If you pick up your knitting project regularly, what tends to happen is this: you quickly find you have gone from just a cuff to a whole sock almost without thinking. This really flew past.

But it doesn’t make sense to stop there, does it? Because if you push on just a little more, you tend to get to this:

Yes, since finishing my Cucumber Vintage Sweater at the end of last week, I have managed to complete a pair of socks!

These are odd socks, with the change of yarn partway through the foot. They will definitely be wearable, and any addition to the sock drawer is to be applauded, but I’m not entirely convinced that I would be inclined to do this again as an exercise in using up yarn. Since the entire pair were by way of an experiment, I decided to try out using a twisted stitch in the toe area to see if it’s any more sturdy than my usual basic stocking stitch. The toe is the part that I tend to wear through, so I’m always cooking up ideas on how to improve matters in that department. Working the twisted stitches was mildly irritating so it would have to provide a substantial amount of additional wear in order to be worthwhile.

Moving on, now it is Wednesday and I don’t have a single thing on the needles. The UK is heading towards a spell of scorching weather and I don’t think I will be likely to want to work on any knitting for the rest of this week, which leaves me free to dream about what I will make a start on when I am ready to pick up the needles again.

Away from knitting, I realised this week that no matter how much I concentrate on the ideas of well-collated wardrobes, I am absolutely rubbish when it comes to buying clothes. I have struggled with summer clothes for my entire life, so starting these plans for a more cohesive set of clothes is a bit silly at this time of year. However, I’ve just ordered a couple more items for autumn which fit much better with the 1980s “Looks That Work” concept, and I’m intrigued to see what knitting ideas they spark when they arrive. Actually, one is sparked by the knitting, rather than the other way around: the skirt I decided would work well with my Grape Fade Rimini cardigan had a small price reduction and was still available in my size, so I leapt at it.

Another thing that tends to happen is if you sit down every evening intending to write at least 500 words on your novel, you start to notice milestones flicking past like distance markers on a motorway. I hit 60,000 words this week and I’m not sure I’ve even drawn breath since I was at 40,000 words. It turns out that the advice given by most published writers is entirely true: there is no substitute for actually sitting down and doing the writing. You can plan to your heart’s content, you can dissect each character until you know them better than your own family, you can know every single nuance of the pathway your story is going to take, but that isn’t writing the story. In the same way, it is all well and good understanding your knitting wool inside-out, reading the pattern so that the shaping of a garment is fixed in your mind, but unless you have the stitches on the needles and are turning up to work on them regularly, you will never have a finished object.

Have you been watching milestones flash past, or are you sitting in a traffic jam this summer?