks I was following the Candy Cane socks pattern that West Yorkshire Spinners released along with the yarn. It’s written by Winwick Mum who is a bit of a legend when it comes to sock knitting. I’m not sure I’ve followed any of her patterns before, but I’ve certainly seen her tutorials before and know how much everyone rates her.

I did have a couple of moments of confusion in this – especially when I started doing the heel flap backwards as I’d not quite understood the instructions – but overall I’m really pleased with how these turned out, especially after such a long gap since last knitting socks.

The only thing I think I need to improve on is tension on my dpns and not ending up with a ladder effect where you can see how the stitches were split across the needles. This had already improved by the second sock and I’m hoping that it will improve more in future pairs.

They might not have been finished by Christmas 2021, but I’m delighted to have finally got to grips with socks again. These definitely won’t be the only pair on my needles in 2022. And, in writing this blog post I’ve also realised that West Yorkshire Spinners also has a whole Christmas Collection of 4-ply yarn, with the Vintage Tinsel particularly nice. Maybe that can be a festive treat to myself at the end of the year if I manage to master my sock knitting this year.

Not one, but two finished crochet projects

April 16, 2021 by Penny Leave a Comment

If the last 12 months have taught me anything it is that I was incredibly well prepared when it came to having things to do in the event of lockdown during a global pandemic. I’ve not needed for a single item of craft materials at all. But, I didn’t factor into my plans having to home school two kids whilst looking after a toddler too!

When I see all these pictures of people’s amazing lockdown creations I have to remind myself that I may well have been able to do similar if I hadn’t been grappling with Year 6 English grammar and facilitating Year 3 science experiments! My ridiculous level of craft supplies did make me realise that I really need to finish some projects off before buying anything new, so that’s exactly what I’m planning to do in 2021 and just over three months into the year I’m rather proud of my efforts so far.

Anyone who used to follow me back when I was Mrs C will know that I am a crochet addict, and taught myself to crochet after falling in love with Lucy from Attic24’s amazing crochet blankets. Over the years I have bought myself three of her kits, but until recently two of them sat unfinished as I acknowledged that I’m absolutely useless at sewing in ends as I go along!

With the Hydrangea I’m not entirely sure when I actually started this blanket, but I do know that I was already working on it when I first met my husband nearly four years ago. It’s seem me through quite a lot over that time and in a way the idea of finishing it felt a little strange after it had been such a constant in my life. But finish it I did. I also challenged myself to start sewing in ends before I actually finished all the rows. For every colour stripe that I completed I made myself sew in 5 ends before starting the next. It sounds so simple, but was actually a real challenge. Once I started motoring though the last few stripes though the motivation to get it finished took over and it wasn’t long before I could actually move straight on to the edging and finish it all off. Quite an achievement.

The second blanket had been in my basket for even longer. Looking back I think the Moorland CAL started just after Christmas 2016. I bought myself a kit as a Christmas present and also bought my mum one at the same time. She was a relatively recent crochet convert and I thought it about time she tackle a big project. I managed to roughly keep up with the crochet along itself, but then the dreaded ends started haunting me and once I was left with nothing else to do but sew them in it just sat there on a chair for years. Literally. It’s moved house twice with me in its incomplete state and I was beginning to wonder if I’d ever manage to finish it.

Mind over matter finally kicked in and after several nights sewing in ends (although not as many as I feared!) I was able to start thinking about the edge. The only problem being that I couldn’t actually find the yarn I needed to do it. I was able to make a start based on extras I had in my yarn basket, but knew that somewhere I had kept all the officially Moorland leftover yarn for when the day came. The problem was I’d put it in a safe place before those two house moves!

I cracked on regardless though with what I had and was hoping that I would have enough, but quite soon disaster struck. A meter of blanket edging to go and only a couple of inches of yarn left. A plea for help on Instagram brought along a lovely lady that I’ve only ever spoke to via the platform and she so very kindly popped a bit of yarn in the post for me. Thank you so much!

