Spinning My Wheels

It took me a minute this morning to remember that it's Monday; having a Tuesday off is a bit weird, and if I were in charge, I would have shut down the office today as well. I expect that many people will be off today and not much will be happening at work, but I do have two meetings this morning.

We had a very wet weekend, with rain and storms on and off. I did manage to get out and walk both days, and it felt a bit like walking through soup because the humidity was so high. I had grand plans of spending Saturday afternoon at my wheel (as Saturday was the first day of the Tour de Fleece) but got caught up in cleaning bathrooms and doing laundry. Still, I managed to finish up the final bobbin of singles for my combo spin yesterday morning:

I spent about three hours total yesterday afternoon and evening plying, and I still have room on the bobbin (and will likely be filling a second bobbin as well!):

I'll be interested to see how much yardage is in the finished skeins. If I assume an average of about 400 yards per bag of fiber, then I should have somewhere in the range of 1,200 yards, but I would not be surprised if I have more than that. I will say that for projects like this, I am very glad to have my Super Skeiner so I don't have to kill my shoulder winding off the yarn using a niddy noddy!

Finally, I wanted to mention that I did manage to publish my sock pattern Friday afternoon, so you can find it on Ravelry and Payhip if you're interested.

If you're celebrating the 4th tomorrow, I hope you have a wonderful holiday! I'm not feeling especially patriotic this year, but I will certainly enjoy a day off from work and a chance to get together with family.

Wrapping It Up

It's the end of the week and the end of the month, and it's been a strange couple of days here. We've had a lot of smoke come into the area from the Canadian wildfires, so our air quality has been horrible here -- code purple, which is one step above code red. It's given me a good idea of what it must've been like to live here at the height of the steel era. When I got up yesterday morning, I could not see to the end of our (pretty short) street due to the combination of smoke and fog. Here are some images captured by a local photographer I follow to give you a sense:

Things are supposed to improve a lot today, thankfully; I haven't been outside to exercise in two days, and I miss being outdoors!

I'm taking today off from work, using the second of my two personal days per year that expire today, and I have plans to take advantage of having the day to myself. I hope to run today, and then Mo and I have some things to do. We've got a bunch of clothes to box up and send off to ThredUP. We may do some baking for tonight's dessert. And on top of my list is taking final photos of these socks so I can publish the pattern (I got it back from my tech editor earlier this week, so all that's left to do is the final photos):

I'm obviously not going to finish the entire project before the end of the month, but it's possible I could finish (or get close to finishing) the singles of my combo spin.

I finished up the second bobbin (the purple one) yesterday and started on the third. Only three of the four balls of the final colorway are shown here because I'm nearly finished with the one that's missing. I've really been focused on this project this week because I'm really anxious/excited to see what the final yarn will look like, but I know I still have a lot of spinning -- and a lot of treadling! -- ahead of me. I'm also excited to spin something that isn't green!

We've got a pretty low-key weekend ahead, and our only plans for the 4th of July are going over to my brother- and sister-in-law's place for a BBQ. I'm hoping the weekend brings clearer air and lots of crafting time. I hope whatever you have planned is enjoyable!

Unraveled, Week 26/2023

I am getting this post up a little early this morning because I actually have to go into the office for a meeting at 9 (when the new big boss wants to meet in person, you go in) and work on the road I normally walk along to get there means I have to take a detour, so I figured I'd make things easier for myself by getting a head start on typing. I have no idea if Kat is hosting a link-up this week for Unraveled Wednesday, as she'd said she was going to take a little blog vacation, but I'm still checking in on crafting and reading here!

I have been very focused on spinning the past week and have finished the first bobbin of singles for my three-colorway combo spin:

and have started on the second (this is Woodland Stream):

Apologies for the bad photo; we have a combination of fog and smoke here today.

I am spinning my default singles, which means that the finished three-ply yarn should be in the range of fingering weight. Obviously for a fairly fine finished yarn, that means the singles are even finer, so this is somewhat slow spinning. I'm trying to finish this project as quickly as possible, but we're also headed into a spinning-heavy time of year -- that would be Tour de Fleece, which coincides with the Tour de France and begins July 1 -- so I anticipate that it very well could be a finished yarn by this time next week. We'll see!

I've also made some progress on my current sock WIP, as it came with me to dinners all weekend:

These socks were originally intended to be for my mother, but after seeing the full stripe sequence, I don't think they're her colors, so now Mo will be getting them. I have plenty of other options for my mom in the stash.

It has been an excellent week of reading, with three great finishes!

