A Familiar Refrain

Happy Friday, friends. Sometimes I feel like this is getting to be a weather blog instead of a knitting blog! It's continued to be a damp week, though thankfully not as wet as it started out. As of yesterday, we've gotten 4.16 inches of rain so far this month; our average is about 3.5 inches total for all of August. So the grass is looking great and I haven't had to worry about watering the plants, but some of our neighbors also look like they're running mushroom farms.

Don't worry; Ruthie hasn't tried to eat any.

 With all of that moisture, I'm not surprised that it took two days for my latest skein of handspun to dry (and it's not like it was dripping after it was washed -- I squeezed a lot out and rolled it in a dry towel and snapped it vigorously). But yesterday it was finally dry enough to measure and photograph.

The colorway is called Solstice, and I think this blurple (that's blue/purple) is a great representation of a winter sky, especially with snow on the way. I know my photos probably don't do it justice.

The fiber was a mix of 60% Merino, 30% silk, and 10% angora. The silk was a bit slubby, and I had to pause and pull it apart in places to get it to actually draft, but the result is that there are some nubby bits where it didn't want to be drafted (you can see some of them in this photo). I think it gives the yarn some character, though a younger version of me would have been more annoyed that my yarn wasn't uniform. After plying and washing, the yarn is in the fingering to sport range, and I've got approximately 433 yards of it in the skein. One weird thing about it is that it gave off a strange smell when I washed it that wasn't the wet wool or wet silk smells I've experienced in the past. Maybe it was the angora? Fortunately it went away when the yarn dried. Don't ask me what I'm going to do with the skein, because I have no plans for it -- all I wanted to do was get it from fiber to yarn!

I similarly have no real plans this weekend, other than hoping to meet up with a knitting friend who will be in town this weekend to move her daughter into college. Tomorrow is supposed to be the one dry day for a while, so I'm sure I'll be outside a lot! I hope you also have some good weather to allow you to enjoy the middle of August.

Unraveled, Week 32/2026

It's Wednesday, so that means it's once again time to join the fun with Kat and the Unravelers.

It's continued to be a wet week, with occasional heavy downpours and thunderstorms. Yesterday I was running behind when I went into the office and left without an umbrella (I didn't want to make myself even later by digging through the closet for one) only for it to start raining pretty hard. Luckily, I was able to get the newly licensed driver to come pick me up! As much as it saddens me to know how quickly Molly is growing up, it is very helpful to have another driver in the house.

On Monday night, I finished plying my current spin, dealing with some tangles at the end in an effort to use every last bit of singles; I anticipate that some of that messy yarn at the end will be removed.

While I didn't weigh the fiber beforehand, there was supposed to be 2 oz. in each bundle, so that's ostensibly 6 oz. of finished yarn. The next step is to skein and wash and then likely wait several days for it to dry, as it's incredibly humid here because of all the rain, but I hope to be able to show you some finished yarn by the end of the week.

Meanwhile, I'm on the third mini skein on my hat, and it's currently measuring a partial Ruthie:

I'm not particularly enjoying working with this yarn, as it's on the coarser side. If I had to guess, I'd say the 3-ply minis are a Corriedale base, whereas the 2-ply skeins might be superwash Merino. I am hopeful that the hand of the yarn will improve once the finished hat is washed, as it's very possible that the person who dyed the yarn wasn't particularly skilled at it and may not have rinsed the yarn as much as they should. At the very least, a bath in warm water with some wool wash will add a bit of lanolin.

Reading this week has been all nonfiction and heavily dominated by ARCs. I finished three books.

An Inconvenient Woman: The Extraordinary Life of Lillian smith, the Southerner Who Defied Jim Crow America by Keri Leigh Merritt

4 stars

For most people who have learned about the history of Jim Crow and the civil rights movement, the term "white Southerners" will conjure images of violence and hatred. But not all Southerners supported segregation, and some brave ones spoke out against it and worked with the more well-known leaders in the movement to fight it. That said, throughout history, the role of women in political movements has always been minimized and, in some cases, even forgotten, so I was not surprised that despite her record of prolific work in support of racial equality and her friendships with such famous names and Eleanor Roosevelt and Martin Luther King Jr., I had never heard of Lillian Smith. This biography proved to be an excellent way to rectify that. Lillian Smith spent the entirety of her adult life writing essays, works of social criticism, and novels to advocate for racial equality and to attempt to show that racial discrimination harms whites as well as Blacks. As a queer liberal woman unafraid to share her opinions, she faced backlash and very real physical threats, yet she didn't let anything stop her, and she used what power she had as a white woman to uplift and promote people of color who often faced much worse. I am grateful to have had the opportunity to get to know her and her work a bit, and I am glad that this biography is doing its part to ensure that Smith's story isn't lost to time. Thank you to NetGalley and St. Martin's Press for providing me with a digital ARC of this book in return for an honest review. It will be published on September 29, 2026.

