A Wintry Start to the Week

We had quite the weekend of weather here in Pittsburgh! On Saturday, it was snowing heavily when I got up. I'd planned to go to Costco when it opened, but after looking out the window and seeing the weather forecast, I decided to push that trip back a day. Over the course of the day, the temperature rose a bit and the snow transitioned to rain. Thankfully that improved the conditions of the roads so I could drive to a friend's house to play mahjongg and so the Mister and I could go out for a date night, but it was still gross out there. Yesterday, I woke to rain (and most of the snow had melted), so I had a wet trip to Costco. By early afternoon, temps had dropped and the rain changed to snow. And this morning I woke up to this:

I am glad that Molly does not have school today and I don't have to go outside in this mess! Though it's supposed to be frigid this week, so this stuff isn't going anywhere for a while and I'll have to deal with it tomorrow. For today, though, I can stay cozy inside. And there's more good news -- I had coffee again this weekend with no ill effects, so I can be fully awake this week!

Although the weekend had its fair share of cleaning, laundry, and errands, it also had a good amount of knitting time. I finished up the hat I am testing yesterday morning during my weekly friend Zoom:

This will be getting a good soak today because it's a very snug fit on me. I'll admit that I only did one swatch, with a US 6/4.0 mm needle, and I was so far off on gauge that I decided to follow the recommended needle sizes in the pattern (US 4/3.5 mm and US 3/3.25 mm for the ribbing). I have a feeling the fabric is going to relax a bit when it gets wet, but I want an accurate measurement of the gauge I got with the recommended needles to report back to the designer. I may be that I should have gone down only one needle size rather than two, but we'll see. This can always be added to the donation pile if it's still too snug for me or Molly.

I also cast on for my vest yesterday! The opinions to my blog post were unanimous in favor of handspun alone, and the responses to the poll I posted on Instagram were heavily weighted in that direction (at last check, 83% voted for handspun only). While I liked the feel of the fabric with both yarns, probably because the laceweight was a fuzzy 100% merino, the handspun was so much prettier on its own, and my gauge was closer with just the handspun was closer to the pattern gauge anyway. So that's the way I went. I didn't get very far because the start of this pattern has a lot of short rows, and it's hard to see in any case because it's in stockinette, but here's the humble beginning:

While I'd glanced over the pattern after printing it out, I didn't really get a complete sense of the construction until I read through it to highlight the instructions for my size. It's knit from the top down, starting with the back. The shoulders are shaped with short rows, and then you work down to the underarm, incorporating shaping for the armholes. Next, you place those stitches on hold and return to the cast-on edge, picking up stitches for the front, which is worked to the same spot, incorporating neck shaping as well as that for the sleeves. When the front and back are both knit to the same point, they're joined to work in the round for the body, and then the armhole and neckline ribbing is added at the end. The pattern is extremely detailed, with helpful diagrams scattered throughout. It's an excellent example of a project that appears to be very simple is actually very well designed.

I'm working today, but it's a work-from-home day and I won't have to do school pickup, so I should stay nice and cozy. I got us a rotisserie chicken from Costco for dinner last night, so I'm planning to pop the carcass into my slow cooker and make some chicken broth for the freezer (this is the first time I've done that not using the whole chicken, so I'm excited to see how it goes). I baked banana bread yesterday afternoon, and we're having spaghetti and meatballs and garlic bread for dinner -- we are all about the comfort food right now! The Mister has yet another work trip this week, but luckily it's only a couple of days and not the whole week. And while my stomach issues have settled, this week's anxiety-induced fun is an eczema flare around my eyes, one of which looks like I've been punched in the face, so I'll be getting in touch with my dermatologist to see if there's anything I can do beyond leaving it alone and keeping it covered with Aquaphor. It's always something, isn't it?

I hope your week is starting out with as much calm and warmth as you can find.