Happiness Falls is a book that is impossible to classify when it comes to genre. It's a mystery. It's a family drama. It's a pandemic novel. It's a work of philosophy. It's a political book about disability and society. It's a study of identity. It's an examination of nature vs. nurture. It's a work of cross-cultural and social commentary. Regardless of how you describe it, it's a compelling and well-written read. It's a book that I couldn't put down once I got started. It's a book that made me laugh and cry. It's a smart and emotional story of a family dealing with the mysterious disappearance of their father in the middle of the pandemic and the revelation that their nonverbal son and brother may be capable of more than they realized. The characters are three-dimensional and complex, people you will come to care about and root for. More than anything, this book tells the story of the love between members of a family. I gave it 5 stars -- highly recommend!

I received a digital ARC of this book from NetGalley and Random House in return for an honest review. The book is due to be published in August, and if you're quick, you can enter the Goodreads giveaway for a hard copy (just click on the link to the book above and look under the cover image for a link to the giveaway).

If you've read Jesmyn Ward's novels, then you know how her writing is simultaneously gorgeous and devastating. She has previously written about how this country has failed people of color in more recent times, but in her newest work, she goes back to one of the ugliest eras of its history. In Let Us Descend, she takes us back to the South before the Civil War and gives the reader an unflinching portrait of life as an enslaved person. In her portrait of Annis, a young enslaved woman, Ward shows the suffering but also the humanity and gives the reader an idea of how it was possible for so many to continue to willingly live each day and find some hope for the future even as they were starved, beaten, and worked to death. I gave it 5 stars, and I do recommend it, though be aware that it's a hard read for many reasons.

I received a digital ARC of this book from NetGalley and Scribner in return for an honest review. This book is expected to be published in October.

It had been a while since I last listened to a Maisie Dobbs mystery, in part because the audiobooks disappeared from Hoopla for a while, but they're back now, so I listed to the 15th in the series, The American Agent, over the course of a few days. This one had everything I love about the series -- a case that kept me guessing interspersed with scenes from Maisie's personal life -- set against the backdrop of the London Blitz. Things are starting to come together, and knowing that there are only two more books in the series that I have still to read, I have a general idea of where things may be going. This was a great listen while I was running -- 4 stars.

I'm currently reading Barbara Kingsolver's Flight Behavior, which wasn't originally on our schedule for the Kingsolver-along, but so many of us were picking it up right now that we've decided to make it our next book to discuss. I'm about a third of the way through it and am enjoying it -- particularly the part I recently read about shearing and skirting the fleeces of a flock of Icelandic sheep!

The End of a Long Short Week

It feels like it's been a very long week, even though technically it was a short work week thanks to having Monday off. But there's been a lot of stuff going on -- extra meetings, two trips to the orthodontist (one scheduled, one not), and general changes to the schedule -- that have made it stretch out. But it's finally Friday, and I'm looking forward to wrapping up the week and putting it behind me.

I did indeed finish the brioche cowl, though I still need to weave in my ends and block it, which I hope to do later today.

I'm absolutely delighted with how it turned out (though I'm generally happy with anything in a rainbow). This version is a bit shorter than the original, which used six mini skeins rather than five, but it's still plenty tall enough to keep my neck warm -- and I do mean my neck, because Mo <del>stole</del> was given the original sample, so I'm keeping this one. Once the finishing is done, I just need to take some new pattern photos, make some minor edits to the pattern, and send it off to Knit Picks.

Mo is working to finish up a blanket for her newest cousin, so we haven't gotten back to our shawl knitalong. Rather than starting another knitting project, I decided to start spinning something new. I thought I'd turbo-charge my stash spin-down by doing a combo spin of three past Southern Cross Fibre club shipments:

I pulled out three colorways that looked similar, and I'm spinning each one onto its own bobbin and will then ply them all together. What you see here are three colorways from three years -- left to right, Woodland Stream (September 2022) on Falkland, Rainforest (January 2023) on Bond, and Gran Cenote (August 2021) on Falkland. Falkland is technically a merino, but it's a bit toothier than the merino you're probably used to and feels very similar to Bond, so I think these three will play nicely together. I've started with Gran Cenote and have spun almost a quarter of it; I split the fiber lengthwise into four long strips, just to break the colors up a bit, and I'll do the same thing with the other two colorways. I don't expect this to be a fast spin because it looks like it'll be a three-ply fingering, but that is my default yarn, so I'm hoping I can get it done while reading or watching something without too much thought.

This weekend we'll be celebrating my newest nephew's (ceremonial) bris and baby naming, and my aunt and uncle are coming in from Michigan to meet him. The ceremony is on Sunday morning, but we'll be having multiple family dinners and lots of extended family time -- good times for the soul! I hope you have some good things planned for the weekend ahead!

Friday Finishes

How is it that the days go by so quickly but the weekend always seems to take so long to come around? That's certainly been the case this week, likely because I've had a grumpy teenager on my hands for several days (nothing major, she's just moody). So I'm looking forward to the weekend.

