Weekending, Late April

Can you believe this is the last week of April? It's been such a strange month of weather; we've had to keep alternating between air conditioning and heat in a way I can't remember doing before. After several glorious days of sun to end last week, it was rainy for most of Saturday and then much cooler on Sunday, making for two days I was happy to be inside curled up next to a snoozing pup.

We truly didn't do much over the weekend, in part because it had been such a busy week. The Mister worked from home Thursday and Friday (his office is right near where the NFL Draft was happening, and he didn't want to deal with all that craziness). I picked Molly and her friend up early on Friday so they could go down to Point State Park and hand out flower seeds to visitors. Her friend's father picked them up and then we all went out to dinner. Molly was so worn out from the week that she fell asleep on top of her bed shortly after taking her shower, with her hair still up in a towel! We all stayed home pretty much all day on Saturday (I went for a walk and took Ruthie out, obviously), and we got takeout and had my in-laws over for dinner. Yesterday Molly worked, I did a Costco run, and we had a lazy afternoon. I may have taken a little snooze as well, as some-puppy decided to wake me up at 5:45 (but I wasn't too upset because I slept until almost 7 on Saturday!).

My big accomplishment of the weekend was finishing the last of the Mother's Day socks:

I essentially used my regular sock recipe for these, though upsized to 80 stitches rather than my usual 68. This sister-in-law has feet that are the same length as mine but at least an inch wider. Usually I make her ankle socks, but as this yarn was more of a light fingering, I though I'd make them a little taller. I'm hoping they fit!

Because those socks were my knitting for while Ruthie naps, I obviously needed to cast on something else right away, so I wound a skein of DK and started a hat for my brother:

This is one of the skeins that came in my recent Fibernymph Dye Works grab bag; the colorway is called Gnome Place Like Home. A gnome-themed color naturally made me think of my brother, so a hat for him it had to be. I'm using the Two by Two pattern (Ravelry link), which I've knit a couple of times before, and at this stage it's pretty mindless -- just 2x2 ribbing. I do that for something like 9 inches and then work decreases, so this should keep me occupied for a while.

This week things should be pretty normal: the Mister is in town, Molly has her last week of school with new content in her classes (next week they'll start reviewing for finals), and the city will resume normal operation now that the draft is over. The weather isn't looking so great -- cooler highs and lots of rain -- but I'll take that over sweating like it's the middle of summer. It's also the final week before commencement, so I'll be keeping my fingers crossed that we have no last-minute shenanigans to deal with! I hope it's a calm week for you as well.

Unraveled, Week 1/2025

Happy New Year! Somehow the start of the year falling smack dab in the middle of the week feels right -- we all know by now that time is just a human construct, and certainly I didn't feel any measurable difference upon waking up this morning compared to any other morning (my first thought, after going to the bathroom, was "I need coffee").

That said, it is nice to start the counter over again on my Unraveled Wednesday posts, and it's also nice to join Kat and the Unravelers for another year. I did not stay up until midnight last night, but I did stay up long enough to finish one last project for the year:

This is my Same as It Ever Was pattern (Ravelry link), worked at a looser gauge than given in the pattern (adding the guidance for how to do that to the pattern is high on this year's to-do list), using Fibernymph Dye Works Bounce in the This Day We Fight colorway. My skein was a bit overweight, as Lisa's usually are, and I used all but 1 g of the yarn, or 420 yards. It's not blocked yet, obviously, but I'll take care of that when we get home and then put it in a pile for charity. These are not colors I really wear, not to mention that I already have plenty of hand-knit hats to wear, but I know it will make someone smile and keep them warm, plus the yarn purchase supports a good cause.

Now I'm down to just the one project here, so we'll see how much sweater I get knit in the next several days.

As is typical for this time of year, when I'm on vacation and don't have any work reading to do, I've gotten a lot of reading for pleasure done and finished four books in the last week!

My mother was finishing up The Wedding People when we came down, so when she finished it, she handed it to me. Phoebe is 40, her husband has just left her for a friend after a series of failed IVF attempts, and her career is going nowhere. Despondent, she decides to book a luxury room at a hotel in Newport, Rhode Island, to commit suicide. But when she gets there, she discovers she's the only person staying at the hotel who is not there for a lavish wedding week, and she soon gets sucked into the festivities. As a result of her involvement with the bride, the groom, and their friends and families, she realizes that maybe her life isn't as bad as it seems and maybe what she's thought she wanted wasn't really what she wanted all along. It's funny, sad, touching, and a bit ridiculous, but a thoroughly enjoyable read (despite a very obvious typo I found). I gave it 4 stars.

