I hope everyone has had a good festive period!

Hope you all don't mind but I'm just going to treat today's post as a diary of sorts… I also don't have photos today!

I've been off for a few days, visited my family, and will be travelling back today… I'll then have a few more days of rest before starting back at work.

We've been cooking, eating, cleaning… I dare say I haven't been too excessive in the eating department… didn't have dinner (and by dinner I mean evening meal) on Christmas Day or Boxing Day!

Did you exchange any nice gifts for Christmas (if you celebrate)?

I managed to hand make a fair proportion of gifts this year, and aside from that I tried to buy from smaller businesses where I could. Where possible, I want to avoid giving money to tax evading companies who treat their workers poorly…

On the receiving end, from my immediate family I was mostly given books; a couple of Octavia E Butler sci fi books - I recommend reading her work - and a big ol' vegetarian cookbook called One Pot, Pan, Planet, which I'm excited to try recipes from.

My sister and I have an agreement to hand make garments for one another this year, although neither of has completed them! She also generously got me a nice handmade mug from a local pottery studio…

Prior to my hometown trip, my boyfriend and I had 'mini Christmas'; we exchanged gifts, cooked and ate together and then watched a few movies… I got him a board game which we could play together, a hand knitted hat, a couple of 2nd hand Terry Pratchett books (the old cover art is best in my opinion!) and a sewing pattern, as he has become a much better sewist than me!

He got me a beautiful wicker basket, woven at a basket weaving studio in the town 10 mins from our home. It's lovely, I'll use it to carry around my various knitting projects.

He also kindly gifted me a skein of Whistlebare nylon free sock yarn. Whistlebare is a farm in the very North of England (Northumberland, I think?), and they make yarn from their mohair goats and Wensleydale sheep.

Let's go on a knitting related tangent now; I think I'm at sock saturation point! So, I'm going to finish knitting up my sock yarns that I have - some for friends, some for me… then I think after that point it's going to have to be a rule of - only one sock project on the go or in the stash! And for me, only non nylon socks. Thankfully there's an increasing amount of options these days! Even if they are a little bit of an investment. If times get hard I will just have to spin my own yarn for socks!

Let's see how long I last on this rule; I've shared a lot of my 'rules' here before, to varying degrees of success!

Anyway please feel free to tell us about your Christmas or any other celebration you had! I'd like to properly celebrate Yule next year.

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