Over the weekend I finished a few projects. First there was the fifth pair of socks in my Socks For Others Club:

After which I started the last pair, for my Dad, which I’m hoping finish before Christmas.

I also started and finished a project I recently thought up as a solution to a home decorating problem.

When we had our house extended, one of the quirky ideas we came up with was to install a urinal in the bathroom. Yes, you can buy white porcelain urinals for the home, and they’re no more expensive than an ordinary toilet. Unfortunately, the dodgy builder hire hopeless plumbers who weren’t much good with working out bathroom fittings they hadn’t encountered before (and even worse with the ones they had) and there were many attempts and a lot of returning parts to the store before the urinal was installed. By the time it was, the pipe had an extra curl in it because they hadn’t lined up the water inlet and drain, and was too close to the floor for your standard ceramic pedestal to cover.

I’ve toyed with the idea of getting a potter to make one for us, but we never get around to it and don’t want to spend much on something that, it turns out, the man of the house doesn’t use much anyway. So I came up with another solution:

Which took half a day with a knitting machine and some circular needles to make. And it can be taken off and washed if necessary. It’s not pretty, but it’s better than naked plastic pipes!