I had a pretty long library wait for the most recent Inspector Gamache book, but my hold came up just as I was ready to start a new book (don't you love it when that happens?). The Grey Wolf finds Gamache, Beauvoir, and Lacoste racing against time and unsure who can be trusted when they uncover a plot to contaminate Montreal's water with a neurotoxin that will kill thousands and send the country into political turmoil. There are the usual moments of levity, but this is a tight, tense thriller, and most of the tension comes not from the potential impact of the plot but from Gamache's constant doubts. Who can be trusted? Who is telling the truth? Are his suspicions valid, or is he being paranoid? I very much enjoyed it, with the possible exception of the big cliffhanger at the end and the fact that we have to wait almost 10 months until we get the next book. I gave it 4 stars.

I can't remember where, exactly, I first heard about I Who Have Never Known Men, but I was so intrigued by the description and kept thinking about it so much that I ended up buying a Kindle copy because I didn't want to wait for it from the library. This is a tight, tense little novel in which not much happens but so many questions are raised. Our unnamed narrator is a young teenager when the book opens, and she is the youngest of 40 women being held in a cage in an underground bunker that is guarded by men who never talk but who wield whips for punishment. None of the women remembers much about how they got there or why the narrator was kept with them. One day, an alarm sounds and the guards disappear at the precise moment the cage door was being opened to wheel in a meal, and the women are able to escape. But once they are out of the bunker, they have even more questions. Where did the guards go, and how? Are they the only ones alive on Earth? Are they even on the earth, or is this another planet? Over the years that follow, they are able to answer some but not all of the questions as they explore their surroundings, build homes, and age. Eventually our narrator is the last woman left alive, and we learn that the story we are reading is an account of her life that she has written as she nears death. This book was originally published in 1995. The author and her family fled Belgium when the Nazis invaded in WWII, and it's not difficult to see this book as an allegory for someone trying to establish their humanity when an enemy power was seeking to dehumanize them. I wouldn't recommend this book if you're someone who doesn't like ambiguity or an untidy ending, but it's one of those books that I know I'll be thinking about for a long time. I gave it 5 stars.

My last finish for the year was Colored Television. Jane is a 40-something biracial English professor on sabbatical from her teaching job as she tries to finish sophomore novel, now a decade in the works, while she and her painter husband and two kids move from one temporary home to another. When her novel is rejected by her agent and publisher, she is left reeling and wondering who she is if she's not a novelist. In an desperate moment, she calls the agent of the friend whose house she's staying in and steals his idea for a TV show based on biracial characters. Everything seems to be going well -- until it's not. I found myself getting a little frustrated with Jane and the increasingly desperate decisions she made, but I also wonder if I was maybe not the target audience for this book. I also wonder how much of this book is auto-fiction; Danzy Senna is a biracial novelist who is married to Percival Everett. While the real-life authors clearly aren't struggling to make a living like her characters are, the internal struggle over identity felt genuine, and I certainly identified with that even if I couldn't identify with the racial questions. I gave the book 3 stars.

I got another library hold last night after returning this one last book, but I decided to wait to start fresh today. Here's to another year of good reading and good crafting!

Feels Like Fall

Though we're due to have highs in the upper 80s later in the week, this past weekend felt decidedly fall-like. We had some much-needed rain overnight on Friday, with some lingering sprinkles and a chilly breeze on Saturday morning. And it was in the mid-40s when we got up on Sunday! But the sun came out both days and warmed things up enough.

On Saturday morning, the Mister had to go help a friend with some computer/internet stuff, so Molly (she's said I can now use her full name on the blog!) and I went to the art festival and met up with my brother, sister-in-law, and nephew. There was a lot of good stuff to see -- including my high school U.S. history teacher, who retired from teaching a couple of years ago and now makes jewelry! I did find the potter I was looking for and picked up a couple of pieces:

The lighting isn't doing these pieces any justice, but it was the best of several attempts. The one on the left is a spoon rest; I accidentally broke the one we had several months ago, and we'd been making do ever since with some silicone ones the Mister found on Amazon. This sweet one with the goldfinch is so much nicer and coordinates with the mug I already had (it has the same branches and leaves without any birds). The one on the right is a small-ish serving platter, about the right size for a wedge of cheese and some crackers or clusters of grapes or a selection of cookies, for example. I have quite a few large serving platters but very few smaller ones, and I thought this was such a pretty design.

