They have their own bunk bed. The blankets are finished, the boys have glued the other bed together and they have pillows and mattresses made from some spare calico that has been lurking in a box from when I made a practice wedding dress out of it.

The blankets are done with entrelac knitting which is where you knit a little square at a time, you pick up some stitches along the side of a previous square and work back and forth just across those stitches whilst decreasing on the other edge to join it to the square at the other side. There are loads of online tutorials or patterns if you search for them by people who can explain it far more eloquently than me! It’s a bit fiddly so I wouldn’t recommend it for knitting big things but it looks interesting. It also taught me a new skill – I got thoroughly fed up of turning the knitting round every six stitches so I worked out how to do a knit stitch going from right to left rather than left to right and then not long afterwards Sarah on Crafts from the Cwtch did a tutorial on exactly that which you can look at if you are interested because I am too lazy to take a load of pictures to explain something when someone else has already done a better job of it.

The knitting part of the secret thing is finished so I had to take a deep breath and do the steek. A steek is where you put a few extra stitches into your knitting so that you can cut it later. It means you can knit things in the round which end up flat or which need an opening later on, for example you could knit a cardigan as though you were doing a jumper in the round (which is much better for trying to do fair isle because you are always looking at the front of the pattern) and then you cut it up the middle, tidy up the edges and do the button band and stuff.

You can either machine sew over the steek before you cut it or crochet over the extra stitches, I decided to machine this one because it is going to have some binding sewn along the edge afterwards anyway.

Hold your breath! It hasn’t unravelled so far…

The Secret Thing, which is a bit bigger than I had planned (meaning I didn’t really plan it or work out what the finished size would be from the tension and just started it, oops) is blocking at the moment (blocking is when you wash it and lay it flat in the right shape to even up the stitches and make it look even better – the Yarn Harlot has written a nice thing here). After some considerable thinking I decided it would have to be pinned to the rug because it won’t fit anywhere else sensible but the rug is on the table because I was paranoid about the water soaking through and marking the floor, I did think about stripping the bed, pinning the Secret Thing to that and sleeping somewhere else until it is dry but I thought it wouldn’t go down too well with the other occupant of the bed, long suffering though he is, I imagine that would be a step too far. Although he only has himself to blame – it was him who taught me how to knit in the first place.

On a completely different note I currently have the ear worm of the suffragette song from Mary Poppins – “Though we adore men individually, we agree that as a group they’re rather stupid!’ which whilst this isn’t a view I particularly agree with (unless applied to the human race as a whole, regardless of gender – I prefer individual people to large mobs) I don’t see why I should have to suffer Glynis Johns being Mrs. Banks marching up and down singing about Missus Pankhurst being clapped in irons if nobody else does. Ready? One, two, three, go: “We’re clearly soldiers in petticoats”…