Unraveled, Week 3/2022

It's Wednesday again, in spite of my brain insisting that it's only Tuesday (something that happens without fail anytime I have a Monday off), so that means it's time for my weekly link-up with Kat and the Unravelers!

No unraveling has happened this week, but not that much knitting progress has been made since the weekend, either, and that's mainly because much of my attention has been focused on this:

This is the first bobbin of plied yarn from my combo spin (which is actually more green than blue, as it appears here), and there's going to be at least one more. I'm going to cram as much as I can on this bobbin before I switch it out. Plying handspun can get a little tedious; at least when I was spinning the singles, I was actively doing something and I had the novelty of each new bundle of fiber I pulled out of the bag. This is more mindless, but it's at least something that lends itself well to reading at the same time.

I have done a little knitting (though I haven't touched my sweater since the weekend). I'd cast on a sock for our trip home from Florida, and the intention was for it to be a way to try out an idea I had to combine two of my sock patterns -- one cuff down, one toe up -- into a new version that could be knit in either direction. I've been just about to the heel for a while and kept putting it off, in the way that you put off something that requires a little thought and seems like it'll require a huge effort but in actuality really doesn't take much time at all once you sit down and do it. And that was the case with this heel. About an hour of knitting time gave me proof of concept.

I know it looks a little like a shark fin, but it's a combination of gussets and a short-row heel, and it seems to work! I tried it on right after finishing and was happy with it, but I want to try it on again after knitting a bit more of the foot to be sure. Then it's just a matter of working out all the numbers for the different sizes.

Reading has been good this week! I've finished two books.

Shortly after I posted about Magpie Murders last week, I got really sucked into it, and I think I listened to the second half of the book over the course of Thursday. The story follows a book editor, Susan Ryeland, who has just gotten the latest murder mystery from her publisher's most popular author, and we read the book along with her at the start. But she discovers that the final chapters are missing from the manuscript, leaving the murder unsolved, and when the author of the book turns up dead, she finds herself involved in her own murder mystery as she tries to find the missing pages. Horowitz's detective in the book-within-a-book felt a bit like Poirot to me, but both story lines were very entertaining, and I thoroughly enjoyed both narrators. I gave it 4 stars.

The more Lauren Groff I read, the more I am impressed with her as a writer. I found the characters and the plot of Fates and Furies to be completely unrealistic and yet completely compelling, primarily because of the writing. I'm choosing to view this book as a modern Greek tragedy rather than an attempt at realism; Groff even inserts her own commentary on the plot in real time in brackets as a sort of chorus. I kept reading not because I cared about the characters, who at times seemed even too much for fiction, but because I was fascinated by how the author wrote about them and I wanted to see where she would take their story. This was a read that for me was less about the plot and more about the craft. I gave it 4 stars.

At the moment, I am only reading Braiding Sweetgrass, still quite slowly, but I've got the new Read With Us title, Agatha of Little Neon, queued up in my Kindle library to start later today and am hoping that soon I'll have Stanley Tucci's memoir to listen to from the library.

What are you making and reading this week?