Footloose and Fancy Free

A sweet hello to everyone from me, how has your week been going so far? Joy of joys it will be Friday tomorrow and I can breathe a sigh of relief at having a rest from such a chaotic, yet fulfilling and enlightening week at work.

Thank you for popping in and all your lovely encouraging and kind comments they really do make blogging complete! Welcome if you have commented for the first time and may have added your name to the followers list. I always try and pop in to your blogs to say hi and nice to meet you if I can xox

Back to today's post, Do you like the colours of the above photograph? I like taking pictures of my feet, in fact I have always liked my feet in comparison to having met people who really hate or intensely dislike their feet and never wear flip flops or sandals or go bare foot. Something I find hard to relate to as I was mostly bare foot as a kid growing up in Sunny South Africa where it was completely normal to not wear shoes. Anyhow, I wanted to show you my feet in Loop in London (see previous post for details of my visit there). I loved the carpet and thought my shoes rather suited it, hence the photograph despite having a few interesting peeks / looks from other customers. The staff in Loop ignored me, ignored me in a good way that is, maybe they are used to people being loopy in their shop :0)

Stick to the subject Penelope!

Ok, so this post is about my feet first of all and then a little more on Loop. On the way up to London last Saturday I knitted on the 2 hour train journey there and back and a little on the underground tubes too. I started knitting myself some socks on two needles (yes only TWO...no DPN's for me at the moment)with the yarn I bought in my LYS in their May bank holiday sale shown here

What a sheer delight to knit with Manos 70% merino wool and 30% silk. So soft and so swift to knit with these socks took me no time at all and required little knowledge and experience as a knitter. I found the pattern in a great Erica Knight book called Classic Knits which you can access on Amazon via this link. I found it in my library and you can request it from yours too if you don't want to purchase it. It's full of simple yet classical knits and has socks on TWO needles for silly billy's like me who fear DPN's.

Here they are, ta dah....

They are not perfect by any means but I am rather pleased with my 'Slouch socks' and after finishing sewing them up a couple of nights ago I haven't wanted to take them off in view of their softness, comfort and warmth not to mention just having a lot of foot appreciation in this house. Poor Alice and Andy have had enough of me dangling my feet in their faces! Needless to say a request or two has come my way from a certain little lady :0) for autumnal socks please.

What a pleasure and sense of achievement making your own socks can bring, I've always been able to sew my own clothes if I desired but socks have remained out of the equation of fabric uses. Just love them and I am sure many more 1 skein wonders will appear from this pattern in the future.

Do you want a peek at my Loop yarn I purchased on Saturday? I'm already onto a new pattern I found in Loop and although this is quite ambitious for me I hope I haven't gone too far out of my depths with it. I'll show you what I am making very soon. So here's a peek at the yarn first.

Such heavenly, girly colours don't you think? It's very lightweight and I am being a bit ambitious here but hopefully I'll succeed.

So I'm off to be fancy free on my bicycle, new socks and birkenstocks on and off I go. Hope to catch up with all your lovely blogs over the next few days and bring you more news of my creations xox