Dark evenings = knitting evenings in our house

The one saving grace of the dark winter evenings, for me, is my knitting and crochet emerge again.

I have only learnt to do both fairly recently, but my mother is a master knitter, who can read newspapers or watch telly without every looking at her needles or knitting. I have to check off every row completed, whereas decades of knitting seem to have left her with a natural ability to keep track of the most complicated pattern repeats without even trying. I can only aspire to that!