We also found an artist who makes some really gorgeous batik pieces and bought a couple prints:

The photographer was slanted, not the artwork.

Molly loved the one on the left, so we will likely find a frame for it and put it in her room. I picked the one on the right -- definitely click the photo to enlarge it so that you can see that those lines in the top two-thirds of the image are tree trunks!

Much of my crafting time over the weekend was spent at my wheel, and I have two finished bobbins of singles to show for it:

This was a pretty quick spin, one in which I wasn't too concerned about consistency or smoothness (though I did pull out some of the add-ins when they were too bulky or rough). I have no idea what weight of yarn this will ply to or how much I will have, but it doesn't really matter; this is an instance of spinning the yarn that the fiber wanted to be and then finding a suitable pattern to go with it.

I also came into some new yarn this weekend. Now, you all know that I've been trying to work from stash whenever possible, and I've actually bought very little yarn in the past year or so. But I suddenly have a lot of baby gifts to knit, and as Molly has used up nearly all of my solid and semisolid partial skeins and leftovers in the scrappy granny square blanket she's been crocheting, I did have much suitable on hand. Fortuitously, Lisa of Fibernymph Dye Works was running an end-of-summer sale last week, so I ordered three skeins of DK in baby-suitable semisolid shades. The order was placed Wednesday afternoon, it was in the mail by Thursday, and it was delivered Friday evening. Occasionally the USPS does something right!

In addition to knitting for my niece, I have a coworker expecting a baby around the same time, I still haven't knit anything for a cousin who just had a baby this summer (I sent a board book about Andy Warhol because I didn't have anything on hand to knit at the time), and some of our neighbors also recently had a baby. For the sake of simplicity and speed, I expect all will be getting hats, which will also leave me some of these three skeins for future needs.

I expect the big work project to return this week (though apparently it's being cut in length by about half), and I also have Curriculum Night at Molly's school to look forward to on Thursday evening. I'll be continuing to work on the lace baby blanket whenever possible, and with any luck, I'll get to ply those singles in the next couple of days. Have a good start to your week, and see you back here on Wednesday!

Unraveled, Week 4/2024

Greetings from a very gloomy Wednesday morning here in Pittsburgh. The good news is that we finally got above freezing after a stretch of frigid weather. The bad news is that rain is in the forecast for the foreseeable future, so there's not much sun to be seen.

It's Wednesday, so that means it's time to link up with Kat and the Unravelers and give you an update on my making and reading. I've decided that after my success with the sweater, I should give the same sort of attention to my other WIPs from 2023, so I pulled out this shawl:

This is my Mas Vida shawl, which I cast on way back in June and thought I would whip up in no time. I got a lot of it knit when I was in Nashville in July and then it just sat. Last night I pulled it out again, added a few repeats, and finally got to the point where I will stop increasing and start decreasing. I'm using some really lovely yarn (a merino/cashmere/silk from Fibernymph Dye Works) that will be a delight to have around my neck, so I think I have sufficient motivation to get this done soon.

I've also got a new spin going, the July 2023 Southern Cross Fibre club shipment. It's called Bloom and is on a decadent 70% superfine Merino/30% mulberry silk base. I've decided to do a chain-ply, so I split the fiber into four narrow strips that I'm spinning in succession. The lack of light won't cooperate to allow me to share a decent photo of the singles, but here is the fiber:

In keeping with last year's trend of a high percentage of audiobooks, I've finished two in the last week.

The first of these is Family Family, which was just published yesterday. If there's an overarching theme of this book, it's that families come in so many different forms and can be created in so many different ways, and no one form or one way is inherently the "right" way. There are so many assumptions about adoption, many of them involving implied trauma, and this book sets out to show that's not always the case.

The story is told in alternating timelines, one in near-present day and one one in the main character's past, slowly working toward the present. India Allwood is an a teenager aspiring to life as a professional actress when she finds herself pregnant, ultimately deciding that placing her child for adoption will allow someone else's dreams of being a parent come true. In the present, she has just found herself in the middle of a controversy over comments she has make about her most recent role, in which she's a mother who was so traumatized by giving up a child for adoption that she's become addicted to drugs. As we learn more about India's past, we learn more about why she signed on for the role in the first place, why she was dissatisfied with the message it sent, and how complicated families can be -- whether they're biological or adoptive. I gave it 4 stars.