A Conundrum

Happy Friday, friends, and happy Valentine's Day! My original valentine has just landed from his trip across the country; my other valentine is still sleeping (she is off for an in-service day today; yesterday was the last day of her second trimester at school, so the teachers are busy working on grading). We got a very light dusting of snow overnight, and we're expecting snow changing to wintry mix changing to rain tomorrow -- we're actually under a flood watch. Today, though, will be dry and cold, and even though I'm working today, it feels a bit like the start of the weekend.

I finished and blocked my vest/slipover swatch on Wednesday afternoon, and now I'm trying to decide what to do next. Amazingly, I had perfect stitch and row gauge on both sections before blocking, but of course the fabric changed after. Here's the blocked swatch:

On the left is the handspun held together with the lace yarn. On the right is the handspun alone. I am pretty close on gauge on both -- 20 stitches over 4 inches on the left and 20.5 stitches over 4 inches on the right compared to the pattern gauge of 21 stitches/4 inches. There's a fair amount of positive ease built into the pattern, so I think I could make both work. The conundrum is that I'm not sure which way to go. Certainly the handspun alone is closest to gauge, but the fabric is also a bit thinner. The handspun plus lace creates a sturdier fabric, but the gauge isn't as close and I think the lace yarn obscures the colors in the handspun a bit. I could go down a needle size with the handspun alone and see if I can get closer to gauge (though I suspect I'd then have too many stitches per inch), but I think my fabric would be too stiff with a smaller needle using the two yarns together. So what would you do?

Unraveled, Week 7/2025

Good morning and happy Wednesday, friends! Another winter storm is moving through, though thankfully it doesn't look like we're going to be much impacted (a little snow overnight and this morning and then rain later today). My sinuses aren't a big fan, but at least I won't have to dig out the driveway and sidewalk this time. I am happy to report that I am feeling loads better, if a little sleepy -- I love tea, but it just doesn't wake me up as well as coffee does. But without anyone snoring next to me in bed, I'm sleeping better, so I think it all evens out right now. Time to join in with Kat and the Unravelers!

I did manage to finish one last charity hat Monday night, so my total for this particular hat-knitting fever is six, which used up a total of a bit more than 2,400 yards of yarn, or about six average skeins of fingering weight. That's a lot!

These will get washed and then safely put away for donation the next time they're needed. And now I can move on to new projects.

There's not much to see at this point, and the terrible lighting doesn't help the fact that there's a lot of gray here. On the left is the start of my swatch for my vest, knit by holding a strand of very old Knit Picks laceweight alongside my handspun. I'm going to continue with the handspun alone because I think the two strands held together might actually be too thick, but I do like the look of the combination. We'll see what happens after blocking. In the middle is a swatch for the hat I'm testing. I normally wouldn't swatch for a hat, but the needle size called for in the pattern is a lot smaller than what I'd normally use for worsted, and the gauge listed is also in the textured pattern rather than stockinette, so I didn't want to just guess on the needle size. Finally, the cuff on the right is a new pair of socks for Molly using Fibernymph Dye Works Mountain Tweed in neutrals (you saw the skein earlier in the week). I am hoping that by the end of the week the swatching will be complete and I'll have actually cast on those new projects.

It's been a good week for reading, with four solid books completed.

The longest of the four was an audiobook, The Unseen World, written by the author of The God of the Woods and Long Bright River. Most of the story is about Ada, a young woman raised by her single father, David, a computer scientist in the 1970s and '80s at the "Boston Institute of Technology" (presumably a stand-in for MIT). Her childhood is unconventional in that she is home-schooled by her father and is a regular in his lab, where he and his team are working on the precursors of artificial intelligence. But when Ada is entering her teen years, it becomes apparent that something is wrong with David, as he becomes more and more forgetful and confused as dementia tightens his grip on his mind. Ada eventually moves in with one of David's colleagues when it's clear that David needs full-time care, and then a new mystery arises when none of the details of David's life seem to be true and all she has left of him is a disk with a string of letters he has left her to decode. In near present day, Ada is a computer scientist herself working on virtual reality, but she is still haunted by the code she could never solve. I could have done without the repetition of those letters and some computer code in the book; had I been reading with my eyes, I probably would have skipped over them. But the story was really intriguing, and even though it's told against the backdrop of computers and AI, at its heart it's a story that raises questions about how well we can know people and when the stories we tell ourselves become the truth, even if they're not actual facts. I gave it 4 stars.

