I'm still alive

Wow, it has been a very long time since I posted on here. A lot has changed in the past year since I posted, and it's going to be very hard to summarise the past few months, but here goes:

• Graduated from medical school
• Spent two months in Malawi, Africa working in a hospital
• Moved back up to Leeds
• Started my years as a junior doctor
• Finished my first of 6 4 month job placements, and moved on to the second

So yes, in a nutshell, very busy. I stopped blogging whilst working towards my medical school finals, which obviously took up an awful lot of my time and energy, and then wasn't really able to blog whilst in Africa, as there wasn't really any reliable internet connection. Hopefully I can do a blog post about my time there, as it was an incredible time, but no promises!

Connor and I then moved to Leeds so I could start my junior doctor training, and rented our first proper house. We've furnished it with freebies and charity shop things, but it is lovely and it really feels like home. In August, I started officially working as a doctor, in gastroenterology, and the first 4 month job just flew by. It was a terrify, exhilarating and confusing time, and I feel like I almost learnt more doing it than my 5 years in medical school. I'm now working in paediatrics, just coming to the end of 2 months in paediatric surgery, before I move on yet again to paediatric medicine.

I am loving work, I have met some amazing people and seen some incredible things. I am now completely sure that I picked the right career for me, and I'm looking forward to many more years doing it.

And now, the knitting. It was not a very productive year for me, what with everything else that was going on, but this is what I made:

At the top on the left are baby projects. We now have two new babies in the family (though one is a toddler now), and I made them a gift each over Christmas. I love the design of the blanket, Sleeping Baby's Castle, I think the knitted castle is incredible.

Bottom left are charity items, three preemie hats and three innocent smoothie bottle hat for the Big Knit in aid of Age UK.

Top right are socks, including what may well be my favourite knitted socks, Sock Strap. It's an amazing construction, the back in knitted, then the sides picked up and knitted outwards from the back, with the top knitted down after that. There is also Hopsox, made as a birthday gift for my best friend, in my hand dyed wool, and the socks I knitted Connor for Christmas 2013, which were written about in my last blog post!

Bottom right is a present I made for my Mum. It's a modified version of Anthemion, in hand spun silk yarn. I only had 68g of yarn, so I turned the wrap into a scarf, and modified the number of middle repeats, using every scrap of yarn.

The latest thing I have knitted is Saioa, in a squishy BFL single bought from a spinner at the Westmoreland County Show. It's really soft and warm, perfect considering the snow we've been having!

I am still knitted. I actually finished one more project in the last year, and wore it a couple of times, before deciding it was just too small. This is Arielle, and my gauge was slightly off, and so I have frogged the whole thing and am now reknitting it on slightly larger needles. Yes, I am crazy, but I love the pattern so much that it was a shame I would never wear it

I've also finished a none knitting project. This is a whole new thing for me, branching out into furniture! I mentioned that we have furnished out house with second hand furniture which was gifts from family or from the charity shop (I should really do a blog tour, you might be surprised at how nice some of it can be). I was given a gift of a set of 1970s nested tables, which were varnished in a hideous dark orange brown. They were practical, but really not very nice. So, on my last week off work, I set about stripping them down, and doing them up

I stripped off the varnish, sanded them down and waxed them. The wood underneath was lovely, and I wanted to show it off. The first two pictures of the rows show off the before and after best, and the biggest table has found a home next to my spinning wheel, where it goes rather nicely.

So there you have it. I will try and blog more regularly, because it would be lovely to get back into blogging a bit more. Hopefully I can do a few more posts to fill in the gaps, because this barely seems to do justice to what has been a whirlwind year!