Yesterday ended up being a busy work day, so I'm delighted to finish up the week with a couple of finished projects. First, after speeding through all the singles of my first combo spin skein, I was able to ply and wash Wednesday afternoon. I had to play with some photo editing to get the colors to come out something close to reality for this photo (the gloom we've been having makes everything look totally washed out on camera), but here it is:

The yarn came out pretty much perfectly sport weight, which is what I was aiming for, though I only have about 238 yards in this skein, which is less than I would have expected for the amount of fiber. So the yarn is pretty dense and perhaps a tad overplied, but I am planning to use it for colorwork mittens, so both features should add to the durability. The purple fiber underneath the finished skein has now been split up into a bunch of little bundles, divided into three, and is ready to be spun to match. I plan to start that spinning today.

Just before bed last night, I finished another WIP:

I tried several times to get a photo of this on my head, but between the bad lighting and my not-so-great selfie skills, every shot was a fail. So you'll have to settle for a flat lay for now. This is my version of the Musselburgh-style hat, using the pattern that's currently with my tech editor as well as my recipe for a top-down swirl crown hat using any yarn and any gauge. I used size 4 (3.5 mm) needles for this one and used up nearly all of my yarn -- I had a heavy skein (108 g to start) and used 104 g. The hat is large enough that I can fold up the brim a couple of inches and it's still got a bit of slouch in the length. And I just love the colors. I will have to have Rainbow take a photo of me or model it for me so you can see it on an actual head.

My plan for today (assuming work cooperates) is to start spinning the purple fiber, because I'd love to have a finished skein by the end of the weekend. The Mister and I have plans to go out to dinner with some friends and my brother-in-law and sister-in-law tomorrow evening (Rainbow will be hanging out with my in-laws and her cousins), but we've got nothing else on tap, so I expect I'll be able to get a lot done. We're likely going to watch the Super Bowl, though we're not too invested in who wins (I suppose we should root for the Eagles, given that they're from the same state and I lived in Philadelphia for a number of years?). I've promised the Mister I'll make Ina's Chicken Chili, but now that he's recovered, he'll be doing the shopping again.

Here's hoping it's a good weekend for all of us. See you back here on Monday!

Plying for Days

It's Monday morning and a very cold start to Thanksgiving week! We started off the day with a trip to Rainbow's dentist, so I am playing a bit of catch-up this morning. I've got to get going soon if I'm going to get my walk in before my work meeting at 11, so I'm going to keep this post pretty short and sweet.

We had a pretty relaxing weekend, which was good because it was frigid outside and it was good time to hunker down inside where it was toasty. I spent quite a lot of it plying my combo spin, a task that took longer than expected because it seemed like my bobbins were magically adding more singles when I wasn't looking. In all it took me three days of plying sessions (no, I did not spend all of those three days plying) to fill up two bobbins of yarn.

I started plying using the purple Akerworks bobbin and switched over to the wooden Lendrum bobbin when I thought I'd plied about half of my singles, but when the second bobbin was full, I still had more to go, so I had to rejoin my singles to the end of the plied yarn on the first bobbin to do the rest. In the end, I used pretty much every last bit of singles. When the first bobbin of singles ran out, I wound off the singles from one of the two remaining and made a plying bracelet, and when those ran out, I chain-plied the tiny bit that was left (if you look closely at the bobbin on the left, you'll see that last bit -- it's the solid orange-y bit you can see coming out from under my thumb). It took me a good while to skein up the yarn yesterday afternoon, and then both skeins got a nice soak. The one plus of the temperatures being so low is that the radiators in our house are on high, so the skeins are ever so slightly damp this morning.

This spin used three past club colorways from the Southern Cross Fibre club: Poisoned Apple on Bond from October 2018, Posy on Bond from April 2019, and Blazing Skies on Rambouillet from November 2021. I split each one up into multiple smaller bundles and then split all the bundles into three piles so all three colorways would be evenly distributed over the three bobbins of singles. The final yarn is fingering weight, as planned, and I have approximately 1,180 yards.

I'm delighted with how this yarn came out, but I am ready to spin something that's not a shade of red now! I'm going to take a break from my wheel for a few days, but then I'll be dipping into my Fibernymph Dye Works holiday set, so get ready for some spoilers. In the meantime, I hope you're keeping warm if it's cold where you are, and I hope you have a good start to your week!

Unraveled, Week 46/2022

Happy hump day, friends! It's another gloomy one here, and it feels quite a lot like winter. Yesterday we got our first measurable snow of the season -- a bit more than an inch, according to the National Weather Service. It was coming down in very big clumps for a while there, and some of it stuck to the grass and the tops of things like garbage cans, but it's all melted this morning (I'll have to be very careful about wet leaves on my run this morning). I have the lights on in my bedroom/home office already, so you know it's very dark outside, so I apologize in advance for the poor quality of the photos in this post.

