Still Drying Out

It has been another wet week here in Western Pennsylvania -- yesterday was especially wet, with heavy rain all morning (exactly when I need to be out to walk Ruthie and then walk to and from work). Needless to say, I got pretty soaked. We were predicted to get as much as 2 inches yesterday alone, and I'm pretty sure we got close to that. I wish we could share all this rain with folks who are experiencing drought! The sun did come out for a little while yesterday afternoon, and the temperatures were only in the low 70s, so it was pretty comfortable and a nice change from the higher temps and high humidity. Looks like there's more rain in the forecast, though, so things aren't drying out completely anytime soon.

We've officially begun the countdown to the first day of school year. Molly goes back (for a half day, sheesh) on the 31st, so next week is her last week of summer break. All this month she's been working on her summer reading assignment and a whole bunch of chemistry assignments (to prepare for AP Chem this year). I'm also preparing for my next big knitalong, which starts September 9, so although I'd like to start a sweater, I'm waiting until it counts for imaginary internet points and biding my time until then with some smaller charity projects. You've already seen the current hat, which is growing a couple of inches or so each day and is now maybe a third of a Ruthie:

I also started some Snowball Throwin' Mittens (Ravelry link), though this time around I'm picking up and knitting the cuffs in superwash yarn before felting.

The part that will be felted is knit in Cascade Eco Wool (bulky), and I'm using some leftover Fibernymph Dye Works Bona Fide (DK) for the cuff. I knit a different pattern a couple of years ago using superwash for the cuff and non-superwash for the hand and it worked well, so I'm hoping that's the case here

It should be a less-dramatic weekend here, particularly as the Mister is recovering well but not yet up for running or biking yet. Molly is slated to work Saturday and Sunday, and there's an arts festival in our neighborhood's business district both days, so she should be busy and not interested in doing much when she gets home. We're planning to take my in-laws out for dinner tonight, and that's all that's on the social calendar. All of that is just fine with me!

Have the best weekend available to you, friends, and see you back here on Monday.

Unraveled, Week 33/2026

Thank you to all of you who left good wishes for the Mister's recovery on Monday. I'm happy to report that he does seem to be improving: He's been getting around the house much easier and even went into the office yesterday. I imagine it will be a while before he's able to run or bike again, which is bound to be frustrating for him, but the upside is that he can't get even more injured than he already is.

It's Wednesday, and as usual, I'm linking up with Kat and the Unravelers. And I'm starting things off with a stealth FO, one I don't think I even mentioned I was knitting because it came together so quickly.

I had a fair amount of yarn leftover from the baby pants and wanted to whip up a little hat to go with them and the BSJ, so I turned to a pattern I haven't knit in well more than a decade. It's a sweet little cap that looks great in self-striping yarn, and even though I seem to have messed up somewhere along the way because the stitch count didn't quite work out at the end of the decreases, I'm quite happy with how it turned out and don't think you can tell that anything went wrong. Now I just need to block it, sew the buttons on the BSJ, and package it all up to send off to Sweden once I talk to the recipient and figure out the best way to get it to her.

I also started the next stash-busting charity hat and am mildly entertained by how the variegated yarn is pooling now that I'm in the "knit until there's only enough yarn left to decrease" phase:

While the knitting has been small this week, the reading has been rather prolific (helped quite a bit by things being very quiet at work last week). I've finished five books, and I'll start off with the one I liked least and move on with the better reads.

The Angel of Warsaw by Rebecca Scott (audiobook)

