Poetry in April: Poems about Hope

You may be surprised to see a post from me today because it's not one of my usual blogging days, but April is National Poetry Month, and as in years past, a group of us is marking the occasion by sharing poetry every Thursday this month. Kym is our fearless leader, and you'll also find posts from Bonny, Kat, and Vera this month. 

Each Thursday, we have a theme. Today's is (as you might guess) "Poems about Hope." Hope is always something important to have, but I think it's never more important than during times of uncertainty. At this time five years ago, when we were stuck at home and had no idea when that would end, I took great comfort from seeing the signs of spring emerging outside during my daily walks. There really is nothing more hopeful than seeing how nature persists in spite of everything, so I think you'll understand why this poem by Ted Kooser spoke so well and so loudly to me.

Dandelion

The first of a year's abundance of dandelions
is this single kernel of bright yellow
dropped on our path by the sun, sensing
that we might need some marker to help us
find our way through life, to find a path
over the snow-flattened grass that was
blade by blade unbending into green,
on a morning early in April, this happening
just at the moment I thought we were lost
and I'd stopped to look around, hoping
to see something I recognized. And there
it was, a commonplace dandelion, right
at my feet, the first to bloom, especially
yellow, as if pleased to have been the one,
chosen from all the others, to show us the way.

From How to Love the World: Poems of Gratitude and Hope, edited by James Crews (c) 2021, Storey Publishing

Unraveled, Week 22/2025

It's been a wild few days here. On Sunday, our ovens died (and this is after we'd just replaced them several years ago), and that foiled some baking plans and made dinner prep a bit complicated. Then, after a warmer weekend that encouraged pretty much every living thing outside to bloom, we go a return of winter yesterday, though at least the sun came out for the afternoon. It's supposed to be wet off and on for the foreseeable future, but I guess that I should expect that now that it's April! And it's Wednesday, which means it's time to join in with Kat and the Unravelers.

On my long to-do list over the weekend was to swatch for handspun sweater, which I started but didn't manage to complete until Monday. The one benefit of the weather turning colder is that it meant the radiators came back on, so after washing it Monday afternoon, it was dry by Tuesday. Even better? My stitch gauge looks pretty much spot on and row gauge isn't off so much that I can't make it work.

I was undecided about how to use the two skeins of yarn (two different colorways from Southern Cross Fibre with slightly different fiber content), but I think I am just going to use them both the whole way through the sweater and alternate every two rounds for micro-stripes. I'd thought about fading from one to the other, but then I couldn't decide which one I wanted to be on top. I'm getting 9.5 rounds per inch, so each stripe is going to be less than a quarter inch in width, and I think I'll get a nice blending effect. And if I've knit a bit and it looks terrible, I'll just rip and start over!

My top priority at the moment, though, is finishing up my sister-in-law's socks, which are on the home stretch:

I prefer knitting with long circulars, but it makes for awkward photography.

I expect that I should be able to get the second sock finished later this week, and I'll be seeing her on Saturday and can give them to her then as a belated birthday gift.

After my eyes uncrossed after reading all those names last week, I got some good reading time in last week.

Remember how I recently reread Jane Austen's Mansfield Park? The reason is because I wanted to refresh my memory of the story ahead of reading This Motherless Land, which is a retelling rather than a modern update. It follows the lives of two cousins over several decades. First, we meet Funke in Nigeria. The daughter of a Nigerian father and a (white) British mother, she hears stories about the magical house in England where her mother grew up and is content with her life. When a great tragedy happens, she is sent to that house to live, only to discover that it's old and dilapidated and full of unfriendly relatives, especially her aunt, who is intensely bitter about how her life has turned out after her sister left. The one bright spot is Funke's cousin, Liv, who is nearly the same age and is desperate to be her friend and protector. The two become inseparable as they grow up, only to be split apart by an accident that sends Funke away from the place she had begun to think of as home. We see how the two cousins reconcile the split and the choices they make with the lives they've been given in the aftermath, all the while trying to come to grips with who they are and what makes a place home. While I found the connections to Mansfield Park to be slight, it's an enjoyable story that comments on race, class, and culture. I gave it 4 stars.

