Knitting, Reading, and Thinking

It's Thursday, and while I don't typically join in on the Three on Thursday thing, my post today seems to have three parts and I'm going with it.

I. Knitting

I have finished a thing! A small thing, true, but it is finished and blocked and pretty darn cute, if I do say so myself.

Pattern: Flax Light by Tin Can Knits, size 6-12 months
Yarn: Knit Picks Felici in Baker Street, 1.46 skeins
Needles: US 4 (3.5 mm) and US 2 (2.75 mm)
Started/Completed: May 27/June 4

This pattern has been knit thousands of times, and with good reason -- it's a classic style that's good for anyone and it's very well written, as you'd expect from a Tin Can Knits pattern. I have a feeling I'll knit it again in the future, perhaps for me and Rainbow and maybe even for the Mister, should he decide he wants another sweater (though perhaps for him I'll opt for the heavier version). I didn't make any modifications to the pattern and only messed with the yarn when I did the sleeves, starting each one with the same color as the last row worked in the yoke. I'll admit I'm a bit annoyed with the breaks in the patterning in the yarn. One happened toward the end of the yoke (that thin line of the dark blue that doesn't quite go all the way around) and I was hoping it was a fluke, but then it happened again on the sleeve you see in on the right. It doesn't seem to be an interruption of the pattern, just a random length of the dark blue where it doesn't belong. There were also a couple of blips of white/undyed yarn that ended up being only about two stitches wide; I think one got blended into the garter stitch on the sleeve, but the other is more obvious on one of the sleeves and I made sure to make that fall on the back of the sweater. I hardly doubt anyone but me (and, well, now you) will notice these issues, so I'm not sweating them too much.

The remaining WIPs on the needles at the moment are Rainbow's Little Boxy, which is still a big tube, and a new pair of shortie socks I started for her.

If the yarn looks familiar, that's because it's leftover from the brioche slouchy hat I knit last month. I have 40-ish grams of the skein left, which I'm hoping is enough for a pair of socks for her. My recent pair weighed 55 g, and her feet are shorter and smaller than mine, so I'm hoping I'll have enough. If I run out, I'll just add in some scraps -- she won't care.

II. Reading

I've been reading quite a bit lately and finished three books since I last posted about it:

• Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed: This was an incredibly absorbing and enjoyable book. I'm not sure if I've mentioned it on the blog, but when I was in college, I majored in psychology and intended to go to grad school to get a PhD and become a therapist. That plan got a little derailed by the statistics courses I had to take, but I'm still quite interested in the profession (and have benefited from therapy myself several times). It was one of those rare books that I could not put down and also didn't want to end. I gave it five stars.
• We Should All Be Feminists: I got this as an audiobook from the library, and it feels a little like cheating to count it as a book that I've read because it's a very short book; the whole audiobook, read by the author, is a brief 45 minutes. I listened while spinning on Sunday and enjoyed it a great deal, and not just because of the content. It was a real treat to listen to the author, with her rich voice and beautiful Nigerian accent, read her own words. I gave it four stars.
• The Lie: A Memoir of Two Marriages, Catfishing & Coming Out: One of the squares on my summer book bingo card is "protagonist with a different gender/sexual orientation from your own," so I decided to think outside the box a bit when I was looking over June's choices for the Amazon First Reads program and go with this memoir. I found it to be an interesting and at times heartbreaking read. Though I feel like I stretched my horizons a bit by reading it, I had trouble following it at times -- it jumps around in time a lot. I gave it two stars, not because it wasn't good, but because of that difficulty.

III. Thinking

There's been a lot of discussion in the online knitting community lately about sizing and inclusivity. Given that the fashion industry has long focused on body types that aren't very realistic, it's no surprise that the knitwear design industry has struggled with its sizing range, and recently a lot of designers have begun the process of making their garment size ranges much larger. Kat posted today about an Instagram post from Romi Hill, and reading Romi's words got me thinking. I've mainly kept this blog as a record of knitting, spinning, and reading, but from time to time over the past year, I may have mentioned that I have been making an effort to lose some weight over the past year. I know that weight and body image are things that nearly all women struggle with (many men do, too, but society is particularly tough on women); it's something I've been dealing with since my early teenage days. For most of my adult life, I've been overweight -- not terribly so, but enough that I've been self-conscious of my body and my size for pretty much most of my life. I've tried numerous diets over the years, but nothing ever worked. And as I've been reflecting on it, I think that the reason nothing ever worked was because I was doing it for the wrong reasons. I was trying to be thin so that I'd meet society's idea of what I "should" look like.

What changed in the last year or so is that I made changes to my diet and my lifestyle in order to be healthier. I had stopped eating meat for a while because my cholesterol was a little high, but when that did nothing to change it (my cholesterol levels actually went up), I realized that losing weight was probably going to be the most effective way to get those numbers down. So I started paying closer attention to what I ate. I'm eating less, yes, but I'm also making better choices about what I put into my body -- eating more fruits and vegetables and whole grains and fewer processed carbs and sweets. And I'm moving more and doing some exercises daily to strengthen my body. For as good as it has felt to see the numbers on the scale go down and to wear clothes that I hadn't been able to wear comfortably in years, what really feels good is that I've made a lifestyle change that I feel like I can keep up in the long term. And I feel more comfortable in my own skin, which is really a better measure of the effectiveness than any number on the scale. (Oh, and my cholesterol has gone down, too, which is one less thing to stress about.)

I'm telling you all this not so you can pat me on the back about what a good job I've done or to make you feel guilty if you're not happy with how you look but to show you that any change can be made if you do it for the right reasons -- most especially if you do it for yourself. There are plenty of things in this world and in my life that I can't control, but I can look out for my health in terms of how I care for my body, and that's very empowering.