Unraveled, Week 7/2023

What a strange week it has been! With Rainbow being home on Monday unexpectedly and planning for her to be home on Friday (for a planned in-service day), I'm all mixed up on what day it is. But thanks to Kat's weekly Unraveling link-up, I can be sure that today is Wednesday. So, here's what I'm working on this week!

After finishing up the second combo spin skein on Sunday afternoon, I needed something to work on that evening while watching the Super Bowl, so I started a new pair of socks for Rainbow using more of the Knit Picks Felici she picked out a while back. I thought I'd so something a little different and use a tubular cast-on for these, in part to see if I could make a slight adjustment and end up with a tidier edge. All I did was make my yarnovers backwards (and then corrected how they sat on the needles on the the next round). Reducing the amount of yarn used for each yarnover ever so slightly seemed to work well -- look at this edge!

This colorway is called Friendly Skies, but I can't help to think that the one section of the stripe sequence looks like candy corn.

On Monday afternoon I wound the two skeins of handspun so I could start my mittens that evening, and all went well until I tried to start the colorwork and found that my stitch count was off (specifically, I had two more stitches than I should have had). I took another look at the chart and found the reason why. Can you spot it?

That little loopy symbol in the first and last squares on the first row of the chart is the symbol for make 1. Except that if you look closely, you'll see that the number 1 along the bottom of the chart falls not beneath the first stitch of the chart but rather below the column of row numbers. While the numbers at the bottom seem to indicate that you should have 28 stitches on each side of the mitten, you actually only need 27, so when I increased two stitches on each side, I ended up with those two extra stitches. I'm not sure how this error was missed in editing, or how the fact that the decreases also aren't indicated for the top of the mitten were also missed. These errors don't seem to appear anywhere online, either. I'll be sure to note them on my Ravelry project page. The good news is that as soon as I tinked back and removed the two extra stitches, everything was smooth sailing, and I'm now about halfway through the hand of the first mitten:

The white is waste yarn where the thumb will go.

Lest you think I'm letting my wheel sit idle, I also started a new spinning project yesterday. Remember my combo spin from last fall? I wanted to spin a bit more yarn to go with it so I could use it for a sweater, so I've pulled out last October's Southern Cross shipment, Dragon's Breath, and have split it up a bunch to mix up the colors. This will be a three-ply fingering weight (or at least I hope it will!):

I've continued to read quite a bit in the past week, but because of what I am reading (hello, brick that is War and Peace!), I have only finished one book.

Fresh Water for Flowers came highly recommended by both Katie and Mary, and it was available as both an ebook and an audiobook on Hoopla. I was out of podcasts to listen to toward the end of last week, so I opted for the audio. This translated work tells the story of Violet, a French cemetery caretaker. It's a bit of a mystery that jumps around in time as it tells the stories of her life and how she ended up caring for the final resting places of others. The book itself is quite good, but I found that my enjoyment of it was somewhat diminished by the fact that the reader was butchering all the French names and words in it. I may be a bit more sensitive to this than others because I'm trying to relearn my French, but you would think that for a book with so much of a foreign language in it, the publisher would try to find a reader who had some familiarity with that language. I wouldn't let that dissuade you from reading the book, but if mispronunciation is something that bothers you, you may want to read this with your eyes. It really is a beautiful book. I gave it 4 stars.

I'm 37% of the way through War and Peace (I've been reading while spinning, mainly) and have less than 100 pages left of The Tsar of Love and Techno. I'm reading the latter primarily before bed, so I don't get a lot read in each reading session, but I'm enjoying it so much that I may need to sit down and finish it during the day.

How about you -- what are you making and reading this week?