2 stars

I found myself in need of something to listen to over the weekend, just before I was about to take the dog for a walk, so I was a bit rushed to make a choice and ended up with this fictionalized account of Irena Sendler and her efforts to save Jewish Polish children during WWII. I knew a little bit about Sendler (mostly from having watched a movie about her a number of years ago), and I knew that this was fiction inspired by her life, but even so I was pretty disappointed. I don't think it's expecting too much for a work of historical fiction based on a real person to have some grounding in the facts, but apparently the author didn't think so and was more interested in making this book just as much about the romance between Irena and a collaborator as it was about her saving children. Also, as some reviewers have pointed out, there are some pretty big mistakes, such as having Irena go into the Warsaw ghetto on a date that was months after it was liquidated. If that wasn't enough, the writing was overwrought and used way too many similes and metaphors that often sounded impressive but didn't actually mean anything (and in the case of the audiobook, this issue was compounded by the narrator's tendency to read just about every line in the most dramatic tone of voice possible). The only reason I gave this book 2 stars rather than 1 is because I think it at least does some justice to Sendler and what she and her collaborators accomplished. But if you're interested in the story, do yourself a favor and skip this book -- see if you can watch the movie instead.

This Time Tomorrow by Emma Straub (paperback)

4 stars

This book came out four years ago, and I remember hearing about it everywhere, but the wait at the library was always really long and I sort of forgot about it -- until I happened upon a copy in a Little Free Library in my neighborhood. Alice works in admissions at the NYC private school she attended, she has no children, and she's single once again. And her father is in the hospital, slowly dying. On the eve of her 40th birthday, she gets drunk and ends up back at the house where she grew up with her father after her parents split and her mother left town. When she wakes up the next morning, she's still there, only she's 16 again and her father is alive and well. Alice has to figure out how to get back to her life in the future but also has to figure out what, if anything, she can do to change the outcome. Yes, you have to accept that time travel is possible in this novel, but that's really only the tool used to get Alice to reflect on her choices, then and now, and evaluate whether any change she effects in the past is really worth the unconsidered consequences in the future. I really enjoyed the relationship between Alice and her father, and it wasn't surprising to read the author's note at the end indicating that much of it was grounded in her own father/daughter relationship. Though it deals with death quite a bit, what shines through the most is how important our enduring relationships are throughout our lives, whether or not we get to go back in time to try to adjust them.

Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism by Sarah Wynn-Williams (audio)

4 stars

There was a lot of buzz about this book when it came out last year, notably from Facebook/Meta, which tried to keep it from being published, and that alone leads me to believe in the veracity of its content. Sarah Wynn-Williams worked as director of global policy at Facebook for almost a decade, initially joining the company because she believed it would be revolutionary for creating connections and improving lives around the globe. But what she discovered was that the public faces of the company behaved differently in private, that the company didn't care about following other country's laws or putting people in physical danger, and that no matter how hard she worked -- even while in the middle of giving birth to her first child! -- she could not escape from the misogyny and sexual harassment that pervaded the office. I deleted my Facebook account years ago, but this book made me wish I'd never had one. It was eye-opening and shocking, but, like a car wreck, I couldn't look away. I have so much respect for the author for staying as long as she did to try to fix things (and I really enjoyed listening to her read the book, with her lovely New Zealand accent). 

Is It too Late to Make a Run for It? by Judi Dench with Brendan O'Hea (digital ARC)

4 stars

I really enjoyed the first collaboration by Dench and O'Hea focused on Shakespeare, so I was delighted to spend more time with the two of them in conversation about Judi Dench's life and long career. She reflects on her childhood, her schooling, her early days in the theater, her marriage and collaboration with her husband, and her relationships with many actors and directors over the years. Even in her early 90s, she is sharp and witty and has an amazing memory of roles she's played. She talks a lot about laughing and playing pranks, but there's also a wistfulness to her stories, such as when she talks about the trees she's planted in her garden for loved ones and friends who have passed away. It was a delight to spend more time with her, and I certainly hope there's going to be an audiobook of this one, too! 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. This book will be published November 3, 2026.

