Unraveled, Week 25/2022

Today feels simultaneously like Tuesday (because I had Monday off) and Thursday (because I'm taking Friday off), but it is actually Wednesday, and that means it's time for an Unraveled update! As usual, I am linking up with Kat today and talking about what I'm making and what I'm reading.

I'm working steadily on my brother's cardigan and have closed the pocket opening on the left front. The rows will get shorter soon as I've just started the decreases along the neckline and very shortly will do the underarm shortly. As I recall from the other front piece, there were a lot of rows in this part but they moved very quickly. I think I can probably get this piece done by the end of the week and then start in on the sleeves.

I did work a bit on Rainbow's Hitchhiker over the weekend while we were socializing with relatives and added a couple of teeth, but it doesn't look much different. What's more interesting is the new project I cast on earlier in the week, which is a new sock pattern I am testing for another designer. Mine doesn't look like much at this point:

But you can see what they will look like on her Instagram account (they're the blue socks with the sort of Art Deco-looking twisted stitch pattern that she posted several photos of this week). I'm using some deep-stash Fibernymph Dye Works Sunshine, which is Lisa's light fingering base. It's not one I typically use for socks, but it was one skein of fingering I had in a semisolid. I only need to finish one sock for the test, but of course I'll eventually make both, as I'm making these for me and want to have some pretty new socks to wear when the weather gets cold again.

I haven't had a ton of reading time in the past week because of all the festivities last weekend, but I did manage to finish two books.

Four Souls was one of the three add-on books for the Erdrich-along that we'll be discussing this weekend. This one focuses on the character of Fleur Pillager, though there are appearances by Nanapush and Margaret Kashpaw/Rushes Bear. Now that I've read a good handful of Erdrich's books, I can very easily understand why she has said that her characters won't leave her alone and keep coming back to her so she is forced to write more books about them; in many ways, they've started to feel like real people to me, and each book that features these characters feels like I'm getting more stories of their lives. Erdrich's writing is spectacular as always, and this one has some laugh-out-loud funny moments as well as the usual serious and sad bits. I gave it 4 stars.

The other book I finished was an audiobook that I listened to while I was out exercising. I wanted something that would keep my attention (to distract me from feeling like I was melting in the heat) but that wasn't too serious, so I decided to read Nine Perfect Strangers. I'd never read a book by Liane Moriarty before, though she'd certainly been on my radar. This one was ... okay. It had that page-turner-ness to it that I wanted for the context in which I was listening, but I saw a major plot point coming at the very beginning and thought the climax was rather anticlimactic. It wasn't bad, and it certainly held my attention, but I wouldn't call it fine literature. I gave it 3 stars.

I am still reading Lessons, which, it turns out, is a lot longer than I thought (the problem with reading a digital ARC is that it doesn't have page numbers, just "position," so I can't really tell how much I have left). My Kindle app says I'm 80% through it and have about 2 hours left to read, so perhaps if I can finish up a work project today and nothing else comes in, I might be able to get through the rest this afternoon.

What are you making and reading this week?