Next was the first in the next series of books that a small group of us is focusing on this year -- women in translation, translated by other women. Boulder was short-listed for the International Booker Prize in 2023 and follows our nameless narrator (the title is her nickname), who goes from being a cook on a merchant ship to living in Reykjavik when she falls in love with Samsa. All seems well until Samsa decides that she needs to have a baby. Boulder, in contrast, doesn't want to be a mother, but ultimately her love for Samsa wins her over. The pregnancy and the baby change Samsa and ultimately the relationship in a dramatic way, causing the narrator to reassess her life and her partnership. Eva Baltasar is a poet, and this comes through in the prose and the translation. I gave it 4 stars.

Colum McCann's Apeirogon is one of the most memorable books I've read in the past several years, so I was delighted to be invited to read an ARC of his forthcoming novel, Twist. In three sections, we learn about an experience the narrator of the book, Irish writer Anthony Fennell, has had and his struggles to make sense of it. In the first, he travels to South Africa after he learns about the crews that repair the undersea cables that enable transcontinental communication and proposes an article about one of them. He is connected with John Conway, a fellow Irishman who is chief of mission for a repair ship, and through Conway meets his partner, Zanele, an up-and-coming South African actress. In the second part, the two men get on board the boat to embark on a repair, and Fennell learns about the hierarchy of the ship and the process of the repair. But something dramatic and unexpected happens at the end of the mission, and in the third part of the book, Fennell grapples with making sense of what happened then and afterward. I thought the writing in the book was spectacular and the characters intriguing, but I also felt a little at a loss for why the story was being told. There is, of course, some pretty big symbolism in the need to repair connections, but I also felt that there were a lot of things that weren't explained. I gave it 3.5 stars, rounded up to 4. Thank you to Random House and NetGalley for providing me with an ARC of this book in return for an honest review. This book will be published March 25, 2025.

Finally, I read The Message, a collection of four essays by Ta-Nehisi Coates. I enjoyed the first three very much, but the final (and longest) essay was a difficult read. It discusses his trip to Israel and Palestine and his efforts to make sense of the long conflict and the current state of affairs. Though he opens his essay by recounting the impact of his visit to Yad Vashem, it is clear that he sides with the Palestinians and believes Israel to be an apartheid state and a colonizer. While I admit that much of the knowledge of Israel I was raised with was very one-sided, I have to disagree with Coates' position that Zionism is about colonialism and subjugation. I think that like so much about this conflict, there are many sides and any opinions -- lots of shades of gray and no black and white. His position did make me think a lot, though, and I think that's a good thing when it comes to writing. I also gave this book 3.5 stars, rounded up to 4.

I'm currently reading Eva Baltasar's debut novel, Permafrost, and plan to start something new on Kindle soon. What are you making and reading this week?

Bring On All the Tea

I suspect many of us are dragging this Monday morning, though unlike many people, I am not tired because I stayed up watching the Super Bowl. I turned it off after the halftime show and opted to read until bed instead, but the Mister was up at 3:15 to catch a 6:30 flight -- and because he had to get up so early, he went to bed early, which meant the nighttime "symphony" of snoring started early. Fortunately, I'll get a break from that soundtrack tonight, so if I'm dragging a bit today, I can catch up on the sleep later on.

Thank you for all your kind thoughts last week. I felt better on Friday but then had a terrible reflux attack on Saturday morning, so I am off coffee for the time being (hence all the tea). I had thought I was handling the general state of the world well, but apparently that was not the case. For the time being, I'm off coffee and alcohol and anything else that's really acidic or spicy. It makes for a boring diet, but I'll take boring if it means not feeling sick.