I received an audio ARC of this book from MacMillan Audio/Henry Holt & Company and NetGalley in return for an honest review.

Brotherless Night was a recommendation from Kat during the Read With Us discussion of The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida. Like Seven Moons, it takes place during the long civil war in Sri Lanka, though this novel is much less experimental in its storytelling. It is told by Sashi, a teenager aspiring to become a doctor when the story opens, and follows her through the next decade or so. She tells us this story from later in life as though it were a memoir, and we learn about the tragedies and struggles to befall her Tamil family, including her four brothers. It is a heartbreaking story and a reminder that war is a tragedy on all sides, with blame and atrocities to be found everywhere. I appreciated the audio in helping me with pronunciations, but I also found it a little tricky to keep track of all the characters, and the narrator also had a somewhat strange habit of phrasing things such that she seemed to put a period in the middle of sentences that tripped me up a bit. But overall, I found it to be a really powerful and impactful read. I gave it 4 stars.

I am still working my way through The Poisonwood Bible, though I'm more than halfway through now, and I've just started another audiobook, Monsters.

What are you making and reading this week?

And Relax!

Greetings from southwest Florida! It's a bit chilly for the location (currently 64ºF) but sunny, and I'll be headed out for a run soon to see how far I can go without having to deal with hills or much in the way of traffic.

We arrived, amazingly, on time on Saturday evening after a very bumpy flight down. There was so much turbulence that the flight attendants only managed to get up once to give out water and bags of snack mix because the captain kept telling them to sit down and buckle up. I am very thankful that Mo decided to try taking Dramamine on this trip (she often gets terrible headaches when we fly), and she actually ended up sleeping about half the flight and felt fine for the part that she was awake. Although I started a new pair of socks in the car on the way to the airport, I didn't end up knitting on the flight much of all, in part because of nerves and in part because I had a teenager leaning on my arm. But I got a bit more done on them yesterday, so I can share them with you:

This is the yarn I won from Lisa at Fibernymph Dye Works that she custom-dyed for me. I'd told her two colors I liked (blue and gold) and one color I didn't want in my skein (white/undyed), and this is what she came up with. I'm not in any rush to finish these socks, but I figured it would be good to have something easy and mindless for when we're out and about.

There were a couple of things I'd wanted to finish before we left, but I only managed one of them because I ended up getting a ton of work thrown my way on Friday (which isn't needed until we're back in January, so I'm not sure why there was such urgency). What was finished was all the mini skeins, which you saw plied but not yet all washed and tidied. I was able to throw the second half in to wash on Friday, and as they were dry Saturday morning, I measured them and twisted up all 24:

I am still showing the photo in black and white until all 24 days have passed, as I'd really hate to spoil anyone. My yarn looks to be overall in the neighborhood of sport weight, and I have approximately 700 yards total, which is really quite impressive. I'm thinking that these would make a great cozy shawl, so perhaps in the new year they'll get knit.

The project I didn't get a chance to finish (but which was wrapped up rather quickly yesterday morning) is the charity hat:

Though I did follow the pattern for the numbers, I ended up doing the brim completely differently the second time. The pattern has you work the brim using what is essentially single-color double-knitting: you slip every other stitch every round. It looks nice and creates fabric with a double thickness, but it doesn't stretch. At all. So for the second attempt, I did a provisional cast-on, knit until I had four inches of fabric, folded it up on the inside, and created a hem by undoing the provisional cast-on one stitch at a time and knitting it together with a stitch on the needle. The brim was technically supposed to be four inches, but as that meant I would have had to knit eight inches, I decided to make it half the length. I used up some mini skeins and some leftovers, about 450 yards total, holding the yarn double. This is going into the charity pile.

Although I still have to knit a gnome (and I may very well wait until the full pattern is out to start), my main focus for my vacation knitting is finishing up languishing WIPs. Specifically, I want to make a lot of progress on my Birch pullover, which I had not touched since Mo and I were in Florida for spring break. But I weighed and wound off yarn for the sleeves before we left so that I can blend the skeins on the entire sweater, and I have picked up the body again.