It's Wednesday, which means it's time for my weekly link-up with Kat and the Unravelers and a check-in on my crafting and reading.

Truthfully there has not been a ton of knitting since Monday because I've been focused on finishing up my combo spin. As of this morning, this is all that's left to be spun for the third bobbin of singles, and I'm very confident that it will be completed today:

I was anxious to get this wrapped up because I was expecting my Fibernymph Dye Works Holiday Countdown Set to show up this week -- which it did, yesterday!

I decided to get the fiber set this year, so I have 24 bags containing 10 g of fiber each. I will not be waiting until December 1 to start spinning because, aside from the fact that I won't be home all of the month, we have some big things happening mid-December and I have a feeling my crafting time will be seriously curtailed. So I'm hoping I can wrap up the combo spin this week and get started on my spinning of this fiber next week.

It has been a heck of week for my reading, with five finishes (though two of those were extremely short, so don't be too impressed).

The first and my favorite of the bunch was The Marriage Portrait, the next Read With Us selection. I think by now you all know how much I love Maggie O'Farrell's writing, and this book just blew me away. The subject of the novel is Lucrezia de'Medici, the teenaged daughter of Cosimo de'Medici who is married off to the duke of Ferrara after her older sister, who had been betrothed to him, dies suddenly. At the very beginning, the couple is in an isolated hunting lodge, and she is convinced that he will kill her while they are there. The story then goes back and forth in time, giving us a full picture of Lucrezia's short life in the dazzling setting of Renaissance Florence. The writing is absolutely spectacular and the story compelling. I won't give any spoilers, but I will say that I was very pleasantly surprised by a twist at the end that I did not see coming -- and I expect we'll be discussing it in depth when we meet in January! I gave it 5 stars.

Over the weekend, I listened to the audiobook of The Boys, which Bonny recently recommended. Following her advice, I did not read any synopsis or reviews of the book before I started it, and I'm glad I did. This is one of those books where you will have a particular opinion of the characters and then there will be a moment where everything you thought you knew gets flipped on its head. I will not share any details beyond that because I think, like Bonny, that it's best to go into this book as a blank slate. I found it to be really well written and thought provoking, though I will caution you that it is, in many ways, a pandemic book and one that deals with the isolation and loneliness of the pandemic, so if that is something you're not ready to deal with, you may want to skip this one. I gave it 4 stars.

I picked up A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance several weeks ago when it was a Kindle deal because the author is one of those featured in this season's lineup in the speaker series I'm subscribed to, and I find I enjoy the lectures even more when I've read the book the authors are speaking on. This is a nonfiction work that explores the contradictory role of Black artists and performers in American culture -- how the Black body can seem to be simultaneously invisible and invaluable depending on how it serves white culture at any given moment. It's also partly a memoir, and the writing reflects the author's work as both a poet and a critic. I suspect there's a lot I didn't fully understand as a white reader of this book, but I found it to be really interesting and learned a lot of new things. I'll probably have to reread it at some point. I gave it 4 stars.

The two very short works were both read yesterday, so that should give you an indication of what I mean when I say "short"!

I was delighted to find that Claire Keegan's newest work, Foster, was available on Hoopla, which meant no wait. The digital version claimed it had 60-some pages, but I think it actually had fewer than that. As you'd expect from something so short, the writing is very spare and leaves a lot to the reader to intuit. The gist of the plot is this: the unnamed narrator, a young girl who is one of many children in a family that is struggling financially, is taken to live with a childless couple over the summer, and while she's there, she learns what it's like to live in a home where there is affection and care. My main complaint about this book is the same one I had about Keegan's last novel: There's just not enough. This felt to me like the start of a novel but not a complete one. But there is skill require to evoke strong emotions without saying much, and for that I give her credit. I gave it 3 stars.

As the cover indicates, Alice Hoffman's The Bookstore Sisters is, truly, a short story at just 36 pages. It was a title I picked up for free through the Amazon First Reads program; I'm much more selective about picking up books through this program now, but because I know I have enjoyed the Hoffman books I've read, I was willing to take a chance on this one (and it's so short, even if it was bad, I wouldn't have spend much time on it). It turned out to be a quite enjoyable about two sisters who have long been estranged and the family bookstore that brings them back together. It was a pleasant way to spend a half an hour or so on a gloomy afternoon. I gave it 4 stars.

I'm currently tackling a brick of a book -- Demon Copperhead, which I'm reading in hardback. I'm only 30 pages in but am enjoying the voice of the title character, and I'm hoping I can find some extra reading time (so far I've only picked it up before bed) so make some headway, because this is not a book I want to carry with me on our trip!

Tonight the Mister and I are attending the WQED Cardigan Party, back in person after two years off for COVID, and our cardigans are ready!