With one yarn near disaster under my belt I was beginning to think about replanning the colours for the remaining rounds of the edging yet a sudden urge to look inside an old hamper on top of the fridge freezer in our garage revealed the safe place that I’d stashed the left over yarn in over four years earlier! To say I was relieved would be an understatement.

The edging consists of four rounds and I actually deviated from Lucy’s planned colours and swapped the grape for plum as the rich purple is the colour that I love most in all the beautiful moorland tones. If you’re unfamiliar with the blanket I should say that it works it way upwards from the greens, peaty browns and heather purples of the Yorkshire Moors and gradually works up to a blue sky. For anyone that loves the moors it really is a perfect reminder of them and one that I hope one day I will take with me when we eventually move back up to Yorkshire – planned for when the middle child finishes secondary school we hope.

To say I’m proud to have finished would be an understatement. I also weirdly feel relieved too. The two blankets feel like they have been hanging over me in a weird way for quite a long time too. I already miss not having a crochet project on the go and I’m having to try very hard to always have something crafty that I can quickly pick up and get on with when I want a moment’s calm. I won’t pretend I’m not itching to buy another Attic 24 kit and have my eye on the kit for her original Granny Stripe blanket. I’m just trying to make myself hold on until I’ve got a few more completed projects under my belt to justify it. Let’s hope I’m not making myself wait until the very end of the year or else it will become a Christmas present to myself!

Now I just need the weird April weather to calm down a bit so that it’s warm enough (and not snowing!) so I can take some decent photographs of both blankets. The colours of the Moorland in particular are so gorgeous, but you really need to see it all laid out to appreciate it properly rather than folded up.

And breathe…

March 27, 2021 by Penny Leave a Comment

Yesterday the kids broke up from school for Easter. Just getting my head properly round that statement is mentally exhausting. In one way it seems like they’ve only just gone back – and in a way the 8 March school return wasn’t very long ago – and yet in another way the Christmas holidays feel like they were a lifetime ago.

At Christmas we were so looking forward to some downtime as a family after a hectic term at school, but with actually getting Covid that just never happened. Instead we ended isolation and literally fell into homeschooling in a full lockdown the very next morning. What timing.

As a family we’re incredibly lucky. Both of us adults had full blown Covid, but were able to just look after ourselves at home. If the kids caught it (or more likely had it first and then gave it to us) none of them had any symptoms at all. None of us are suffering long term and my husband’s company paid him sick pay both whilst he was isolating and when he still didn’t feel well enough to go back for a few days afterwards. My self employed work has suffered, but that’s to be expected as there are only so many hours in each day and it’s impossible to fit in homeschooling and working whilst also juggling a toddler. I normally manage the latter two together, but all three is just too much.

The kids have loved going back too school, and despite not everything being back to normal they’re still so happy. It’s strange for me to no longer know everything that they’re up to school-wise, but they don’t seem to have any problems with that concept. The youngest is missing them during the school day, but also enjoying having my full attention again.

After over three months stuck at home I’m now very ready for all this to be over. Apart from school, essential shopping and walks round our local streets I’ve only been further afield once – a five minute drive to a National Trust site where we went for a walk and to fly the kite. It honestly felt as refreshing as a luxury holiday. We even treated ourselves to a coffee and a chocolate brownie. It was like a five star meal!

From Monday the rules change again and I can’t wait to be able to venture a little further afield for walks and maybe even meet up with some friends in the process. I’ve missed water so much and am so looking forward to returning to the tow paths of the local canals. If all goes according to plan we’ll even be able to visit attractions by the 12th April and as the kids have an INSET day that day I was thrilled to be able to book tickets for our most local model village. The kids are already incredibly excited. They’ve missed days out so much over the last year and after such a wash-out at Christmas I really hope Easter means we can finally spend some quality time together relaxing and just being a family without being dosed up on paracetamol and struggling to keep my eyes open!