I expected How to Read a Book to be a bit "women's fiction"-y, but I was surprised by its emotion and depth. This novel follows three main characters: Violet, a woman in her early 20s who is in prison for manslaughter; Harriet, a retired English teacher now running a book club in Violet's prison; and Frank, the widower of the woman Violet killed. When Violet is released from prison and find her family cannot forgive her, she tries to make a new life in Portland, Maine. In a bookstore, the three meet by accident, and that meeting changes the trajectory of all their lives. I wouldn't call this heavy reading, but it does address issues like grief, forgiveness, and life after incarceration -- and, as the title suggests, it emphasizes the power of books. Interestingly, both this book and This Motherless Land feature grey African parrots, which was an amazing coincidence! I listened to this one and found it easy to follow. I gave it 4 stars as well.

Finally, the real star of this past week's reading: The History of Sound is a collection of short stories set in New England over the course of several centuries. They are connected in an interesting way, with each story having another that pairs with it. This isn't to say that the stories in each pair have the same characters or even take place in the same time period; there's just some way they're connected. And the stories are beautifully written and inventive. I think one of my favorites (or at least, in my view, the most original) is an imagined transcript of an episode of the podcast Radiolab, so well done that I showed the first page to my husband and then played him the intro to the podcast so he could appreciate it as well. I savored these stories over about a week, but the whole collection is a pretty quick read. I also found each and every story to be satisfying, which is saying a lot; my biggest complaint about short stories is that I often feel I want more when I finish them, and few collections I've read have been this satisfying. I'm so glad that I bought myself a copy of this book rather than waiting for it from the library, and I'm passing it along to my parents next. I gave it 5 stars.

What are you making and reading this week?

Less in 2025: March

I probably sound like a broken record, but I really do feel like this month has flown by and I'm a bit shocked that this is the last day of March! It feels fitting, though, that the final Monday of the month is also the final day of the month and thus time to do my One Little Word reflection. Thank you to Kat for hosting our monthly link-ups!

When I picked Less as my OLW for this year, the main thing on my mind was having less stuff. Yarn and fiber were certainly top of mind, but in general I have been feeling a need to simplify my life in terms of the stuff I have in my house that isn't used.

A big category of that stuff is clothes. Now that I'm no longer going into the office every day (and now that our dress code at work seems to have gotten a bit more casual), there's a lot of office wear that's just not getting worn. On top of that, I've still got a lot of clothing from my heavier days that's too big. I'm trying to go through my closet and drawers regularly to pull out items that aren't being used so that they can be put back into use somewhere else. I've got a three-fold plan for these things:

1. Items that are high quality and in good shape get sent to ThredUp. I've been sending them stuff for a couple of years now, since Kym first put the site on my radar. I've made a little extra money, nothing huge, but I like the idea that clothes are finding new life in someone else's closet or being recycled responsibly.
2. Items that are cheaper but still in good shape get donated to places like Goodwill or the Free Store.
3. Items that are stained, torn, worn out, or generally low quality I take to drop in a bin at work for textile recycling. They'll even take my worn-out shoes!

I think you all know by now that I've been actively trying to reduce the size of my stash, which means using what I have and not buying more in general. But one area where I'm feeling particularly overwhelmed is my handspun. Every time I go into my stash to try to find a specific skein of handspun, I find more skeins I've forgotten about. So I think I'm going to open an Etsy store again. I don't love Etsy because they nickel-and-dime you, but there aren't really any alternatives that will take care of shipping and taxes and all that (and I don't have the time or energy to try to set up my own site with all of that integrated). I had an Etsy store several years ago, but I'm going to rebrand and start over. Molly has gotten quite good at using Canva, so she's helping me with a logo. And at some point I'll have to take ALL the handspun out, organize it, and start photographing and putting it up. There are so many skeins that I enjoyed spinning but that I just don't feel like I need to use, so if someone else will, I'll be happy to pass them along. I'll let you know when that's all set up, just in case you're interested (no pressure!).

I'm sure I'll be coming back to this same theme for Less throughout the year, and we'll see just how much I can clear out of the house by the end of it!

A Change in Plans

I'm always happy to see Friday come around again, but I'm especially happy today. It's been a tiring week. Remember how I told you that commencement lists were due? One of them was 46 pages long. That's 46 pages of names that I had to make sure were in alphabetical order. It's not hard, but it is rather mind numbing. I'm very happy that's done with for another year and I won't have to do it again until the fall, when we put together the December commencement program.