What are you making and reading this week?

Unraveled Wednesday, Week 42/2022

Good morning from what feels like winter here in Western Pennsylvania! We've had a cold front from Canada pass through the past two days, and when Rainbow and I had to leave the house at 7 a.m. yesterday to go to an early orthodontist appointment, she said that it felt like the middle of winter rather than fall -- and she wasn't wrong. There are some snowflakes in the area today (though it looks like we'll mostly see drizzle), but we'll be back to the upper 60s and low 70s by the weekend. In the meantime, I'm happy to have all the woollies on me.

It's Wednesday, which means it's time for the weekly link-up with Kat and the Unravelers.

Since finishing the hat, my focus has shifted to finishing up the socks. I did manage to get the pattern written up and laid out, and it was sent to my tech editor yesterday; she's pretty busy right now but promised she'd squeeze it in next week. I'll need a finished pair to take final photos, and I'm getting there!

It's a bit hard to see (the light is absolute crap here this morning), but I am partway through the heel on the second sock, and once I get past the heel the rest of the sock will fly.

I have also finally started my combo spin and about halfway through the singles on the first bobbin. The lighting issue here is compounded that this particular section of fiber is rather dark, but a least you can get a sense for the current state of the bobbin.

Reading has been pretty good this week! I've finished two books.

I'd tagged The Netanyahus as "to read" on Libby when Kym raved about it, but when Mary mentioned that she'd listened to it, I found it was available on Hoopla (which means no waiting!). It was really delightful on audio, as both the beginning and end of each chapter have some mood-setting music and there are some audio effects scattered here and there. There is a lot packed into this relatively short book, including quite of a lot of esoteric scholarship, but there's also a lot of slapstick comedy. You don't need to be Jewish to enjoy it, but if you are, you'll recognize and get a lot of the cultural humor. This is one I might have to reread with my eyes someday to fully appreciate. I gave it 4 stars.

I also finally finished Booth yesterday afternoon; it took me much longer than I would have expected not because I didn't like it but because thinks kept coming up every time I tried to sit down and read it. I found this to be a really fascinating read, having only a slight awareness of perhaps the most famous (infamous?) Booth, John Wilkes, but none at all about his family. And the rest of the family is really the focus of this novel, which is very much grounded in historical fact but does take some liberties with details about the characters about whom less is known. I found it to be a really interesting study of family dynamics set against a backdrop of difficult times in the country, and I was a little surprised that John Wilkes Booth is, until the very end, a relatively minor character. I also found it very interesting how, in the author's note, she mentioned that in an age of mass shootings, we often don't think about how one person's heinous actions affect the members of their family, and she drew some interesting comparisons between the views of Abraham Lincoln as a tyrant and the Civil War as a perilous time in our democracy and more recent events in this country. I wouldn't say I loved this book, but I found it fascinating and worth the read. I gave it 3.5 stars, rounded up to 4.

I have two books I am very eager to start, but first I am focused on finally finishing Braiding Sweetgrass!

What are you making and reading this week?

Savoring the Color

In a "normal" year (whatever that is), I'd be in a car coming back from Rhinebeck today. But obviously I didn't go to Rhinebeck this year, and as much as I missed it, I don't regret the decision to skip it. I certainly didn't need to buy any yarn or fiber, but I was sad to miss out on seeing friends and seeing all the knitwear. The trees in my neighborhood decided to cheer me up by putting out their best color, and we had gorgeous blue skies both days.

I didn't do a lot of sitting around this weekend, in part because I spent time outside to enjoy the beautiful weather while it lasted, but I did manage to find time to finish up the hat I started last week:

Because this was knit top down, I was able to try it on as I went, and it seemed long enough once I finished up the last round of orange, so I finished it off with the blue. I haven't yet blocked it (which is why it looks a little wonky still), but I'm very happy with it, and it's been added to the pile of charity hats. I'm really pleased with the stitch pattern, too, so expect to see it again! I have my eye on a set of mini skeins in my stash that I think will work perfectly with the pattern in a cowl.

I'm still working on the mate to my latest sock, and I've got a draft of the pattern written up (I'm just waiting to hear back from my tech editor to make sure she's available before I put the layout together). And I also finally started my combo spin yesterday, using a mix of three colorways from Southern Cross Fibre:

 

This will be an interesting week here. Rainbow has standardized testing at school starting on Wednesday, and she's done at noon Wednesday and Thursday and at 11 a.m. on Friday. I decided to take Friday off so we can hang out, and provided the weather holds out, we're planning to make a trip out to a local farm to pick up apples, a pumpkin, and maybe some other fall goodies (thanks for the nudge to do that, Kym!).

I've got an alarm set for this afternoon for the Booker Prize announcement. Will you be tuning in? What's your choice to win?