Partly because of the reflux and partly because it was just gloomy winter, it was a quiet weekend. I did get out for a walk, my first one in a while, on Saturday morning before wet weather moved in by the afternoon (we actually had a thunderstorm!). I spent most of the weekend knitting hats and reading, and I've just about gotten this multi-stranded hat thing out of my system.

I've got one last blue hat on the needles that I'm trying to finish up today and then I will take a break from this particular hat for a while. Six hats in about a week isn't bad, though! They were just the right break, but now I'm ready to start some new projects, which today will require winding some yarn.

This is a terrible photo (it's very overcast here today, as per usual for winter), but those two skeins on the left are handspun that I'm planning to use for an All Season Vest (Ravelry link). Of course, I've got to swatch to see if it'll work because the pattern calls for DK or worsted and this yarn is probably sport to DK. I may need to carry along a strand of laceweight to get gauge, but we'll see. The skein on the right is for some socks for Molly, at her request. I also just got approved to test knit a hat for Kerri Blumer, so I'll be digging in my stash today for something for that. I guess I'm not entirely done with hats!

I hope your Monday treats you kindly! See you back here on Wednesday.

Can I Get a Break?

We've made it to Friday -- thank goodness! It's been a long, exhausting week. I've spent a lot of it not feeling well, first thanks to an IBS flare and then, I suspect, due to the wild fluctuations in the weather. I've had terrible sinus pressure, haven't been able to get warm, and have been exhausted. And the Mister was traveling for work this week, which meant I had to do everything to keep our household running. This morning I'm finally feeling more like myself and keeping my fingers crossed that I continue to feel okay. At least there is a weekend coming up and I can get some extra rest!

First up, I want to share with all of you that I published a new pattern this morning! Or new-ish, I should say -- it's a lightweight version of a previously published pattern.

This is Funnel Vision Light (Ravelry link; Payhip link), a fingering weight version of the Funnel Vision Cowl I published with Knit Picks back in fall of 2023. Although I'd proposed the pattern for a heavier yarn (I had DK or worsted in mind but was given bulky), I'd always thought of what this design would look like in fingering, and I actually knit this sample nearly two years ago. It wasn't until late last year, though, that I finally decided to write it up as a pattern after I wore it in public and was asked about the pattern several times. It's all knit it brioche, so it's super squishy, and I knit this one in an MCN yarn, so it's extra cozy. I'm thinking I might need to knit myself another one in two colors.

The knitting this week has been pretty boring -- it's all scrappy hats, all the time! I finished my third yesterday (the one on top of the pile):

This latest one is the scrappiest of the latest bunch, with five different yarns represented. Though I started out knitting the largest size in the pattern, I'm now making the next size down because its stitch count plays more nicely with the adjusted decreases I'm doing for the crown (the original pattern decreases rapidly, leading to a sort of rumpled top, so I've changed them to a more standard eight decreases every other round). Would you believe that these three hats have used up more than 1,200 yards of yarn? That's more than I used in my most recent sweater!

I'm clearly not done with this current spate of hats, either, because I dug into my bin of full fingering skeins and wound up three blues to start some more:

That deep royal blue on top is Socks That Rock Lightweight that I bought at my former LYS, which closed more than eight years ago. The blue/gray variegated on the bottom left was purchased on our trip to Cape Cod back in 2017. And the light blue/white is from Knit Picks, purchased who knows when. I'm still feeling quite overwhelmed by the size of my stash -- each time I go digging, I swear it's gotten bigger -- so these hats seem like a great way to use up a bunch and do some good in the meantime.

The weekend ahead is looking pretty wide open, which is quite welcome. I think we could all use some extra down time. We'll be watching the Super Bowl (me because I like the commercials, Molly because she's cheering for Taylor's boyfriend) but otherwise laying low. There's been a lot happening the past several weeks, much of it terrible, so I think all of us could benefit from rest and self-care. Be well, friends, and keep looking for the good -- it's still out there.

Unraveled, Week 6/2025

Happy first Wednesday in February! Like many of you, I've been trying to avoid the news and instead focus on happy things, and joining Kat and the Unravelers is always one of the highlights of my week, so I'm all in on this update on my making and my reading.

