I don’t want to jinx it but I feel summer has truly come to an end now. The heat wave is over, the students are back in town and leaves are beginning to change colour. Also, last Friday the Summer Socks KAL ended and apparently I managed to finish 7 pairs in the last 2 months! Not only did I find my knitting mojo back over summer, but I finally also managed to squeeze in some reading time.

I haven’t finished Three Bags Full yet, but I am really loving it. It’s a sheep detective and I think that says enough for anyone to want to read it. I loved all the books I finished (Het Smelt by Lize Spit, Slade House by David Mitchel and Me Before You by Jojo Moyes and To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee which I loved the most), with the exception of the new Harry Potter book. I know there’s plenty of people out there that loved it, I am most certainly one of the people that couldn’t help but feel it read like badly written fan fiction.

Other than the socks I already blogged about (Pixel Socks, Spring Fern, Evening Stockings for a Young Lady and Fine & Dandy socks) I managed an additional 3 vanilla pairs. The yarn used for these are: Lana Grossa Meilenweit (in the Bronx colourway), Regia Pairfect (in the cheesecake colourway) and Arne and Carlos design line (in the summer night colourway).

These Arne & Carlos socks just came off the needles last Friday and as you can see they still need a soak. And although the stripes in the Pairfect Cheesecake socks are my favourite colour-wise and I’ll be buying pairfect yarn in all possible colourways, the cuff on the Arne and Carlos socks worked out so well I think I’ll be using it for more socks from now on. If you want to try it it’s super simple: I just did a provisional crochet cast on, then knit X amount of rows, purl one row, then knit X amount of rows again. Fold the provisional cast on inside the socks, take out the waste yarn and knit each newly opened up stitch together with one of the live stitches.

Now that I got this insane spree of socks knitting behind me, I’ve been spending my entire Sunday browsing patterns, running to my stash looking at yarn, and dreaming of all the 5 billion autumn projects I’ll be casting on.

How has your summer knitting been? Have you already started on any autumn projects?

The summer weather just doesn’t want to go away, and so my binge sock knitting continues (because this correlation makes total sense).

Pattern: Fine & Dandy socks by Jessica Gore
Yarn: Cosmic Strings sock yarn in Sprinkles colourway

It took me a little while to get the hang of the flower pattern in the beginning, if you’re struggling just like me this youtube video is most helpful. Once figured out, this is an easy to memorise pattern repeat, although a bit fidgety at times.

The yarn is so much fun to knit with, waiting for the little colour explosion to happen. The socks differ a bit from one another, with one being a bit more speckled than the other. After already having seen a similar thing happen with my Spring Fern socks, I think we can officially call this the summer of slightly mismatched socks. Years from now we’ll fondly think back to this time, complaining about how all our socks are way too matchy and how life was simpler during that hot hot summer of ’16.

What’s next? More socks I reckon, because we’re in the middle of a heat wave, and you know, why wouldn’t there be a heat wave in the middle of September instead of autumn weather? I’ll just have to be patient a tad bit longer for autumn to finally arrive, and with it every possible warm knitting project I can think of.