Yesterday was the day I made my Christmas puddings. It was a lovely day, chilly but sunny with no wind, the perfect weather to have your windows open to let out the steam. My mum’s recipe (the only one to be used and I will brook no argument on that, although I will happily allow you to use your mum’s recipe if you have one) calls for the pudding to be steamed for 8 hours on the day you make it and then for a further 3 hours on the day you serve it. She always tended to give the pudding 3-4 weeks to mature after making, so somewhere around the last weekend of November is the best time to make it.

Once the pudding mixture was prepared and bowls filled, with one in the steamer and one in the fridge ready to be steamed today, I could look forward to nothing more important than working on my Heather Sweater and browsing through old knitting magazines for a project to suit my mid-blue wool. I felt inclined towards a more delicate design for the new project as my wool is 4-ply/fingering weight and I wanted to use just the basic single strand after two projects in a row which use two strands of 4-ply held together. But what do I know? The pattern that leapt at me was “Rivelin” by Louisa Harding which was published in Issue 26 of The Knitter magazine.

It uses an aran weight yarn, so my wool holding three strands together should do it and the thicker yarn means it will be a quick knit with just enough interest in that cable and bobble trim to keep me amused. Feel free to remind me of all of this when it’s the middle of January and I’m complaining about the pattern, the wool, and my desire to be working on anything else at all…. It is, I think, very important indeed to know yourself!

I wanted to cast on straight away for a swatch to check my gauge (also known as Tension), but I needed to work on my Heather Sweater so I made a pact with myself. If I started the seaming of the Heather Sweater in the afternoon, then I could work on the swatch in the evening. That’s fair, isn’t it? Here’s how I did.

I mischieviously thought of titling this post “What (all) do I know?” because a new bugbear phrase has entered my universe and I want to name and shame it right here, right now:

What all….

How and why this phrase has suddenly leapt into my field of vision escapes me. I started to notice it cropping up in YouTube videos and it’s become increasingly prevalent, although mainly on the American side of the Atlantic. From what I can determine, it is being used as a substitute for the word “everything”, a prime example being “I’m going to show you what all is in my planner”. Is it some new fad, or has it always been around and I’ve just not been associating with the kind of people who use it? Now I’m starting to see it in written work, in blog posts, for example in the sentence “Imagine what all she might pack.” I can certainly imagine all she might pack. I can posit what she might pack. Everything she might pack would work well for me. But “what all”? No, not today, not tomorrow, not ever; it is not elegant, it is not clever and I do not like it. Does it annoy you or am I alone in this?