Unraveled, Week 3/2023

One small joy of a long weekend and a resulting shorter work week is that it feels like Tuesday but is already Wednesday! And that means it's time for my weekly link-up with Kat and the Unravelers.

After two extraordinarily busy weeks at work, this week has started off much calmer, so that has meant both more time and more mental energy for crafting and reading. After finishing off the orange hat over the weekend, I wound yarn for and cast on a new charity hat:

It doesn't look like much (mostly because I've only knit two round past the ribbing, but also because there is zero sun out today), but this is the start of a Fox Gap (Ravelry link). I'm again using Fibernymph Dye Works Confetti Tweed DK, this time in Electric Purple. I did a tubular cast on and have just started the cables. I should be able to make some progress this evening after only managing one entire round yesterday.

The main reason I haven't knit that much on it is because I've been sucked in by my spinning again. I snapped this photo of my bobbin yesterday afternoon when the sun briefly came out and did a better job of showing the depth of color the gray fiber gives the dye:

I am hoping I can finish up the singles today, which could mean I'd be ready to ply as early as tomorrow. Perhaps.

Thanks to things finally calming down at work, I've had a bit more reading time, though I've only finished one book since this time last week.

I'd had Women Talking on my TBR list for a while, but when it came up in a Zoom over the weekend, I found it was available as an audiobook on Hoopla and the timing was perfect to start something new. At only about 6 hours in length, it was a two-day listen for me. There is a new movie coming out based on this book that's getting a lot of buzz, and I generally like to read the book first. This book is set in a fictional Mennonite community where it has recently been discovered that a series of rapes and sexual assaults against the women in the community have been perpetrated by their husbands and sons. There's not a lot that happens in this book; as the title suggests, all the "action" is around a group of women talking and trying to decide what to do -- do they do nothing? stay and fight? leave and face the unknown? All of their discussions are recorded by a man who recently returned to the community after he and his parents were expelled from it when he was a child; he has been charged with recording the minutes of their meeting because he can read and write and the women cannot. This is not an easy book, given the subject matter, but it takes on some big topics and does so surprisingly well given how short it is. It's very much a thinking book, one that will leave you thinking about the impossible decision the women are forced to make, the importance of community and tradition, and the bravery required to contemplate a future in an unknown world. I gave it 4 stars and am very much looking forward to seeing the movie!

I am still somewhere in the middle of The Transit of Venus and had planned to sit down with it and make some more substantial progress over the weekend, but I got distracted by the arrival of Babel from my library holds. I've been waiting for this very buzzy book from last year for quite a while, and I have gotten thoroughly absorbed by it.

What are you making and reading this week?