Almost overnight the world seems to have been transformed into a blaze of autumn colour. There are yellow leaves and red berries:

and vivid crimson creepers hanging against a wall I passed on my way to a meeting after lunch:

It’s beautiful, but even though it’s still quite mild the temperatures are dropping, and I work in a fifty-year-old building with ancient and creaky central heating which doesn’t do a remotely adequate job of keeping the building warm. Of course, being a knitter I just wrap myself up in cosy handknits – adding a shawl round my neck and a pair of fingerless mitts really helps, and it’s rarely so cold that I feel I have to wear a hat as well. My colleagues aren’t so fortunate, though, and a number of people have suggested to me that I should knit fingerless gloves for everyone else to wear. I had been resisting this, but then last Saturday I spent an hour helping out on the p/hop stall at Fibre Flurry and chatting to people about the Cranford knit-along that’s being run on the p/hop group on Ravelry, and so many people told me what a quick knit Cranfords are I thought that maybe it was feasible after all. Which is why, instead of knitting myself a pair of Cranfords as I’d planned, I’ve now agreed to knit half a dozen pairs for various colleagues, in return for donations to p/hop. It’s possible that this is the action of a complete lunatic (it’s not as though I have unlimited knitting time, much as I would like that!) but having cast on the first pair last night I’d managed to knit three pattern repeats by this morning:

Maybe this isn’t so mad after all.

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Thank you Whitehart. You can read more from Whitehart here.

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