Unraveled, Week 31/2026

It's Wednesday, so that means it's time to join in with Kat and the Unravelers! This Wednesday finds me with just one knitting WIP (because I did end up finishing the purple hat), and it's the handspun scarf, on which I've now started decreasing:

Apologies for the washed-out photo

I was intending to increase until I'd used just slightly less than half of the yarn, but I realized if I did that, my scarf would be very long, which kind of defeats the purpose of making a little scarf. So I decided to increase until I had 45 stitches in garter stitch (yes, to match my age) and then started decreasing. I'm a bit worried now, though, that maybe I flew past that halfway point. Keep your fingers crossed I don't have to play yarn chicken! I figure the worst-case scenario is that I have to back and reknit, and honestly that wouldn't be so bad -- it's quite lovely to knit with merino/silk handspun!

Speaking of handspun, I'm working on my third bobbin of singles for the merino/silk/angora. I'm hoping to wrap up that spin this week to correspond to the Tour de France Femmes.

Reading! I've got three finished since this time last week.

I really enjoyed The Help, so I was interested in Kathryn Stockett's new novel The Calamity Club -- but I needed some persuading when I saw how long the audio was (28 hours!). I won't bury the lede: It was absolutely worth it, and it also didn't really take that long to listen to because the readers were slow, so I was able to increase the speed to 1.75x. Set in 1933 in Oxford, Mississippi, this novel is told from the point of view of Birdie, an unmarried 20-something woman who is the sole support to her mother and grandmother following the death of her father, and Meg, an 11-year-old living in an orphanage after her mother seemingly abandoned her. Birdie travels to Oxford from her small town to ask her married sister, Frances, for a loan to help pay back taxes when the family home is at risk. But when Frances's husband disappears, along with much of his family's possessions, Birdie has to step up to help Frances and her mother-in-law. Meg, meanwhile, is poorly treated at the orphanage, particularly by the woman in charge of running it, and still doesn't fully believe that her mother left her on purpose. Birdie's volunteer work helping out with the accounting books at the orphanage brings her together with Meg and gives her a personal interest in the girl's future. And when things start to get particularly dire, a woman named Charlie comes into Birdie's life and proposes a solution that seems dangerous and preposterous -- but just might be what will save them all. There are some ugly words used in this book and some ugly ideas, but they're very reflective of the time and aren't used gratuitously. The heart and soul of the novel is its strong female characters -- Meg, Birdie, and Charlie -- who aren't afraid to work hard and make sacrifices to help those they love. They are smart, funny, and fierce, and I really enjoyed spending time with all of them. I gave the book 4 stars.

I'd heard a lot of buzz around The Great Wherever and put it on notify in Libby ahead of its publication. I got really lucky because I happened to be looking at my phone when I got the notification it was available and ended up being the first person in line to get it, and my hold came up just before we left on our trip, so I was able to read it in its entirety over the course of the weekend. It follows Aubrey, a woman in her early 30s who is struggling. She thought her boyfriend was about to propose, but instead he broke up with her. She has multiple jobs that she doesn't like in order to pay her rent but still comes up short. Her mother died when she was just a child and her father only recently passed away. When nothing seems to be going right, she gets an email from family she doesn't know and discovers that she is part owner of a homestead in Tennessee and that she and the others have to contemplate an offer to purchase the property. She flies to meet them and soon learns the full history of the place: how her great-grandfather was one of the first Black homeowners in the area, building the house with his own hands; how the family's history was tied up with that of the wealthy white family who started the town; and how the family had held on to the land all these years in the face of many attempts by others to buy it. Throughout it all, ghosts of members of the family watch over their descendants, occasionally seen by one relative or another and sometimes even managing to avert an action that might prove disastrous. Though Aubrey is the focus, the story is much bigger than her and is a beautifully written illustration of a family that has its struggles and its triumphs. I could not put it down and gave it 5 stars.

And now for something completely different! Glorious Exploits is set in Syracuse, Sicily, during the Peloponnesian War. After a recent battle, a group of Athenian prisoners is being held in a quarry, and two friends, Lampo and Gelon, decide to pass the time by staging a performance of Medea in which the prisoners are the actors -- because while they may hate Athenians, they still love their drama. As they work with the prisoners, they start to see their humanity, and they realize that by getting others to come see the play, perhaps they can do the same. It's a bit wacky, a bit funny, and a bit sad, and it's made a bit weirder by the fact that the author is Irish and the dialogue sounds more at home in modern-day Dublin than ancient Syracuse. Ultimately it's a creative way to show that art is a way to bring people together and help them recognize their similarities in spite of their differences. I gave it 4 stars.

What are you making and reading this week?