Thank you for all the compliments on my wee chicken! I'm most definitely contemplating another one, at some point, at a tighter gauge. I like the size, but I can also see the stuffing through the fabric a bit. Plus I'm thinking of how to add some stitches to make seaming easier. And I'll definitely be rewriting the pattern before I use it again because even the third time through, there were certain ways the instructions were worded that tripped me up.

While I didn't have a list or a definite idea of what I was going to cast on next, my acceptance to SSK* has caused me to shift my plans a bit, at least for the next month or so. One of the signature perks of the event is that they always have a ton of door prizes. You can win prizes by putting tickets in for the items you're interested in, and you can earn extra tickets for things like participating in knitalongs/makealongs prior to the event and earn more for using yarn from vendors or handspun. At least since I've been attending, the patterns you can make are ones designed by the teachers at that year's events, with one featured for a set length of time leading up to the retreat. Through the end of March, the featured designer is Rosemary "Romi" Hill. I knew I didn't have much time to make anything, so I went for small projects.

This is the washcloth from Romi's Silvermist Bath Set (Ravelry link). I made two to ensure I had used at least 100 yards (you get one ticket for every 100 yards you use), and the red/purple one is handspun -- it's cotton from HipStrings! It was actually the very first -- and, to date, only -- cotton I've spun, and it's very uneven and highly textured, but I think it works quite well for a washcloth. The white (which is plain-old Sugar 'n Cream) shows the pattern better, obviously.

Starting April 1, the featured designer is Carina Spencer (Ravelry link), and I'm planning to knit two of her patterns. First is a top I've wanted to make for a while, Sugar Maple (Ravelry link). I pulled these two skeins of handspun to use:

Both are from Southern Cross Fibre. The one on the left is a blend of superfine merino and silk; the one on the right is merino and rose fiber. Both feel smooth and cool to the touch, so I think they'll be good for a tee. I haven't decided yet if I'm going to stripe them or start with one and fade into the other. I'm open to ideas! I'll likely wind these up and start swatching this weekend so I'll be ready to cast on next week.

I'm also going to make another Zuzu's Petals (Ravelry link) -- I made one years ago -- using this yarn that I spun from batts I won at SSK in 2023, bringing it full circle:

We have a fairly quiet weekend ahead, with a bar mitzvah to attend tomorrow (the son of one of the Mister's high school friends) and our usual family dinner on Sunday. I'm hoping to get some dedicated reading time in this weekend, given how little there has been during the week. And it's supposed to get warmer, after we had another cold snap and even some snow flurries this week, so perhaps I'll get out to walk.

I hope you have a great weekend, whatever you have planned, and I'll see you back here on Monday with my One Little Word reflection for the month (I can't believe how March has flown by)!

*Pam's comment on Monday reminded me that not everyone knows the acronyms I tend to throw around and I should probably explain. SSK stands for Super Summer Knitogether. It's an annual fiber arts retreat in Nashville, Tennessee, hosted by Leslie and Laura of TheKnitGirllls. This will be my third year attending; I previously went in 2017 and 2023.

Unraveled, Week 21/2025

Bock bock! I'm in a "fowl" mood this Wednesday as I join with Kat and the Unravelers -- with a finished chicken!

Pattern: Emotional Support Chicken by Annette Corsino
Yarn: Fibernymph Dye Works Mountain Tweed BFL in Signature Series: Neutrals (approximately 114 yds./26 g used) and FDW Bounce in two purples and yellow (approximately 28 yds./7 g used), plus a small amount of black leftovers
Needles: US 2/2.75 mm
Started/Completed: March 20/March 24
Mods: omitted wattle

This is now the third ESC I've knit, and it might just be the cutest! I figured that because my nephew has one, my niece needed one as well, and with Passover and Easter both coming up, it felt even more appropriate. She's not quite old enough to really be into stuffed animals just yet, though, so I thought a chick would be better than the full-sized chicken. I didn't do anything to adapt the pattern other than use lighter yarn and smaller needles.

The leftover yarn from Molly's socks ended up being pretty perfect for a chicken -- the purple stripes and yellow for the beak were added in manually, but all the other color changes are just the tweed yarn. I still have a good amount leftover, so I very well may have had enough to do the entire chicken in it, but I still rather like the purple stripes for some added flair. I embroidered the eyes rather than use safety eyes; frankly I thought the safety eyes I have would have been comically large on this smaller bird, if not downright scary. I also omitted the poly pellets I usually put in the bottom of the body (in a sewn bag).