But first I have to say a very heart-felt thank you for all the beautiful compliments you gave me on my sweater. I have worn it twice already this week, and I would not be surprised if I wear it at least once more. It is incredibly comfortable and warm without being stifling, so it's been great for this up-and-down weather we've been having.

There was so much of a focus on the sweater in my last post that I didn't mention that I also finished up a hat over the weekend:

Originally this was going to go in the charity pile, but then Molly tried it on after I finished it and it looked adorable on her, plus she gave me that look, so how could I say no? I did tell her that if I was going to give it to her, I expected her to wear it, and so far she's made good on her promise that she would. This is my Same as It Ever Was pattern (Ravelry link), which I recently published an update to that tells you how to work it at any gauge using any yarn. I've really been enjoying using fingering weight yarn and US 2.5/3.0 mm needles. For this particular one, I used Urban Girl Yarns Virginia Fingering, which comes in a very generous put-up of 480 yards per skein, in the colorway Duke of Hawtness (apparently it's a Bridgerton reference).

I seem to have gotten into a hat mood this week in general, because once those two projects were done, it's been all about hats.

It's the last week of the Pigskin Party, so I thought I'd try to sneak in a couple more projects to get some last-minute points. I'm using the Sagamore Flyover pattern, which calls for a bulky yarn, but instead I'm using fingering held triple. I think that's closer to Aran than bulky, but I'm knitting the largest size to make up for the difference. The bluish hat was knit with two strands of Bella Fio fingering that I won as a prize earlier in the Pigskin Party and one strand of LolaBean Yarn Co. fingering that was leftover from my Oh My Cod socks. The one in progress is using the rest of the skein of the Bella Fio yarn, leftovers of another LolaBean fingering that I used for a baby top last year, and leftover Geektastic Fibers (now Fandoms and Fibers) fingering from this cowl. These hats knit up really quickly but also use a lot of yarn -- that first one used 374 yards! These will be added to the charity pile for sure.

After having only one finished book to share last week, I've got four this week!

Bonny is responsible for putting Small Rain on my radar, though since she mentioned it, I've heard about it other places as well. This is a fairly quiet but incredibly powerful book. The unnamed narrator (who shares many similarities with the author, though he has maintained this isn't a memoir) suffers a life-threatening medical emergency in the summer of 2020 and ends up in the ICU. He sees plenty of doctors and nurses but is allowed only one visitor per day for a limited amount of time, and thus he spends a lot of time alone, giving him ample opportunity to think and reflect on his life, his family, his relationships, and his place in the world. The uncertainty and confusion that many of us felt in the early days of the pandemic is amplified here, but so is the beauty that can be found in simple human kindness. It's hard to know how much of the book is truth (or at least modeled on truth) and how much is pure fiction, but regardless it's a beautiful and heartwarming work. I gave it 5 stars.

Next was my first audiobook in quite a while (I was way behind on podcasts because I usually listen to them and to books while I'm walking and running, and obviously I hadn't done that for several months). Typically the Read With Us Zooms include an opportunity to make recommendations or talk about what we've read lately, and during the call last fall, someone recommended Beautyland, which I recently found on audio on Hoopla. This is a quirky novel that follows Adina, who believes she is an alien sent to Earth to observe humans and report on them to her superiors, with whom she communicates via an old fax machine. Adina finds humans to be incredibly puzzling and spends many years trying to understand them through her observations. Is she actually an alien? I'm not sure, though I thought a lot of her difficulty in understanding human behavior and relationships could also said to be true of someone who was neurodivergent, so perhaps she's not actually an alien but feels like one. I thought it was charming and felt myself sympathizing with Adina frequently, even though I am definitely not an alien. I also got a kick out of the fact that at one point she is made fun of for mis-singing the chorus to this song as "Simeon the whale" because not only is the song from a local band, but back when I was a tween going to summer camp, there was a staff member at my camp named Simeon and we deliberately sang the wrong lyrics to the song. I gave this book 4 stars.