The last week has seen people marking a year since the first lockdown started and I want to make the time to look back at everything we’ve been through in that last year. So much, both as individuals and as a family too. In a way we’ve done so much too, but then it also looks like time has stood still. It’s certainly been a year that none of us every expected to live through.

The one where I got Covid on Christmas Day!

January 22, 2021 by Penny Leave a Comment

2020 really was the year that kept giving.

There I was feeling all smug that my kids reached the end of term without anyone in either of their school bubbles having to isolate. Yes, there was the bit where we went from Tier 4 on Friday to Tier 3 on Saturday and then Tier 4 on Sunday, but I was already at peace with the idea that seeing any family on Christmas Day itself wouldn’t be sensible, so again it didn’t damped my festive enthusiasm too much.

By Christmas Eve I felt on top of the world. A long-overdue Zoom catch up with some friends was wonderful, and after that I decided to celebrate with a glass of wine. A rare occurrence these days. I went to bed and then had a weird night of tossing and turning and not being able to sleep properly. I woke up with a thumping headache and just assumed it was the effects of said glass of wine. I carried on as usual though with the youngest, who was incredibly excited about their first Christmas where they had a clue about what was going on.

By lunchtime the paracetamol had turned the headache into a dull thud and so I went of to collect the eldest two from their Dad’s before returning and starting the rest of Christmas celebrations here. By 3pm it was time to put dinner on and I was starting to feel rough. Really rough. Rough enough that I pretty much fell asleep on the sofa and B had to make Christmas dinner – which to be fair about he did really well, even if both of us did totally forget the stuffing until two days later!

A bit of food made me feel a little better and I perked up for a while, before slumping again as the evening wore on. That night in bed though I again couldn’t sleep, but this time though I was starting to feel all feverish. Alarm bells started ringing, but I could still smell and taste everything so I assumed it wasn’t Covid but something else. By the next morning though I felt no better at all and sensible me said it would be wise to get a test. Just in case.

So, Boxing Day 2020 saw me heading to Luton and the glamorous location of a dodgy looking tent in an equally dodgy looking car park under a fly-over. As I approached, had it not been for the presence of a security guard in hi-vis, I might have assumed I was there to take part in a drug deal.

Credit where it’s due though – the whole booking a test process and actually being tested was incredibly straightforward. I was in and out within ten minutes and could have booked a test for as soon as 30 minutes after logging on to the NHS website.

Thirty six hours later my results came through and I was genuinely shocked to see a text message containing a positive result. Back in December it still felt quite unusual to test positive and many people didn’t know anyone who had. I spent ages trying to work out where I might have picked it up. Apart from one supermarket trip (when I couldn’t get a click and collect slot) I hadn’t been anywhere else at all. Literally just walking local streets with the kids. It’s my assumption that one of more of the kids picked it up at school, didn’t have symptoms themselves and then passed it on to me. My husband came down with symptoms five days after me, suggesting that I gave it to him, so that rules out it having come from him at work.

As time went on and the January return to school loomed it turned out that I wasn’t the only parent from my children’s classes who had been ill over Christmas. Nearly a third of us had and only in one case had their children shown any symptoms. This “new” strain seems to not only pass more easily, but also not present many symptoms in kids at all.

It goes without saying that having worked all this out I really couldn’t see how re-opening schools was sensible at all. Where my kids are at school in Hertfordshire the Covid levels were higher than many of the London boroughs where they announced that schools would remain shut. It made no sense at all and frankly sounded dangerous.

As a school governor, and in particular one responsible for some of the most vulnerable children in our school, I am fully of the belief that school is normally the best and safest place for our children. This definitely wasn’t the case in early January though. We were bought some extra time as my children’s school refused to take them back initially as there was still Covid in our household at that point (my husband was in his 10 day self-isolation period still) and even though the kids had finished their ten day period, there was no guarantee that they were not symptom free and had it in the same timescales. My kids school had an INSET day on the Monday, meaning that children were only due to return on the Tuesday, but of course all that changed when the latest lockdown announcement came through late on Monday night.