Here you can see the new chick with my chicken for a sense of scale. I think I could even stand to knit one on smaller needles (US 0 or US 1) for a mini chicken -- one day. I'm a bit chickened out for now.

I'm still working on my sister-in-law's socks, though there's not that much more knitting to show. I'll have a better update on Friday.

Reading! I have added three titles to my "read" list this week, though two were so short they hardly seem like they should count!

I was very impressed by Leila Mottley's debut novel, Nightcrawling, so when I received an invitation to read and review her new novel, I was quite interested to see where she would go next. In The Girls Who Grew Big, Mottley takes her readers to the opposite side of the country, the tiny town of Padua Beach, Florida, and introduces them to three young women all dealing with pregnancy. Simone, the oldest, is already the mother to 4-year-old twins, who she is raising in a red pickup truck after being kicked out by her parents and has recently discovered she is pregnant again by the twins' father. Emory is a high school senior with a 9-month-old son who is realizing that having a baby has not brought her life the meaning she thought it would. Adela is 16 and has been sent to live with her grandmother until she gives birth because of her parents' shame. These three are among the girls and young women who have come together to support each other in the middle of community that judges them but also offers them little to no help.

My thoughts on this novel are conflicted. On the one hand, the writing is powerful, and Mottley shows that her debut was not a fluke. On the other hand, I didn't understand how Simone, for instance, was able to make ends meet (she's living in a truck, but somehow still manages to party with her group?). I also often found myself exasperated with these three young women and the poor choices they repeatedly made -- though I also have to wonder if that wasn't the author's point. They are, after all, still children and are being forced into very adult decisions and responsibilities, and I suppose I was judging them as much as the adults in their lives were. Perhaps Mottley is asking us to suspend our disbelief in these particular characters a bit to see the bigger picture: that girls and women who find themselves pregnant often have few, if any, options and are often shamed by others no matter what decisions they make. I gave it 3 stars.
Thank you to NetGalley and Knopf for providing me with a digital ARC of this book in return for an honest review. This book will be published June 24, 2025.

Last Thursday, when I was off from work, Molly and I took a trip to the main branch of our library system to see if they had any books she could use for her history research paper. She didn't find anything, but at long as we were there, I poked around in the nonfiction section and came home with two books by Ted Kooser, who many of you have been talking about lately. First I read Lights on a Ground of Darkness, which is a short memoir of sorts (I think it was originally published as a long essay) about his mother's family, how they came to live in Iowa, and his memories of his interactions with them when he was a child. This is a beautiful, quiet remembrance, with the writing very clearly that of a poet. It's very short, at only about 70 pages, but I took two days to read it to savor it. I gave it 4 stars.

Those of you who are already familiar with Kooser as a poet likely also know that, for more than two decades, he sent out a poem on postcards for Valentine's Day, first to friends and later to women across the country. His collection Valentines contains all the poems, each one paired with a beautiful black-and-white illustration by artist Robert Hanna. Even though I tried to read these slowly and deliberately, I read through them all in one sitting (though I'll admit I took photos of a handful so I could continue to enjoy them after I returned the book to the library). This was my first experience with his poetry, other than a small selection some of you have shared on your blogs, but it won't be my last. I gave this collection 4 stars.

I am currently reading This Motherless Land, a modern retelling of Jane Austen's Mansfield Park (hence why I reread it recently), and I've just started The History of Sound, which I ended up buying because it was only available as an audiobook (with a long wait) via Libby and the hard copies at the library were checked out.

What are you making and reading this week?

Deep Breath Before the Rush

Good morning and happy Monday, friends. I am bracing myself for a busy week -- commencement lists are due to me today, which means I'm in for a week of reading page after page of names that I have to ensure are in alphabetical order. It turns out that the end of last week was an excellent time to take a couple of days off before things get hectic again, and even though it wasn't a terribly exciting long weekend, it was restful, and that was much needed. Molly and I enjoyed the bonus time together, and I'm looking forward to having her around the house for one more week.

I spent most of my knitting time this weekend working on a chicken.

I call this the "spatchcocked" phase of the project.