What I Ate in One Year by Stanley Tucci

3.5 stars

I loved Stanley Tucci's memoir Taste, especially its gorgeous descriptions of food, so I thought this second work would be as enjoyable. And partially it was. There are still some elements of memoir and personal life, and I loved the parts when he talked about cooking for himself and his family, but this newer book also contains a lot of complaining about how bad food is as well as what seemed to me to be an awful lot of name dropping. I know, he's a famous actor and he knows a lot of other famous people, but sometimes the mention of celebrities seemed rather irrelevant to the discussion of food. That said, I love listening to Stanley Tucci talk, so to have him in my ears for about six hours talking about food was overall a good experience. It also made me want to eat a lot of pasta.

The Nuremberg Women: The Untold Story of the Eight Women Who Brought the Nazis to Justice by Natalie Livingstone

4 stars

The Nuremberg trials are famous for bringing a sense of closure to the horrors of World War II and some sense of justice to the atrocities committed by the Nazis. They've been written about extensively and dramatized on screen. But, as far as I know, little has been documented about the small but significant group of women who were present at the trials. In The Nuremberg Women, Natalie Livingstone focuses on eight women from varied backgrounds, nationalities, professions, and political beliefs to show the importance of their involvement. We get to know a brief biography of each woman, her role in the trials, and a bit about her life afterward. As a collection, these profiles show that these women all played a crucial role, but those roles often were behind the scenes or downplayed as less important than those of the (male) lawyers and judges. What was particularly fascinating was learning about how their views of the trials changed over the years and colored their experiences of the Cold War in the decades to come. War is so often characterized as a masculine arena, but these women -- a lawyer, three journalists, an artist, a survivor of Auschwitz and Ravensbruck, and an interpreter -- all recognized that wars inflict suffering on women just as much as men and that they should have a voice in the processes of reckoning that follow a war. Thank you to NetGalley and St. Martin's Press for providing me with a digital ARC of this book in return for an honest review. It will be published November 3, 2026. (Side note: There's currently a Goodreads giveaway for this book, if you're interested.)

Currently, I'm in the last third or so of This Time Tomorrow (reading on paper before bed), I'm more than halfway through a historical fiction/magical realism/mystery audiobook called The Sirens, and I'm reading yet another ARC that I already think might end up being one of my favorites of the year.

What are you making and reading this week?

Wet Weekending

If there was one word to describe this past weekend, it would be soggy. We had some pretty epic rains on Friday, including a thunderstorm that hit just after Ruthie and I came in from our morning walk (so no run for me that day) and another that came through as we had dinner that left what I called "temporary water features" in our backyard. There were flash flood warnings in the area, but because our street sits above a deep ravine, they thankfully weren't an issue for us. There was more rain on Saturday and overnight into Sunday, and with all that moisture and some hot weather, it was generally very steamy. Let's just say there were extra showers taken every day. The week ahead is supposed to be warm (though not beastly hot) and there's a chance for rain most days, so I think I'll just have to get used to it!

When I wasn't melting outside, I got a fair amount of crafting done inside. For one thing, I finished my handspun scarf -- and didn't run out of yarn!

It turns out that it was not as close a game of yarn chicken as I thought; when I finished, I still had 7 g of yarn left (from 110 g total to start). I had weighed my yarn as I approached the halfway point, but it was when we were in the car last Sunday and the numbers kept changing because we were moving, so I didn't entirely trust them. Still, it's a win that I'll take. I still need to block it, which I think will help with some wonkiness here and there, but I'm quite happy with it.

I also started plying my current skein of handspun, which may actually be complete by the time you read this (I'm writing on Sunday afternoon and have plans to do more plying on Sunday evening):

In order to have something fairly mindless on the needles for Ruthie Nap Time Knitting, I pulled out some very old mini skeins (like as old as Molly old!) from a long-ago yarn club that was associated with a lot of drama. They'd been stashed away because I was a bit busy with a newborn at the time, and I didn't even remember I had them until Molly and I did the stash reorganization recently. There's no information at all about the yarns, but they all appeared to be fingering weight, so I put them in a gradient of sorts and am making a charity hat.

Finally, I spent time this weekend getting everything ready to publish my new hat pattern this morning. It's the first one using my new tech editor, who has been fabulous to work with, and she's already got my next pattern to work on. This is the hat you've seen twice before, now called Mandlen. It's up on Payhip already and will be published on Ravelry not long after this post goes up (look for it in my store).

I'm hoping for a regular week ahead, including my usual Wednesday update. Here's hoping it's a good one for all of us.

