I had another blog post lined up for last week – a little tutorial on how to plait when both ends of the straps/string/whatever are attached – but then I saw exactly the same thing on Pinterest, and explained better, so I gave that a miss. I have to admit, I wasn’t in love with it anyway.

What I am in love with, is my knitting machine. I whipped up a pair of socks two weekends ago in two hours. Well, without the ribbing that is, which then took me a week of careful hand knitting rationing to do.

Yarn: Ellyn Cooper’s Yarn Sonets, a wool-bamboo mix I got from Seaport Yarns in New York.

A week or two before that I finished adding heels, toes and cuffs to one of the tubes of leftover sock yarn I whipped up a few months back. It’s been too dark and I’ve been too busy to photograph them until now.

It occurred to me that I could knit the heels like standard top-down toes, with decreases down to kitchenering the last 16 stitches, rather than short rows (which leads to having to kitchener 30 stitches to join the toe to the rest of the sock, so I think I may like this method better!).

I finally got the courage up to go to a Machine Knitters Association of Victoria meeting, heading to Surrey Hills one Thursday morning with my socks and a contribution of chocolate mudcake. It was great. They did twin demonstrations: one for those with the model of machine I have and one for a powered model. As I hoped, I picked up some tips and gained an understanding of parts of my machine that I hadn’t investigated yet. If I’d gone as a raw beginner I would have been completely bewildered, but experience with the Bond USM and working out how to do socks on the Passap meant I’m at about the right level of understanding to follow along. So, satisfied that the meetings will be fun and of benefit, I sent off for a membership to the MKAV.

Last Saturday I spent a day experimenting, then on Sunday managed to produce a pair of fingerless mitts, sans the thumb and ribbing. My back is a bit crook at the moment, so it may be a while before I do the hand knitting, but I’m feeling pretty chuffed that I’m making progress.