Friday Finishes

Ever have one of those days where you turn around and it's 3 in the afternoon? I'm having one of those days today. It started out calm enough -- after rain all day yesterday that was supposed to switch over to freezing rain and then snow, it finally did change last night, right around the time that Rainbow's school decided to close again today. So when I got up this morning, there was no need to rush or get her out of bed, and I was able to savor my coffee while I checked my email. But then I had to start making bread (we're having dinner with my brother and sister-in-law tonight, and I promised I'd make challah) and try to get a walk and shower in before I had to go to a 1 p.m. doctor's appointment (just an annual check-up), and in the midst of that our internet decided to stop working. Suffice it to say that it was not my intention to get this post up so late in the day, but it is what it is.

I have really been on a finishing kick this week and have two of my three main projects wrapped up. First, I finished the last steps of my combo spin -- although I'd finished the plying on Tuesday, I still had to skein and wash it to set the twist and then wait for it to dry to measure it and estimate my yardage. There's a lot of it!

My pre-wash estimate ended up being spot on: I have a bit more than 2,300 yards of three-ply fingering weight. This is excellent news, and not just because I now know why it took so long to spin and ply and why it took me an entire afternoon to wind these three skeins. I'd spun this yarn with the Garland sweater in mind, in large part because there's a coordinating kid's sweater called Little Garland and I thought it would be cute for Rainbow and I to have matching sweaters again. Originally I thought they'd be more coordinating than matching and that I'd spin something else for her main color, but I have enough yardage to knit us both sweaters using this yarn as the main color (I'm planning to spin an undyed light wool for the colorwork), even assuming I want to make sizes that give us several inches of positive ease. She's on board with this plan, so the contrast will be the next thing going onto the wheel.

Next, though I'd already gotten corrections back from my tech editor on my new sock pattern and made the adjustments in the pattern, I still had to finish the second sock so I could take pattern photos. I did that yesterday, and Rainbow was kind enough to take some glamour shots for me.

Expect to see this pattern available early next week -- it's ready to go, but there's a lot of admin work to get it ready to be out in the world, and I plan to use the weekend for that.

Finally, while my sweater isn't completely done, it's much closer now that I've finished the first sleeve and started the second:

I even taught myself how to do a tubular bind off in the round for the cuff (it's a bit different from the instructions for doing it when working flat) and wove in my ends on the first sleeve before I started the second. I estimate I've knit about three inches on the second sleeve, and of course the rounds get faster as I work more decreases. As soon as this one is done, I'll be turning my attention to my long-neglected Shifty pullover with the hope of getting it off the needles this month as well.

Now, can I interest anyone in some fresh-baked challah?

Have a wonderful weekend, friends!

Unraveled, Week 5/2022

In the words of America's weatherman, happy Super Twos-day -- it's 2/2/22! I don't think it surprised anyone that Punxsutawney Phil has predicted another six weeks of winter, particularly with the giant storm that's headed across the country right now. We're supposed to get rain starting tonight, changing to sleet and freezing rain and eventually snow tomorrow. Please, if you would, send some positive travel thoughts the Mister's way? He's headed back home tonight from a work trip, and I'd really like him to get in before the weather turns.

As it's Wednesday, that means it's time for a weekly link-up with Kat and the Unravelers and a chance to talk making and reading.

I am almost finished with the first sleeve of my sweater and have done some sock knitting, but yesterday I decided that I really wanted to focus on finishing up my long-languishing combo spin. It took most of the day and there was some splicing and perhaps even some swearing at the end -- and ultimately some singles left that I just didn't want to deal with anymore -- but I ended the day with three full bobbins of plied yarn:

The one on the far left is the last one I filled, and you can see that the end nearest the WooLee Winder gear was threatening to overflow. I have no idea why the bobbins fill unevenly like that; some have suggested that it's due to the angle of the yarn guide or due to gravity (because my wheel is at a tilt), but it seems to be a fairly common issue. Today I hope to find the time to wind this yarn into skeins and wash it and finally declare this project finished.

I've finished two books in the past week, one of them right before going to bed last night.

I'd been waiting patiently on the library hold list for a long time for Ruth Ozeki's most recent book, The Book of Form and Emptiness, after loving my first experience with her writing last year. This was equally entertaining in terms of sheer wonder at her craft. The story is told in alternating chapters, some of which are told by Benny, the teenager at the center of the story, and most of which are told by a book -- yes, inanimate objects have sentience in this world! The story of Benny is a sad one, but it's beautifully told, and I think what I most appreciated about this book is that it brought a really new and respectful perspective to the idea that some people hear voices, suggesting that what has been labeled a symptom of mental illness might not be the case. I gave this book 4 stars.