A Friday Finish

What a week it has been! Even though it was a shorter week for me, there's been a lot going on, including a lot of weather. I got caught in an unexpected downpour during my run on Wednesday (I took cover during the worst of it, but I did finish because I was already mostly done and soaked in any case) and have been taking a second shower in the evening almost every day because it's been so hot and humid that I get back from walking Ruthie and have found myself turned into a puddle. The forecast and my weather app have been no help; I've looked at the radar when it's raining heavily and it shows absolutely nothing. It's a good thing I don't melt!

While I continue to work on both my handspun shawl and the last ply of my current spinning project, I have a finished object to share with you today:

This is the hat that was mostly knit last weekend in the car and that will be put away as a gift for my sister-in-law, likely for Christmas (her birthday is in early September, when giving someone socks doesn't seem so ridiculous but a hat is totally out of season). The yarn had been in my stash for many years, purchased from the Steel City Fiber Collective, which closed quite a while ago -- I don't remember the exact date, but I do know it was pre-pandemic. I may actually have bought the skein when they announced they were closing and were trying to liquidate their inventory. It's a superwash merino/nylon/sparkle fingering and it didn't have a color; Molly was solidly in her purple phase then, so I guess I thought I'd use it for something for her and never did. And now it is out of the stash! Nothing fancy about this hat -- my pattern (Ravelry link), US 2.5/3 mm needles, knit to use up most of the yarn. I'm sure it's only a matter of time before I cast on another because they make for great mindless knitting and an easy way to use up a skein of yarn.

Tomorrow morning I will be up bright and early (as I always am, let's face it) to go get my annual mammogram. So here's your regular reminder to get your girls squished if you are lady of an age when you need to do so! Have a lovely weekend and see you back here on Monday -- perhaps with another FO.

Unraveled, Week 31/2026

It's Wednesday, so that means it's time to join in with Kat and the Unravelers! This Wednesday finds me with just one knitting WIP (because I did end up finishing the purple hat), and it's the handspun scarf, on which I've now started decreasing:

Apologies for the washed-out photo

I was intending to increase until I'd used just slightly less than half of the yarn, but I realized if I did that, my scarf would be very long, which kind of defeats the purpose of making a little scarf. So I decided to increase until I had 45 stitches in garter stitch (yes, to match my age) and then started decreasing. I'm a bit worried now, though, that maybe I flew past that halfway point. Keep your fingers crossed I don't have to play yarn chicken! I figure the worst-case scenario is that I have to back and reknit, and honestly that wouldn't be so bad -- it's quite lovely to knit with merino/silk handspun!

Speaking of handspun, I'm working on my third bobbin of singles for the merino/silk/angora. I'm hoping to wrap up that spin this week to correspond to the Tour de France Femmes.

Reading! I've got three finished since this time last week.

I really enjoyed The Help, so I was interested in Kathryn Stockett's new novel The Calamity Club -- but I needed some persuading when I saw how long the audio was (28 hours!). I won't bury the lede: It was absolutely worth it, and it also didn't really take that long to listen to because the readers were slow, so I was able to increase the speed to 1.75x. Set in 1933 in Oxford, Mississippi, this novel is told from the point of view of Birdie, an unmarried 20-something woman who is the sole support to her mother and grandmother following the death of her father, and Meg, an 11-year-old living in an orphanage after her mother seemingly abandoned her. Birdie travels to Oxford from her small town to ask her married sister, Frances, for a loan to help pay back taxes when the family home is at risk. But when Frances's husband disappears, along with much of his family's possessions, Birdie has to step up to help Frances and her mother-in-law. Meg, meanwhile, is poorly treated at the orphanage, particularly by the woman in charge of running it, and still doesn't fully believe that her mother left her on purpose. Birdie's volunteer work helping out with the accounting books at the orphanage brings her together with Meg and gives her a personal interest in the girl's future. And when things start to get particularly dire, a woman named Charlie comes into Birdie's life and proposes a solution that seems dangerous and preposterous -- but just might be what will save them all. There are some ugly words used in this book and some ugly ideas, but they're very reflective of the time and aren't used gratuitously. The heart and soul of the novel is its strong female characters -- Meg, Birdie, and Charlie -- who aren't afraid to work hard and make sacrifices to help those they love. They are smart, funny, and fierce, and I really enjoyed spending time with all of them. I gave the book 4 stars.

