Unraveled, Week 3/2025

Happy Wednesday, friends! I am going to need to keep this post relatively brief because today I have the pleasure (ugh) of  attending an all-day work retreat, which I will have to walk to after dropping Molly off at school. It's a tech-free event, too, which means I can't even entertain myself online. But I will be taking knitting with me to stay engaged, and I'll have to catch up on your posts from today later on.

Let's join Kat and the Unravelers for the week, shall we? I've got a bit of an update on my handspun sweater to start us off.

You should feel free to laugh at this photo because it is rather funny and also a bit ridiculous. Because I am knitting with handspun yarn and want the colors to be as mixed up as possible, I am alternating skeins every round. I have three skeins of yarn total, so I started with the first for the collar and joined the second once I had completed the short rows. When it came time to start the first sleeve, I wanted to introduce the third skein so that I'll have enough yarn to continue alternating in the body, but I need to pick up where I left off, so I wasn't about to cut the second skein. At first I just had it off to the side, but pretty quickly all three strands of yarn started to get horribly tangled, so that lump you see in the upper left is the second skein, shoved inside the upper right arm and tied up with some scrap yarn. It's an inelegant solution, but it's working.

I should add that the colors are fairly accurate in this photo, for once! I also love that you can see the subtle single-round stripes. Even though I split up the fiber and spun the little bits of it at random, I'm quite intrigued by the fact that it looks like I'm getting wider stripes of green and purple.

Speaking of random spinning, I finished up the first bobbin of my combo spin yesterday and split up the remaining fiber for the next two bobbins. Here's a shot of all that fiber laid out so you can see the range of colors:

Although it would have been impossible to document each little bit of fiber that was in the pool, it would have been nice to have a master list of all the fibers and dyers that were represented. I might suggest that if I'm ever involved in this kind of thing again.

Last week was so busy at work that I had very little reading time, so I have only managed to finish one book since last Wednesday.

Even though I've been meaning to read Morgan Talty's short story collection for a while now (and even own it on Kindle), I decided to skip ahead to his debut novel, Fire Exit, because Katie had such good things to say about it. She described it as a quiet novel, and I'd agree with that assessment. Much of the book is spend inside the thoughts of the narrator and main character, Charles, who grew up on a reservation in Maine because his stepfather was a member of the tribe, though Charles and his mother are not. Now a middle-aged man, he is reflecting on his childhood and his stepfather's death as he cares for his mother, who long struggled with depression and is now dealing with dementia, and as he worries about his daughter, who doesn't know he's her father. Charles reflects on keeping secrets and the value of knowing your family history. Not all that much happens until something very dramatic and emotional does. This book is full of flawed characters who you can't help but root for. I gave it 4 stars.

I am currently reading Same as It Ever Was, which I picked up at a Free Little Library in the neighborhood in the fall, and am about 100 pages in (I'm reading it before bed, so it's slow going).

I've also put together that big list of books I have on hand that I've been talking about for a while -- if I've figured out how to share it correctly, you can see it here. I won't say this is a complete list of all the books I have, but they're the ones I own that I have not yet read and am interested in reading that I could find. I know it looks like a lot, so before you worry about my bank account, I'll note that a large portion of them were picked up at Free Little Libraries, passed along to me by others, or purchased from a used bookstore/Thriftbooks or on Kindle deals. Some of them have also been on my shelves for many years. As you can see, I've got quite a lot of books to choose from! I'm hoping to make a dent in this list over the course of the year, and I'll report back from time to time.