Striped socks and a cabled blanket

Just a quick post with two items I've finished recently:

First, yet more socks. But these socks have stripes WHICH MATCH!  Look!  The stripes match! 

This wool was given to me by Vikki, she was going to knit it into socks for my birthday but ran out of time and so decided I could knit my own.  It was quite an effort to get them to match.  I made sure I started the first sock at a colour change (blue to purple) so I could cast on the second sock in the same place.  I also thought it would be clever to write down how many rows I knitted for the foot, so I would know for the second.  I wrote down a number, 24, but there are quite clearly more than 24 rows in the foot of this sock.  Next time I will remember to write down the actual number, not just a number.

I was quite happily knitting away on sock two when Ben and I were on the way to my parents' for my birthday weekend.  Then I realised there was a knot in the wool and the colour sequence went completely wrong.  I had no option but to remove the knot, miss out a section of wool and then take back some rows (I was on the first pale blue section) and try my hardest to get the colours to match sock one.  In a car, with no scissors or a flat surface, this was a bit of a struggle.  But I managed and just kept my fingers crossed that it would all work out.  Which it did!  I posted them to a friend as a belated birthday present this week and apparently they fit perfectly.  Always a relief!

Back in May I won a competition run by Vikki, which I wrote about here.  I finally finished this blanket on Thursday's commute.  It wasn't the easiest thing to knit on a train (quite a bit of blanket in my lap, quite a big ball of wool still at my feet) but I was so close to the end and just wanted to finish.  There are a few errors in it, which I can see, but I think I'm just being over-critical and they will be less obvious to non-knitters (as Vikki reassures me!).  This week it will be given to a friend who is posting it to a friend in Australia - it's going to be a well-travelled blanket!  I've really enjoyed knitting this and it's definitely a pattern I'll knit again.

It's so satisfying to finish a project and give the items to their new owners - but there are always more things to be getting on with (that's not a bad thing, by the way) so on that note, I'm going to return to my sky blanket...I started off so well with sewing in the ends as I went along, but I've been a bit lax recently and I ought to do some more before I find myself with six months' worth to do!