Under Story by Chloe Benjamin (digital ARC)

5 stars

I have such clear memories of reading Chloe Benjamin's The Immortalists back in 2018, and I've found myself thinking about it almost a decade later, so when I heard about her forthcoming novel, I immediately requested an ARC -- and it did not disappoint. Laurel Salter is a mycologist in Wisconsin, but after suffering an unimaginable loss, she no longer finds any joy in her work and decides to get as far away from Wisconsin as she can: the McMurdo Station research base in Antarctica. There she works not as a scientist but on the galley crew, doing all sorts of menial tasks to keep her body busy so she won't retreat into her mind and her grief. And it seems to be working -- until her ex-husband, Eli, a physicist, shows up. He's there to study what has been called the Arc, a strange phenomenon of light that Laurel has felt drawn to and that no one can understand. When Laurel has a dream about the Arc, she becomes convinced that it holds the key to healing her pain, and Eli's theory about a sort of mirror universe might be the answer to undoing the tragedy that tore them apart. There is a lot of science in this book, but it's never overly technical or boring (in fact, I don't know how accurate any of it is, but it's specific enough to convince me that it is). Instead, it's engaging and fascinating; even when the physics was well over my head, I never felt that I wasn't smart enough to understand but rather that the workings of the universe might be too big for any one brain to hold. Benjamin creates an idea for an alternate world that is so compelling and unusual, not least because she's thought of even small details that make it seem almost believable. But you don't have to understand the science or believe any of it to appreciate what's really at the heart of this novel: the characters and their relationships. Laurel and Eli are at the center, but there are also friendship and professional mentor/mentee relationships, and what's especially wonderful is seeing how the same relationships are the same but also different in the alternate universe. This is a big book (500+ pages), but when I finished, I still wanted more time with these characters, and I think this may very well end up being one of my favorite books of the year. Thank you to NetGalley and Putnam for providing me with a digital ARC of this book in return for an honest review. This book will be published September 1, 2026.

(P.S. Chloe Benjamin is a knitter and there's even a little bit of knitting in the book! She's collaborated with Ritual Dyes and designer Sari Nordlund on a small collection inspired by the book that will be out the same day.)

What are you making and reading this week?

I'd Prefer Boring

When last we talked (and by "talked," I mean I wrote something and you read it), I was getting ready for an uneventful weekend. We didn't have plans other than dinner with my side of the family on Friday night, and I was excited that Saturday we were going to get a break in the rain. And then, of course, things got more interesting than I'd like.

Do you remember when the Mister had a run-in with a tree branch while bicycling back in 2020? Well he had a bike outing planned with a friend on Saturday and I didn't hear anything from him while he was gone, so I was surprised that when he got home in the early afternoon, he was having a hard time walking. It seems that he had slowed down a bit to wait for the friend to catch up while on an incline on a bridge, his bike wheel got caught in the paving seam, and he didn't have enough momentum to carry him over it, so he keeled over sideways. He had only a little bit of road rash on his arm, but his main complaint was that he had terrible pain in his upper thigh/hip area. He put ice on it and took some Tylenol and hung out in bed for the afternoon. We'd talked about going out for dinner, but as he could barely walk, that wasn't happening, so I managed to cobble together a meal of leftover salad and some pizza from the freezer. He said that if it didn't get better, he'd get it checked out, but it was clear to me that he shouldn't wait, so I told him to make an appointment at the urgent care center on Sunday morning. The good news is that they took x-rays and nothing appears broken, but of course he's still in pain and can't walk. They told him if it didn't start to improve to go see an orthopedist. He's working from home today, and as he can't do much of anything physical (we still had my crutches from when I broke my foot, so he's been hobbling around on them when he needs to move), that means I'm doing everything -- I did the grocery shopping yesterday, I'm on cooking and cleanup duty, I changed the bedsheets, etc. Life is always exciting, isn't it?

But hey, this is a knitting blog. Here's some knitting -- a finished but still badly in need of blocking hat:

And I've got yarn all wound for the next one, because having mindless knitting on hand at all times is useful when your husband seems to be trying to injury himself all the time.

I'll leave you with a bit of lightness -- a photo of Ruthie playing with her friend Finnegan, whose owners and I refer to as Ruthie's "Kentucky cousin." Finn is also a rescue who came from Kentucky, and we think the two dogs look alike. They certain play the same way!

Here's hoping this week is a lot less eventful! I will be back on Wednesdays with some more knitting and some book reviews.

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.