Widdershins Purled I, Stringing It Low

I may not have mentioned this before (if I have, I can’t find where), but some years ago I discovered that I purl backwards – which is to say, clockwise, or Eastern Style.

I don’t know how long I’ve been doing it – if that was the way my mother taught me, being simpler, or if I just found it easier than the anti-clockwise way and decided in my youthful innocence that it didn’t make any difference.

Revelation: it does. When one knits continental style – the way I do – the yarn goes round the needle anti-clockwise. Like so:Continue & Comment

How to Live Without TV

  1. Remove TV from house; delete all TV-related tabs, apps etc.
  2. Ta-da! You are living without TV.


Except what we really want to know is not how to live without TV, but how to thrive without TV. (Side note: if English was a more sensible language, that would have rhymed and been an all-around more catchy sentence.)

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I’m A Gnu

I’m knitting socks at the moment, out of a single ball of yarn – knitting the ball at both ends, as one might say. To avoid the awkwardness of having one short sock and one long one, I have both socks underway simultaneously – first foot, second foot, second leg, first leg. Unequal sockage duly avoided.

What I have failed to avoid, however, are the strains of The S-Song of the S-Second S-Sock, floating through my mind. And since that song is set to the tune of The Gnu by Flanders & Swann, I have found myself proclaiming at intervals that I’m a gnu.

Black wildebeest, or white-tailed gnu, Connochaetes gnou at Krugersdorp Game Reserve, Gauteng, South Africa (31233781942)
Gnu waiting for horns to grow long enough to knit with.
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