This is the second part of my three part review of 2020 – A Very Weird Year. If you’d like to read the first part, click here.
The endless winter of 2020
By the time Winter arrived, I had been working from home for ten weeks. Australians had stopped fighting over toilet paper in shopping centres and moved on to raising pet sourdough cultures and completing jigsaw puzzles. I’d been giving myself terrible home-made haircuts and continued to make lots of cakes. My walks outside at lunchtime had stopped because I was working through my lunch breaks and I’d fallen into the bad habit of getting up, working all day and then knitting in front of the telly until bed time. Well, at least I was knitting!
At the time I thought it was lucky that we were getting through the pandemic in Winter because staying home is easy when it’s cold, wet and dark outside. I was pleased to think everything would be back to normal by Spring and I’d snap out of my sloth-like habits. That was before Victoria’s second wave of the virus.
I went to Melbourne to see my dentist and optometrist in early July, and dropped into work to grab a few things I’d left behind in March. I was almost alone on the train into the city, and Melbourne was a ghost town. New virus clusters had arisen over the past few weeks and people were getting worried. Before I got off the train, the optometrist called and cancelled my appointment – the second lock-down had just been announced and they were only seeing urgent cases. The toilet paper wars were back on.
Winter seemed especially cold, and my little home office was freezing. I got to wear the jumpers I’d made over the past years without overheating as I do in the city office. I also spent a small fortune on firewood and had the fire burning all winter which made things much cosier.
I enjoyed having the cats sit on my desk while I worked, and watching the kangaroos in their fuzzy winter coats bouncing around the yard. Ballan cheered things up a bit with Winterknits displays – yarnbombing the town – and I was generally optimistic.
I felt terrible for my friends in Melbourne who went into very strict lock-downs with night time curfews and restrictions on travelling more than 5km from home. In regional Victoria we had to wear masks in public and the cafes and pubs were all shut, but we didn’t have the curfew or travel restrictions that Melbourne did.
It’s not a poncho!
The freezing weather inspired me to finish my Cleckheaton Cabled Poncho. I refuse to call it a poncho though – it’s a winter cape!
Originally cast on in November 2019, I finished the knitting and seaming in the first week of June. I used 2kg of Warby Tweed from North East Yarns, purchased at the Bendigo Sheep Show in 2012. After running out of yarn I had to knit the button bands and the collar by alternating rows of the Warby Tweed and a 12ply alpaca blend I found at Spotlight. It’s not a perfect match but it’s a subtle contrast and doesn’t look terribly out of place.
On my Ravelry project page I’ve marked this project as 99% complete because I’m not quite finished. I plan to line it and stabilise the seams with satin tape. When I got my sewing machine out to make the lining I discovered it was broken. In the middle of the second lock-down there was no way I could get my sewing machine repaired – even with the more relaxed regional restrictions.
Despite not being lined, I wore it a lot – often over another jumper and with woolen gloves as I sat in my cold office watching the snow fall outside. It’s the biggest knitting project I’ve ever completed based on sheer size, and I’m quite impressed I finished it in just over six months.
Given my plans to work from home next year, I think my “not poncho” will get a lot more wear.