I could probably write a whole essay on the way the Government has handled Covid, and in particular the fact that so many announcements, especially ones involving education, come out late at night, or at least after the end of the normal school day. It’s infuriating, rude and creates even more work for people in what should be their down-time.

Trying to recover properly from Covid whilst homeschooling has been a challenge, to put it mildly, but as we head towards the end of January I think I’m nearly back to normal. I do seem to have the insomnia part of long-Covid that many people have reported, but other than feeling very unfit and a bit tired (which could be attributed to home-schooling!) I’ve come out of the whole thing pretty unscathed. At its worst I was aching all over my body in strange ways. I constantly felt cold and also developed a hacking cough. It wasn’t really how I expected Covid to be and was pretty debilitating at times. Not at all easy with two adults ill and three kids in the house. Three kids that had been looking forward to a normal Christmas…

Maybe for Christmas 2021 we can make a better go of things?

It’s lockdown Jim, but not as we know it!

November 5, 2020 by Penny Leave a Comment

Here we go again. Lockdown Part 2. Or Lockdown 2.0 as some people seem to call it. Proof if ever it’s needed that we’re getting more adapt with technology naming conventions.

Whatever you call it, this lockdown is less than 12 hours old as I sit and write this, but the differences from the last lockdown are very obvious. My kids are still at school and as I dropped them off this morning and watched the usual gaggle of parents chatting on street corners it really didn’t feel any different to earlier in the week. A million miles away from back in March when we were all desperately swotting up on primary school grammar and realising that maths had somehow changed fundamentally since we were all at school.

Whatever your views on the decision to keep schools open, you can’t deny that it fundamentally changes things from last time. Yes, non-essential shops still have to close, but this time they are allowed to still open for click and collect orders. This is where the guidance from the Government seems to contradict itself. It tells us to stay at home other than for very specific reasons, yet I’m allowed to go over to the next town to collect an order from Hobbycraft to do some Christmas crafting. In the same way I can’t go into a clothes shop in person, but I can wander around a garden centre with the kids looking at the Christmas displays. As much as I can see how this is good for small local businesses, it also doesn’t quite seem right.

Let’s just think about it a bit more. I can’t visit the nearby outdoor Whipsnade Zoo to see their real reindeer, but I can see animated reindeer models decorated with tinsel indoors at the garden centre. How on earth is that logical in any way? Anyone who has been to Whipsnade will know that the site is made for people to social distance in it. Surely the Covid risk is far greater indoors than out? After all we’re being encouraged to exercise outdoors and parks and places like National Trust outdoor spaces are staying open.

I’m left thinking that this is going to be devastating for the hospitality industry with pubs and restaurants forced to close for a second time. Yet, at the same time, if this lockdown isn’t strict enough to make a difference then won’t it just prolong things until they can open again? If we’d not all been told to “Eat Out to Help Out” maybe we would have avoided this second lockdown and overall the effect on the hospitality industry would have been less. I can’t begin to think how stressful it must be for them thinking about how much Christmas trade they could miss if this extends beyond the initial 4 weeks.

I wish I had faith that what we’re going through is actually going to make a difference, but I’m yet to be convinced when the whole plan seems to be so full of holes.

Photo by Matt Seymour on Unsplash.

Five things my kids miss after five months of Covid

August 12, 2020 by Penny Leave a Comment

The last 5 months have been tough for all of us. Different from anything we could have ever imagined. As adults you can somewhat understand why things are different, but as a chid comprehending everything going on can be somewhat harder. As adaptable as kids may be, there’s still so much that they are missing. As we hit the half way point in the summer holidays I took time to take stock of the five things my kids are missing most after five months of Covid.