Molly recently had to read The Penelopiad for English class, so I borrowed her copy after she was finished because I'd long had it on my TBR list. It's a quick read, but it packs a punch. Penelope, wife of Odysseus, gets to tell her side of the story, from her youth and her love/hate relationship with her cousin Helen (yes, that Helen) to her marriage to her long wait for Odysseus's return from the Trojan War. In Margaret Atwood's hands, Penelope is anything but the patient, loyal wife; rather, she's a smart, cunning woman well aware of her place in the patriarchy who's not willing to sacrifice any more of her rights or herself than she needs to. She's critical of men -- rightfully so -- and gives a view of some of the famous names from The Odyssey that suggests that their legacies might be different if a woman had been the one writing it. I gave it 4 stars.

Finally, I read The Rachel Incident from my Kindle shelf. The Rachel of the title is the narrator, and the bulk of the book takes place a number of years earlier, during the economic downturn in Ireland, when Rachel is finishing up her college degree and working at a bookstore, where she meets James, who quickly becomes her flatmate and best friend. The two of them become involved (perhaps over-involved) with one of Rachel's professors and his wife. To say much more would give away a lot of the plot, so I'll leave it at that. I think what this book does well is capture that difficult period of the early 20s when "real life" is supposed to be starting but the situation isn't ideal -- when you've finished college but your degree feels useless because there are no jobs. I found a lot of the book to be a little on the bleak side, but it did wrap up rather nicely, and I gave it 4 stars.

I am currently reading Boulder on the page and listening to The Unseen World. It's good to be listening to books again!

What are you making and reading this week?

Polwarth in Polwarth

As promised, it's done -- and I love it!

Pattern: Polwarth by Ysolda Teague, size 37.5" bust
Yarn: handspun Polwarth from Southern Cross Fibre, colorway Plot Twist; approximately 1,036 yards used
Needles: US 2 (2.75 mm) and US 3 (3.25 mm)
Started/Completed: December 22, 2024/January 31, 2025

I could not be more delighted with how this sweater turned out. I'd been planning to knit it for several years, probably since I finished spinning the yarn back in 2019 (I couldn't resist the idea of knitting a pattern called Polwarth in Polwarth yarn), and I finally decided that our recent winter vacation was time. It was a good thing that I started it while on vacation because the yoke of this sweater ended up being a lot more involved than I realized. In addition to variable rates of increases (which result in that lovely curve), the brioche detail at the top front is different every round, so I needed my full attention and focus.

When I swatched for this sweater, I could not quite get gauge, likely because handspun doesn't always neatly fall into commercial yarn weight categories. I did a little math, though, and found that at the gauge I was getting with US 3 needles, I could get my desired fit by following the second size in the pattern. For lighter-weight sweaters knit with fingering/sport, I like a little positive ease in the body and a more fitted sleeve, and that's precisely what I got. In these photos, I am wearing a long-sleeved t-shirt underneath (which is how I wear my sweaters in general), and you can see that I've still got a little room. Even though the math was telling me that's how it would work out, I'm still relieved that it did; gauge is such a fickle thing, and we all know how often swatches lie.

The colors are off here, but you can see that lovely increase line.

Knitting with handspun requires ceding some control because inevitably your sleeves are not going to match the body or each other -- that's just the nature of the beast. But I'm pretty happy with how the colors played out here. When I spun the yarn, a traditional three-ply, I planned for the variegation by splitting up the fiber into lots of small bundles (you can see them here) and spinning them at random. Then, when knitting the sweater, I alternated skein every round for most of it, using one skein only when it would be awkward to alternate, such as working the short rows at the neckline. I've found over the years that all yarn spun from dyed fiber, even if it's dyed just one color, tends to stripe, and you can see that happened here. I found it fascinating that certain colors seemed to concentrate despite the complete randomness of the spinning.

I wore the sweater yesterday and was so comfortable and cozy, and I know I'm going to be wearing it a ton on those days when it's chilly but not so frigid that I need something heavier. I really could not be happier with it!