Happy New Year Dearest Readers,

May you thrive, prosper and make useful, beautiful things of all kinds, be it tea cosies, babies or love.

This is our last day in Munich – tomorrow we catch a train to Frankfurt at 7.30am (ouch) and then our plane home in the afternoon.  It is a time of finishing, goodbyes and a feeling of completion.

We spent the morning hopping on and off the U Bahn, approving the beautiful modern designs of the stations and exploring the historic squares above.  We visited Marienneplatz for the Glockenspiel clock, ate lunch at the Viktualienmarkt, Odeonsplatz for the huge lions, the Residenz and the Hofgarten and Munchen-Freiheit just for the station. We’ve had ourselves a great fun romp through Germany.

As we watched the New Year’s Eve fireworks from our window, I finished off my first pair of socks.  How timely – how complete.

I used Erica Lueder’s Hermione’s Everyday Socks pattern which is available free from her lovely, very readable blog.  This was a great pattern for a sock beginner and perfect for the varigated yarn I used.  The yarn and simple broken rib texture pattern really complimented each other.  The socks were knit from the top down and used a modified garter stitch heel flap.  Turning the heel was a simple yet exciting experience.  Ravelled here.

I think I now have an insight into the romance of sock knitting.  They really are quietly beguiling.  There is something very calming and neat about the repetition of stitch numbers in forming the heel flap, picking up for the heel and decreasing for the instep which are all based on halves and quarters of the original numbers of stitches.  It is like knitting the Golden Mean.