If you click to enlarge the photo, you'll see my mermaid progress keeper (though she's upside-down here) marking where I was when I started knitting again last night. I think I managed about an inch while we were watching "The Sound of Music" on TV -- which is really more knitting than you'd think because this sweater is knit in fisherman's rib, which is quite condensed vertically. Now that I've sorted the yarn issue, I'm hoping I can just cruise along on this; I really just have to knit the body until it's long enough minus the ribbing at this point, so there's nothing to pay attention to other than the stitch pattern. Apologies in advance, but you're going to be seeing a lot of this sweater over the next two weeks!

I hope your week is off to a good start and that it's a short week for those of you who are working. I will try my best to take some photos to try to share the sunshine and the warmth for those of you in the cold!

A Weekend of Finishing

I hope you all had a good weekend! I got some much-needed extra sleep and spend some nice time with my family. I also did a lot of finishing.

First, there was the handspun. I did manage to ply the entire skein on Friday, but I didn't get around to skeining and washing it until Saturday. I realized that I never took a photo of the fiber before I split it up, so I stole borrowed David's photo:

I wanted to break up the colors as much as possible, so first I folded the length of fiber into thirds and tore it at the folds and then I split up each of the resulting pieces into four thinner strips. I spun my default yarn -- a three-ply fingering weight -- and ended up with approximately 414 yards.

These colors aren't as exciting to me as some others I've spun recently, but I think they make for an excellent neutral. And I think that at some point I'd like to knit another colorwork sweater out of handspun, so some neutral background colors will come in handy. I was surprised at how often the lighter and darker colors seemed to come together, but I guess being totally random in how I was spinning, it was the luck of the draw.

This is the 20th bag of Southern Cross Fibre I've spun so far this year, so I'm well on my way to hitting my revised goal of 24. I haven't yet picked out what I'm spinning next, but it will be something with brighter colors!

I also finished up my mother's socks over the weekend:

These mostly match up in the stripe sequence, though I had to cheat it a little after turning the heel (I removed a little bit of yarn before starting the gusset). The end of the toes are a little off if you look closely, but I really don't think anyone will. I used my typical sock recipe on 64 stitches using Fibernymph Dye Works Bounce in the colorway Cosmic. It's an older colorway, and the skein had been in my stash for several years. I'm putting these away for Chanukah; I actually knit them in front of my mother several times, but I doubt she'll remember that when she opens these in December.

This week is going to be a rough one: I got sent a 55-page high-profile report late on Friday that I will have to edit this week, which means less time for reading and crafting. I plan to keep up with my usual blogging schedule, but I may not have too much content to share. Today I also have to go into the office to have a one-on-one meeting with our new big boss (she's meeting with everyone individually to get to know us and to get a sense of what we do), and on top of all that I may not be able to get out for a run due to thunderstorms moving through the area. I guess it's a good thing that knitting reduces stress for me! Here's hoping you have a calmer week ahead and your Monday is off to a good start.

Unraveled, Week 4/2023

Good morning, friends! I had to wake up a very grumpy teen this morning who was hoping for a 2-hour delay due to a snow storm -- but when we got up, it hadn't yet started snowing, so no delay. It has since started, though, so I'm going to keep this quick so I can get out for my run early before it gets really messy (though I expect to get wet).

It's Wednesday, which means it's time for my weekly link-up with Kat and the Unravelers. There has been a lot of crafting and reading here this past week. Let's start with the knitting -- it's all about the charity hats!

I finished this beauty up on Sunday evening, though I haven't yet blocked it, as you can probably tell. The pattern is Fox Gap (Ravelry link) by my friend Kristen Jancuk. I once again used Fibernymph Dye Works Confetti Tweed DK, this time in the colorway Electric Purple, which looks purple in some lights and pink in others. This was a very engaging knit that I would absolutely make again, though if I'm honest, I am not wild about the pointy top (but I'm fairly confident I could block that out).

I've got another charity hat going, though it's significantly less interesting:

I'm using FDW yarn again, this time Bona Fide DK in a self-striping colorway called Margarita Swirl that I won in Lisa's makealong last year (if you were wondering because you thought these weren't really my colors). I'm making this one top down, using a cast-on method I've "unvented" and used in my double-ended double-thickness hat pattern (which, I should mention, I finally wrote up this weekend and sent off to my tech editor). I am contemplating using it for a general top-down hat pattern as well that would be designed for any yarn and any gauge, so this is a bit of a test run for that. I've completed the crown increases and now just have to knit until I decide it's long enough. I'm hoping to get this done this week so I can send off a stack of hats by the end of the month.

