Unraveled, Week 50/2024

Week 50! The end of this year is getting awfully close! But Wednesday keeps coming around reliably every week, and this week, as always, I'm joining the fun with Kat and the Unravelers. This Wednesday, there's more gnome fun:

Pattern: Never Not Gnoming, largest size (Gnorbert), by Sarah Schira
Yarn: Fibernymph Dye Works Bona Fide in OOAK (blue) and Teddy Bear (brown) and Lion Brand Baby Soft in White
Needles: US 3 (3.25 mm) and US 4 (3.5 mm)
Started/Completed: December 6/December 10
Mods: omitted arms

This is the gnome I've been making for my youngest nephew, who's only 19 months old, so I've stuck with the very simplest pattern. I've also eliminated the skinny arms that are called for because I figured he'd just pull them off (his parents are frustrated with his current habit of yanking on and tearing book pages). I had a slight snafu with the needles, discovering only after I finished closing up the body that I was using a US 4 and not a US 2 as I thought (I was trying to knit at a dense gauge so the stuffing wouldn't show through), but I wasn't about to undo it all and start over. I think it's fine. Straightforward, simple, and (in true fashion for me) a little wonky. I just hope my nephew is still into gnomes when he opens this guy!

I've also made some progress on the hat for my oldest nephew, and now that I've moved into the long straight stockinette portion, this should fly.

Funnily enough, I made a snafu with this project as well. This is going to be a double-ended hat, and the idea is to use up as much of the yarn as possible, so I intended to weigh the yarn before and after I finished the crown so I'll know how much I'll need to leave to finish the other end. But guess who forgot to do that? Oops. I did weigh the yarn after I finished the increases and I still had 98 g (meaning my skein was likely more than 100 g to start), so I think I'll just go with about 10 g and hope for the best. Worst case, I can add some scraps if I run short.

I have finished two more books this past week, both good reads.

I had heard about Our Wives Under the Sea on a podcast, but it was one of those books where the person talking about it didn't want to say too much because it would give away a lot of the book. The basic premise is this: Miri is struggling because her wife, Leah, has recently returned home from a work trip in a research submarine that was meant to last three weeks and turned into five months, and Leah no longer seems like the Leah who left on the trip. In alternating chapters, Leah tells the story of what happened on the sub. This book is categorized as horror, which is not a genre I typically read; aside from a few icky body-related things that happen (and which aren't described in detail or at length), this didn't read like horror to me. Rather, there's a building tension as the reader learns more about what happened to Leah and begins to question things. It's intriguing and mysterious and in many ways ambiguous -- and it's very well written. I gave it 4 stars.

Madness: Race and Insanity in Jim Crow Asylum is the first book selected for a new community read effort in my area. I was already interested in reading before I heard about this program, and I was even more excited to get a free copy of it from my local bookstore! It's hard to say that I enjoyed this book, because it deals with some very difficult subjects, but I did find it to be very informative and enlightening. This book looks at the history of mental hospitals through the lens of Crownsville Hospital in Maryland, which was built specifically to house Black patients. The author looks at the history of the hospital and its residents to paint a picture of the impact of systemic racism and connection between mental health care and the criminal justice system. The online blurb about this book connects it to The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, and I'd say that's a good one -- and there's even a direct connection between the two. I gave this book 4 stars; really what kept it from being a 5-star read for me was that I was unable to turn my internal editor off and was just bothered enough by what I felt was poor editing -- sentence fragments that didn't seem to be intentionally included for emphasis, improperly placed commas, etc. I would have made a lot of changes if I had edited this book! But most people likely won't notice this kind of stuff, and the content of the book certainly makes it worth reading.

I'm currently reading the last selection for the small group of us exploring past winners of the Women's Prize for Fiction, The Glorious Heresies, which frankly I'm having trouble getting into but that I am committed to finishing (and I see that Kym enjoyed it, so I'm optimistic!). I'm actually going to miss the Zoom discussion of this one because we'll be flying home from our trip, but seeing as I went to the trouble of buying the book, I might as well read it anyway! I'm also about a quarter of the way through an ARC of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's forthcoming novel, Dream Count.