School

Top of the list for most kids has to be school. Whilst the idea of school being cancelled initially made some children jump with glee, the reality of months without their friends and the structure of the school day is now really having an effect on many kids, mine included.

My eldest two were lucky enough to be able to go back to school for four weeks before the summer term ended by virtue of their father being classed as a key worker. As much as they enjoyed being back, it still wasn’t school as they would normally recognise it. Bubbles of just 15 kids and not being with all their friends or regular teachers made it feel somewhat more like childcare in familiar buildings than school proper.

Hugs from relatives

As an adult I’m still trying to get my head around the fact that no one will tell us when we might be able to hug people again. It’s as if the government have forgotten all about that restriction on us. Maybe they hope that by saying nothing we’ll all forget that it is a rule still (as seems to be the case looking at pictures on social media) and then if we have a second wave they’ll be able to blame people for hugging each other?

As a kid though being able to see your grandparents and other relatives but not be able to give them a hug as they usually would is so difficult. I know some parents have stopped visits to grandparents entirely as the feeling of not being able to hug each other is too much for them to handle. I find it astounding that people can be allowed to sit next to each other on aeroplanes and get drunk together in pubs, yet a small child isn’t allowed to be embraced by their grandmother. Doesn’t that just feel wrong to you? In Scotland social distancing is no more for children under the age of 11. Why isn’t that the case here in England too? Or are the remnants of Hadrian’s Wall working as a Covid defence?

Swimming and libraries

We’re a family who enjoy simple pleasures during school holidays rather than flash trips away. Two highlights for my kids are usually going swimming together and taking trip to our amazing local library. Both aren’t allowed right now. The swimming pool has just reopened, but only for lane swimming or formal swimming lessons. My kids just want to mess around in the water, much like friends are doing when they are able to go away to places with their own pools like Butlins or Centre Parcs.

The local library is also reopening this week, but only for people to collect pre-ordered books. As a small child the joy of the library is being able to go in and choose a new author or book from a vast choice. Sitting down with a phone app and clicking on things just isn’t the same.

Playgrounds

The reopening of playgrounds has varied so much around the country. In some places they are open and as you walk past you could almost think that nothing had ever happened. In others playgrounds are still all taped off and the grass in them overgrown.

As a responsible parent I feel that I shouldn’t let my kids into an open playground if it’s too busy. No child let loose in a playground after months of it being off limits is going to remember to social distance. Especially not if they’re a toddler. But imagine how heartbreaking it is to a child to get to a playground and then be told they can’t go in whilst other kids are in there running wild.

Spontaneity

Children may not all understand the word spontaneity but that is definitely what they are missing these summer holidays. One of the lovely things about the long school holiday is being able to get up and say “what shall we do today?” Nowadays pretty much everything has to be booked in advance and it really does take some of the joy out of things. Getting slots to visit a National Trust property is like getting Glastonbury tickets and has to be attempted the Friday before. If you’re visiting somewhere new you need to do your research in advance and book a table somewhere for lunch or dinner, or else you run the risk of having hungry kids and no where to feed them. Places have (understandably) restricted visitor numbers so you just can’t always get a slot somewhere on the day you want. I understand why it has to be done, but when you’re a kid used to being able to be spontaneous it really can be quite disappointing.

I know all this is being done for our benefit, but at the same time we really do need to think about the impact this all has on children. My toddler’s not been able to mix with anyone her own age for months now and that surely must be having a developmental impact on her. She’s at the stage where she should be going to toddler groups and stay and play sessions and just can’t. The older two miss their friends and normal life acutely. Hopefully schools will be returning next month, but with bubbles still in place it’s not going to be how it was when they waved goodbye to their friends back in March. They’ve missed birthday parties and traditional end of school year activities. School trips were cancelled and my son will even be going to a new school in September. They also miss all the extra curricular things they love. Cubs and Beavers. Swimming lesson and football training sessions. Who knows when all that will be back to normal.