The yarn leftover from Molly's socks turns out to be pretty perfect for knitting a bird and is working out very nicely to give some variation to the fabric without having to get too fancy with other yarns. I'll be using the lighter purple for the feathers on top of the chicken's head and yellow for the beak. I'm also going to be embroidering the eyes rather than using safety eyes, both in the interest of safety and because I think the safety eyes might look a little demonic because of the smaller scale of the project. I'm not doing anything different with the pattern other than using fingering weight yarn and size 2 needles. I'll be sure to share a photo of this when it's finished alongside my regularly sized chicken so you can get a sense of scale.

While chicken knitting has been enjoyable, there's not all that much left of it and it's not something I can do while reviewing lists of names, so I needed to cast on something fairly mindless. As it happens, today is my other sister-in-law's birthday, and I would have started these earlier had I remembered that before this weekend, but it is what it is. Unlike the SIL I just finished socks for, this one has very large feet (9.5 inches long and 9.25 inches around), so I typically stick to ankle socks for her.

The label is a little hard to read, but these are being knit out of Knit Picks Felici in the colorway Space Disco (isn't that a great name?). I'm going to knit probably a couple inches of cuff and then start the heel, and I'll do the whole foot in stockinette. I last knit her socks about this time last year, also out of Felici, and did the same thing.

I've saved the best news about the long weekend for last: Just as we were getting ready to head out the door for our haircuts on Friday, my phone pinged with an email notifying me that I'd gotten in off the waitlist to SSK! I yelled for Molly to tell her, and the poor girl thought I was yelling at her because we were running late! Needless to say, once I told her what was up, she was very excited. We've now booked flights and a place to stay (the on-site housing has been full since January, so I reserved a Vrbo that's literally across the street from the retreat center). The event begins on a Wednesday evening, but we are flying in midday on Tuesday so that we can have a bit of time for some extra sightseeing. Neither of us is really a country music fan, but one of us is a devoted Swiftie, and apparently the Country Music Hall of Fame houses the Taylor Swift Education Center, so we might have to make a visit. Personally, I'd like to go back to the Parthenon and see the inside. And I wouldn't mind another visit to Parnassus Books, either! We've still got several months to plan and prioritize, but it's so nice to have something big to look forward to.

With that, I'll sign off for now. I will see some of you online tomorrow evening at the Read With Us Zoom, and I'll be back with an update on Wednesday. In the meantime, here's a little hello from Dippy, who hopes you enjoyed the first weekend of spring!

Friday Finishes

Technically, today is the first full day of spring in the Northern Hemisphere, but it sure doesn't feel like it here. A front came through yesterday, bringing rain and wind, and this morning it's back in the 30s. Brrr! At least the sun is out.

I spent my day off yesterday finishing up both of my active projects. I had a little bit of plying left to do on the skein of handspun, so I took care of that right after breakfast and then wound off the skein after my workout. Thanks to the temperature dropping and the heat coming back on, the finished yarn is dry this morning.

As I hoped, it's a fingering weight (mostly; like any handspun, there's some variation) and measuring about 416 yards. It's also very bouncy and stretchy, which is pretty typical for Targhee. And I've already pulled out fiber for the next spin, which I'll probably spin the same way:

The lighting isn't great, but can you tell I was in a particular mood when I ordered these?

Yesterday's other finish was my sister-in-law's socks, which required just a bit more knitting on the foot and the toe to get done.

I'm very happy with how these turned out, and I can't imagine my sister-in-law won't be anything but thrilled with them (she's incredibly knitworthy). These will be getting a wash and then will be packed away until her birthday in September.

Of course I couldn't leave my needles empty after I finished the socks, so I have started my niece's Emotional Support Chicken:

I'm really enjoying how this yarn is becoming feathers! I'm also interested to see how big the chicken ends up being given that I'm using fingering weight yarn and size 2/2.75 mm needles.

On tap for today, other than the usual stuff (working out, cleaning the bathroom, doing laundry), are haircuts for both of us. My hairdresser always jokes that I only manage to get in to see her once a year, but Molly has informed me that we were last there in May, so it's been less than a year this time! I need to chop a couple of inches off -- I'm at that stage where my hair is getting caught in everything -- and Molly's hoping for some layers that will show off her curls. Tomorrow, we have an appointment to apply for her new passport. She got her first one back in 2019, when we were planning to travel abroad in 2020, but it's since expired. We've decided that we're finally going to take that trip next spring, probably right after the end of the school year, so we're getting all our ducks in a row now. I'm also looking forward to sleeping in the next two days; even though I've taken two days off from work, I've still gotten up with my usual alarm.

Here's hoping it's a good weekend for all of you!