This evening, I have been mostly…

…baking quite a lot of sugar cookies…

…knitting a teeny tiny baby sock…

…and debating the student fees issue with two of my best friends.  There is so much in the media about it at the moment that I don’t really know what’s true or not, but I do think that it’s such an incredibly complex issue that it’s always going to cause controversy.  I personally believe that higher education is a right, but one that you have to earn.  By that I mean that finance, social class, age, or any such factors should not prohibit anyone from going to university, but entrance to a degree should be earned through hard work and good grades.  We’ve become a society that expects degrees for many jobs that would be much better prepared for through vocational training or good old experience and that teaches young people that university is the next logical step after school.  University is not for everyone, and a society that thinks that it is runs into trouble – like higher education becoming too expensive for it to be accessible to those that want to continue their learning.  Knowledge is so important that it should always be available, but it should also be respected.  I don’t really know where this leaves me on the issue of the impending university fees, except to say that something definitely needs to change.

In which Christmas teddy has both of his arms

I was expecting this bear to be bigger than he ended up, but I guess that’s what happens when I use an entirely different yarn and needle size than is advised in the pattern.  I just had to turn this Regia Softy sock yarn into a teddy bear, though – what yarn could be more perfect?  Of course, it would have made equally snuggly socks, but my sock ennui still continues, over a year since I made my last pair.  I keep thinking that maybe I want to make a pair of socks, but then I remember that once I’ve made one, I have to make another one – exactly the same.  I don’t have all that much patience as a knitter; once I’ve completed a challenge, I want another one.  I don’t want to do the same thing twice.  I know that I’m not alone in this – the term Second Sock Syndrome was not coined just for me.

Anyway, back to teddy.  I used this pattern from the knitty.com archives, which is a lovely little pattern, but it does have some hurdles.  Firstly, the body and head are knitted in the round as one piece, so when it comes to turning them the right way out, with the purl side outwards, it’s mighty tricky to fit the head through the tiny gap of the neck.  There’s no other way to turn him the right way out, so I employed brute force and I was worried for my stitches.  Then, when I got to the legs, the instructions were to pick up stitches from the bottom of the body and knit in the round for each leg.  Had I done that, though, the lovely fluffy purl side would have been inside with no way to turn the leg the right way.  I had to modify the pattern to knit the legs separately and then join them as seamlessly as possible to the body.  Other than that, this is a lovely, quick knit.  I was a little unhappy with the arm placement when I first attached them, so I decided to go back and re-place them so that little bear wasn’t pointing all over the place.  They’re still a bit wonky, but I’m pretending that that’s part of the charm…