I'd heard a lot of buzz around The Great Wherever and put it on notify in Libby ahead of its publication. I got really lucky because I happened to be looking at my phone when I got the notification it was available and ended up being the first person in line to get it, and my hold came up just before we left on our trip, so I was able to read it in its entirety over the course of the weekend. It follows Aubrey, a woman in her early 30s who is struggling. She thought her boyfriend was about to propose, but instead he broke up with her. She has multiple jobs that she doesn't like in order to pay her rent but still comes up short. Her mother died when she was just a child and her father only recently passed away. When nothing seems to be going right, she gets an email from family she doesn't know and discovers that she is part owner of a homestead in Tennessee and that she and the others have to contemplate an offer to purchase the property. She flies to meet them and soon learns the full history of the place: how her great-grandfather was one of the first Black homeowners in the area, building the house with his own hands; how the family's history was tied up with that of the wealthy white family who started the town; and how the family had held on to the land all these years in the face of many attempts by others to buy it. Throughout it all, ghosts of members of the family watch over their descendants, occasionally seen by one relative or another and sometimes even managing to avert an action that might prove disastrous. Though Aubrey is the focus, the story is much bigger than her and is a beautifully written illustration of a family that has its struggles and its triumphs. I could not put it down and gave it 5 stars.

And now for something completely different! Glorious Exploits is set in Syracuse, Sicily, during the Peloponnesian War. After a recent battle, a group of Athenian prisoners is being held in a quarry, and two friends, Lampo and Gelon, decide to pass the time by staging a performance of Medea in which the prisoners are the actors -- because while they may hate Athenians, they still love their drama. As they work with the prisoners, they start to see their humanity, and they realize that by getting others to come see the play, perhaps they can do the same. It's a bit wacky, a bit funny, and a bit sad, and it's made a bit weirder by the fact that the author is Irish and the dialogue sounds more at home in modern-day Dublin than ancient Syracuse. Ultimately it's a creative way to show that art is a way to bring people together and help them recognize their similarities in spite of their differences. I gave it 4 stars.

What are you making and reading this week?

Recovery Day

We are back -- and I am very glad I'd planned to take today off to recover from the trip. It's not that the trip was all that taxing, but we did not sleep especially well (both children and adults being loud in the hotel hallway in the middle of the night both nights), and of course now there's laundry to do and the house to get back in order, because the Mister didn't do much while we were gone -- he didn't even put away the coffee pot from Friday! Later this morning I will go pick Ruthie up, and at some point today I will give her a bath because after a weekend of playing with other dogs outside, I'm sure she badly needs one. I'm sure we'll need to do some laundry today, and Molly wants to go get her driver's license card (we had to wait to get the from in the mail from PennDOT), so it will be a full day without work.

It was nice to spend the weekend with family, though it feels a bit like all we did was sit around and eat! It's about a five-hour drive up to the Detroit area, and both on the way there and on the way back we stopped at a service plaza somewhere in Ohio to have lunch and break up the drive, so it took us closer to six hours each way. The eating included a stop at Leo's Coney Island, where I did partake of just one coney (for those of you who are unfamiliar with this delicacy, it's a hot dog covered in a meat chili topped with onions and mustard):

Our plans were largely built around the little kids and their sleeping schedule, so we had relatively early evenings, and between the time in the car, the time sitting around and talking at my aunt and uncle's, and the time in the hotel in the evenings, I got quite a lot of knitting done. My scarf has grown enough that I need to fold it up to get it all in a photo:

and by the time we pulled into our driveway yesterday afternoon, I'd started the decreases on the hat:

I'd originally intended this to be added to the charity pile, but my mother informed me that this purple is actually my sister-in-law's favorite color, so now I think it'll become a birthday or Christmas present for her.

After today, this week should be pretty typical, and I'm looking forward to a regular schedule. We'll see what I missed at work after three days away -- not much, I hope! What I did miss was puppy snuggles, so I'll be trying to get in as many of those as I can (and after being away from me for several days, I'm sure Ruthie will be extra clingy). Here's hoping your week and month are off to a good start. See you back here on Wednesday for an Unraveled update!

And Away We Go

In just a few hours, Molly and I will be headed to Michigan with my side of the family for a visit with my aunt and uncle. Ruthie's at boarding, where there are supposed to be some more dog friends to play with, and the Mister will be holding down the fort at home. It's likely to be a weekend of sitting around and talking, so at least I will get a lot of knitting time in. One project that is coming with me is the new handspun scarf:

So far, my winging it is working out. I'm taking my travel scale so that I can increase until I've used about half my yarn, then I'll start decreasing.

Molly and I went to see The Odyssey yesterday. Visually, it was impressive. As for the script, I'm afraid I have to agree with my Greek professor. In fact, I'd go so far as to say it was only loosely based on the original poem because so much was changed. But it beat spending the afternoon at work, and if you're wondering how much charity hat can get knit during a epic movie, it's about 4 inches.

We will be back sometime on Sunday and I'm taking Monday off (partly because I'll have to go pick Ruthie up), so I imagine I'll have some significant progress to show on these projects. In the meantime, I hope you enjoy this final day of July and the first weekend of August!