My just-before-bed finish was Hell of a Book, this year's National Book Award winner for fiction. I think the overall purpose of this book is an important one -- focusing on how the lives of Black men and boys are so negatively impacted by racism and racist violence -- but I have to admit that I spent much of the time feeling completely confused as to what's going on. Part of that is, I think, intentional. The narrator, the author of a book by the same name as this book, tells us repeatedly that he has "a condition" in which his imagination is so overactive that he sees and hears things that aren't real. I really expected to find clarity at some point, but I never really felt like I got it. I think, though, that this ambiguity would make this an excellent book for a group discussion. I gave it 3 stars.

Up next? Well, I have three titles from NetGalley in my Kindle library, and Braiding Sweetgrass is still sitting patiently on my nightstand.

What are you making and reading this week?

Unraveled, Week 3/2022

It's Wednesday again, in spite of my brain insisting that it's only Tuesday (something that happens without fail anytime I have a Monday off), so that means it's time for my weekly link-up with Kat and the Unravelers!

No unraveling has happened this week, but not that much knitting progress has been made since the weekend, either, and that's mainly because much of my attention has been focused on this:

This is the first bobbin of plied yarn from my combo spin (which is actually more green than blue, as it appears here), and there's going to be at least one more. I'm going to cram as much as I can on this bobbin before I switch it out. Plying handspun can get a little tedious; at least when I was spinning the singles, I was actively doing something and I had the novelty of each new bundle of fiber I pulled out of the bag. This is more mindless, but it's at least something that lends itself well to reading at the same time.

I have done a little knitting (though I haven't touched my sweater since the weekend). I'd cast on a sock for our trip home from Florida, and the intention was for it to be a way to try out an idea I had to combine two of my sock patterns -- one cuff down, one toe up -- into a new version that could be knit in either direction. I've been just about to the heel for a while and kept putting it off, in the way that you put off something that requires a little thought and seems like it'll require a huge effort but in actuality really doesn't take much time at all once you sit down and do it. And that was the case with this heel. About an hour of knitting time gave me proof of concept.

I know it looks a little like a shark fin, but it's a combination of gussets and a short-row heel, and it seems to work! I tried it on right after finishing and was happy with it, but I want to try it on again after knitting a bit more of the foot to be sure. Then it's just a matter of working out all the numbers for the different sizes.

Reading has been good this week! I've finished two books.

Shortly after I posted about Magpie Murders last week, I got really sucked into it, and I think I listened to the second half of the book over the course of Thursday. The story follows a book editor, Susan Ryeland, who has just gotten the latest murder mystery from her publisher's most popular author, and we read the book along with her at the start. But she discovers that the final chapters are missing from the manuscript, leaving the murder unsolved, and when the author of the book turns up dead, she finds herself involved in her own murder mystery as she tries to find the missing pages. Horowitz's detective in the book-within-a-book felt a bit like Poirot to me, but both story lines were very entertaining, and I thoroughly enjoyed both narrators. I gave it 4 stars.

The more Lauren Groff I read, the more I am impressed with her as a writer. I found the characters and the plot of Fates and Furies to be completely unrealistic and yet completely compelling, primarily because of the writing. I'm choosing to view this book as a modern Greek tragedy rather than an attempt at realism; Groff even inserts her own commentary on the plot in real time in brackets as a sort of chorus. I kept reading not because I cared about the characters, who at times seemed even too much for fiction, but because I was fascinated by how the author wrote about them and I wanted to see where she would take their story. This was a read that for me was less about the plot and more about the craft. I gave it 4 stars.

At the moment, I am only reading Braiding Sweetgrass, still quite slowly, but I've got the new Read With Us title, Agatha of Little Neon, queued up in my Kindle library to start later today and am hoping that soon I'll have Stanley Tucci's memoir to listen to from the library.

What are you making and reading this week?

Reasons to Smile

Happy Friday, friends! It's a gloomy day, and there's a snowstorm coming, but I am trying to focus on good things today. I am convinced that there are always reasons to smile and be happy, though sometimes they can be harder to find. Today I want to share a few of them with you in the hopes that you can find some of your own.

First of all, Rainbow's mittens are done! I had a Zoom board meeting last night, and it lasted long enough that I was able to finish up the second mitten and weave in all my ends.

Obviously they still need to be felted, as you can see that they are bigger than even my hands at this point, but that will be easy enough to do. My own felted mittens could use a wash and a touch up, so I will throw both pairs in the wash at some point this weekend, and Rainbow's hands will finally be warm when she heads back to school next week.

I also reached a critical point in my combo spin: I finished spinning the last bobbin of singles on Wednesday and started plying yesterday!

This is a pretty crummy photo (see above re: gloom), but at least you can see it coming together. I anticipate that I'll fill at least two bobbins with yarn, maybe even three. Even a conservative estimate gives me about 1,500 yards of yarn from my five bags of fiber, so there is a lot of treadling in my future. In retrospect, my electric miniSpinner probably would have made sense for plying this project, but now that I've started on the Lendrum, I'm going to keep going.

