Unraveled, Week 5/2023

Good morning and happy February! After a last day of January that included waking up to surprise snow (and thus unexpected but necessary shoveling), I'm happy to see the new month start off with some sunshine, even if it is bitterly cold outside. Days like this it pays to be a knitter; I'll have plenty of wool to cover me when I head out for my walk in a bit.

It's Wednesday, so that means it's time to link up with Kat and the Unravelers and to catch you up on my making and reading. I've been doing quite a lot of both the past week, thanks to work finally calming down. First, over the weekend, I finished up a third skein of handspun for January:

This was the bag of Southern Cross Fibre that was hidden in my project bag pile when I took my big photo of all my SCF stash, so I figured it had to get spun right away. It's a delightful blend of 70% superfine merino and 30% mulberry silk, so it's unbelievably soft and silky. I knew that with such a high silk content, it would demand to be spun fine, so I opted for a chain-ply. I split the fiber in half lengthwise, then spun up each strip end to end. Though the fiber was clearly green, blue, and silver, the green has really taken over in yarn form. And while the yarn seemed really thin even as I was plying it, the merino puffed up a bit in the wash, so it's a light fingering and approximately 430 yards. Into the handspun stash it goes!

Inspired by my pace of spinning, I pulled another bag from the SCF stash to spin next. This bag didn't have a date on it because it was a prize from some event or another, but I think it was likely the oldest unspun fiber in the group because it was in a knotted plastic bag rather than the Ziploc-style bags David began using a few years ago. The only information on the label was "Mixed Wools - Warm Classic"; the latter bit indicates that this came from an era when David still had two levels of club available, classic and deluxe or luxury.

The themes in the SCF Ravelry group this month include both warm colors and combo spin, and I figured I could hit both of those by doing a four-ply yarn with these four little bundles of fiber. I didn't weigh them beforehand, so it's possible some had more fiber than others, but no big deal. I spun each onto its own bobbin, with slightly thicker singles than my usual, and later today I will ply them.

 

I also finished one more charity hat yesterday, for a total of four knit in the month of January. Considering that I set a goal of six total for the year, that's a huge success! The latest is the blue/black one on the far right -- a basic beanie knit top down using a strand of self-striping held together with a strand of black.

Blocking these is on today's to-do list, as I'd like to mail these off to their recipient soon.

Four seems to be the number of the day -- four bobbins of fiber spun, four hats knit in January, and four books finished this week!

I had slowly been reading The Transit of Venus over the course of several weeks; aside from the fact that I was reading it before bed, which meant limited time in general, it's not the sort of book you can really speed through because the writing is so artfully done that you need to read slowly to make sure you notice everything. And even so, I think there's still a lot that I missed, to the extent where I might need to reread it at some point (I totally missed, for instance, that there's a hint on the very first page to a big revelation that comes much later in the book). I hope someone else who has read it will email me and explain what is supposed to have happened at the end; I've searched online and have found conflicting answers. This is not a book for everyone, but I really enjoyed it primarily for the writing. I gave it 4 stars.

A book I did not have to think quite so hard about (but was still extremely well written) was Mercury Pictures Presents. I'd bought it as a Kindle deal a few weeks ago because I am still thinking about Anthony Marra's previous book, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, and knew I liked his writing. While this one is a lot more upbeat (it's set primarily in Hollywood in the lead-up to WWII), it's really less about the movie business than it is about the people and their families. Nearly every character is an immigrant or refugee, so there are stories of migration and separation throughout. This book didn't make me cry, but it did make me think, and I really enjoyed it. I gave it 4 stars.

My audiobook choice for the weekend was the 13th book in the Maisie Dobbs series, In This Grave Hour. It's the start of WWII for England, and as citizens are subject to blackouts and carrying their gas masks everywhere, Maisie is called on to solve a case that has its roots in the last war. I'm quickly running out of books left to read in this series, but I think I have an inkling of where the author may be leading Maisie, and if I'm right, I think I will satisfied with where she ends up. This one was as enjoyable as the rest, and I surprised myself by figuring out at least part of the case before it was revealed. I gave it 4 stars.

Finally, just last night I finished a reread of The Night Watchman. I first read it back in October of 2020, the year it came out, and I don't think I had a sufficient background in Erdrich's work at the time to fully appreciate it. I could not put it down this time, as evidenced by the fact that I started it just before bed on January 29 and was done before bed yesterday. As is typical of Erdrich's books, this one has both humor and pain in it, but this one feels especially personal as it's a somewhat fictional portrayal of her grandfather and his efforts to stop the federal government's attempt to terminate its agreement with Indigenous tribes. There's a lot to unpack in this book, but as usual, it's a pleasure to read while grappling with those issues. I gave it 5 stars this time around.


If you can believe it, I'm not currently reading anything! But that's not for long. I have downloaded the audiobook of Chouette to start on my walk and will pick an ebook to start later when I sit down to ply.

What are you making and reading this week?