Oh dear, oh dear! What a plumbing disaster we had yesterday!

When John was getting boys out of the shower before bedtime, I heard a shout "Deb, I need you" The shower just wouldn't turn off and there was water gushing out of the shower head. Hot water at that. We had to turn off the water at the stopcock to stop the shower, but it meant that we had no running water at all. It was a nightmare! We couldn't flush toilets, we couldn't wash our hands, we couldn't do any dishes, nothing. Nicht. Nada. Nowt. I had to ring an emergency plumber this morning to come out to the problem, which took a whole 15 minutes to fix. How people manage without running water is beyond me, and even more so clean water. So let's not forget those people who don't even have clean, parasite-free water in which to bathe and to drink, let alone to use their bloody dishwashers and washing machines.

Okay, on with knitterly stuff. My sock progress for the Sockamonth Challenge was severely hindered last night due to my stopcock duties *roll*, and my progress thus far is this:



I'm about two thirds of the way down the cuff. I'm knitting a sock for my seven year old son on DPNs (I've given up with the bloomin' two circulars method for now) in a lovely yarn Four Seasons Hot Socks. Matthew chose the colours because they reminded him of the ocean, so they will officially be known as the ‘Ocean Socks', and rather aptly too, I feel, after last night's fiasco with water *rolls eyes again*

And progress has been made on the milk chocolate merino cardigan. After washing and blocking, and then steam pressing, the front and back of the cardigan look like this, you can just about see the sleeves blocking in the same photo:



It actually looks like I picked up the right number of stitches on the front bands now, instead of looking like I picked up too few and the cardigan fronts looking runkled up. That's because I knitted the cardigan to the tension I had after washing and steam pressing, rather than before the blocking treatment. Sneaky huh?