Finally, we have a long weekend ahead, as all three of us are off on Monday for Martin Luther King Jr. Day. And that timing is excellent, given that there's a storm coming in on Sunday that could make things very sloppy on Monday morning, so I'm happy we won't have to go anywhere. A long weekend is always a reason to smile, but this one in particular is making me extra happy. My brother and sister-in-law are taking a quick trip to see her brother's family, so Rainbow and I are dog-sitting Saturday night. We haven't seen our favorite puppy since before the holidays, I think since we had everyone over for her birthday in mid-December, so we're both looking forward to spending some extra time with him. And given that it's supposed to be very cold in the lead-up to the storm, what could be better than curling up with a puppy?

I hope you have some great reasons to smile this weekend, and if you're in the path of this storm, stay safe and warm!

Unraveled, Week 2/2022

First, I want to thank all of you for the kind comments and good wishes for Rainbow. She was able to get back to school yesterday (double-masked!) and is feeling great, other than a little bit of lingering congestion that may or may not be related. I was feeling a little gross over the weekend, mainly with sinus issues, but I started using my nasal spray again and they've resolved, so who knows. I did go back and get another PCR test yesterday -- which turned into quite an adventure when my first swab decided to jump out of the vial and I had to redo it! -- and it's currently being processed, so I hope to have results later today. [Edit: Just got results -- negative!]  The Mister has felt fine the entire time, so he's either not been infected or been asymptomatic.

It is Wednesday today, which means it's time to link up with Kat and the Unravelers to talk about what's in progress and what I'm reading. I am still working on my sweaters (well, actively only on one sweater), but you know that old adage about how the cobbler's children have no shoes? This weekend Rainbow informed me that she has no mittens that fit her. So guess what I'm knitting?

I'm using the Snow Day Mittens pattern (Ravelry link), which I've used many times before, but I've had to go up to the women's small size. The pink here is some Knit Picks Swish Worsted and the heathered  purple is a 50% wool/50% alpaca from a sweater I frogged. I knit all of the purple part you see here during last night's Read With Us Zoom session, just to give you an idea of how quickly these work up. I've got maybe another round or two to knit before I start the decreases.

High on my list of priorities today, however, is finishing up the singles of my combo spin, because this is all I have left to be spun:

I am really excited to get to start plying and see what this mashup yarn looks like!

Reading has been challenging (in a good way) and fulfilling this past week. I finished two books:

 I had heard about Eloquent Rage on a podcast and tagged it as to read in my library app several months ago, and I finally listened to it over the course of a few days. Cooper is a writer and a professor of women's and gender studies and Africana studies, and this book (which she reads herself) is a collection of essays about identity, racism, sexism, and feminism. She is brutally honest about how she views her role as a Black woman in a patriarchal country grounded in systemic racism, and her writing is incredibly powerful. I have a feeling I'm going to need to read this again, in print, because so much of it passed by quickly on audio and I have so many things I want to highlight and take notes on. I gave it 4 stars.

I know several of you have already read and raved about How the Word Is Passed, and someone (forgive me for forgetting who!) mentioned right before the end of the year that the Kindle version was on sale, so I bought it immediately. I took my time with this one and read it slowly; Smith is a poet, which you can tell from his prose, and his writing almost begs to be read at a slower pace. In this nonfiction book, the author takes the reader along to visit a number of historical locations that have strong ties to slavery and reflects on how their legacy can be felt today, both in our society in general and in his own life as a Black man descended from enslaved people. Given his background, you'd expect to get a particular viewpoint, but I really felt that he went out of his way to try to get honest opinions and responses from the people he met during his travels, including white descendants of those who fought for the Confederacy. I had a lot of highlights in this book, but the most powerful one, I think, was the very last one:

"The history of slavery is the history of the United States. It was not peripheral to our founding;
it was central to it. It is not irrelevant to our contemporary society; it created it.
This history is in our soil, it is in our policies, and it must, too, be in our memories."

I gave this book 4 stars.

I'm currently reading three books -- one on paper, one on audio, and one on ebook. The paper book is Braiding Sweetgrass, which is likely to be a long-term read for me. I am listening to Magpie Murders on my walks this week. It's been on my radar for a while, and when Katie mentioned how much she enjoyed it on Monday and it was available with no wait from the library, it seemed like kismet. I'm roughly a third of the way through it and am enjoying it immensely. Finally, after last night's Zoom discussion, I was inspired to read another Lauren Groff. Fates and Furies was mentioned as a favorite a couple of times, and I've been meaning to read it, so I finally borrowed it from the library and started it right before bed.

What are you working on and reading this week?