After two busy weeks at work, things have finally calmed down to a more manageable pace, and that has meant more time for reading -- hooray! I've finished three books since this time last week.

After a long wait at the library, my hold finally came up on Babel, or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution. This was a very buzzy new release in the fall that I was very much looking forward to reading, and it did not disappoint. This is historical fiction with a dash of magic that I'd put firmly in the category of Dark Academia. Even leaving the magical aspects out, it raises some very big questions about colonialism and the ethical issues surrounding translation, the latter of which I'd never before contemplated. This is definitely not a book for everyone, but if the idea of a combination of, say, Harry Potter and The Secret History appeals to you, you'll enjoy it. My only criticism is that the characters didn't talk the way I'd imagine people actually talked in the time in which it was set, but that didn't detract from my enjoyment. I gave it 4 stars.

I needed a new audiobook to listen to over the weekend, and on Mary's recommendation, I picked up Becoming Duchess Goldblatt. If you aren't on Twitter, then the name of Duchess Goldblatt might be unfamiliar to you, but essentially she's a much-loved fictional character created by an anonymous woman, and this book is her memoir. I was only marginally aware of the character, but I still very much enjoyed this book, especially the exchanges between the author and Lyle Lovett (who actually reads his parts in the book). You don't have to know anything about DG to enjoy this book, and it was an easy two-day listen for me that I'd recommend. I gave it 4 stars.

Finally, I read a quick YA novel this week. I Must Betray You is set in Communist Romania in 1989, starting shortly before the revolution that would topple the notorious dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu. The narrator is 17-year-old Cristian, who has recently been force to become an informer at a time when everyone is fearful of everyone else and can trust no one. The book is a heartbreaking look at a time and place where everyone lived in fear, and Sepetys includes an extensive resource list at the end for additional sources for learning more about the repressive regime at the time. I'm probably not the target audience for this book, but I enjoyed it and learned a lot about what it might have been like to live in Communist Romania. I gave it 3 stars.

I'm still reading The Transit of Venus but have less than 100 pages to go, so here's hoping I can finish it up this week!

What are you making and reading this week?

Unraveled, Week 3/2023

One small joy of a long weekend and a resulting shorter work week is that it feels like Tuesday but is already Wednesday! And that means it's time for my weekly link-up with Kat and the Unravelers.

After two extraordinarily busy weeks at work, this week has started off much calmer, so that has meant both more time and more mental energy for crafting and reading. After finishing off the orange hat over the weekend, I wound yarn for and cast on a new charity hat:

It doesn't look like much (mostly because I've only knit two round past the ribbing, but also because there is zero sun out today), but this is the start of a Fox Gap (Ravelry link). I'm again using Fibernymph Dye Works Confetti Tweed DK, this time in Electric Purple. I did a tubular cast on and have just started the cables. I should be able to make some progress this evening after only managing one entire round yesterday.

The main reason I haven't knit that much on it is because I've been sucked in by my spinning again. I snapped this photo of my bobbin yesterday afternoon when the sun briefly came out and did a better job of showing the depth of color the gray fiber gives the dye:

I am hoping I can finish up the singles today, which could mean I'd be ready to ply as early as tomorrow. Perhaps.

Thanks to things finally calming down at work, I've had a bit more reading time, though I've only finished one book since this time last week.

I'd had Women Talking on my TBR list for a while, but when it came up in a Zoom over the weekend, I found it was available as an audiobook on Hoopla and the timing was perfect to start something new. At only about 6 hours in length, it was a two-day listen for me. There is a new movie coming out based on this book that's getting a lot of buzz, and I generally like to read the book first. This book is set in a fictional Mennonite community where it has recently been discovered that a series of rapes and sexual assaults against the women in the community have been perpetrated by their husbands and sons. There's not a lot that happens in this book; as the title suggests, all the "action" is around a group of women talking and trying to decide what to do -- do they do nothing? stay and fight? leave and face the unknown? All of their discussions are recorded by a man who recently returned to the community after he and his parents were expelled from it when he was a child; he has been charged with recording the minutes of their meeting because he can read and write and the women cannot. This is not an easy book, given the subject matter, but it takes on some big topics and does so surprisingly well given how short it is. It's very much a thinking book, one that will leave you thinking about the impossible decision the women are forced to make, the importance of community and tradition, and the bravery required to contemplate a future in an unknown world. I gave it 4 stars and am very much looking forward to seeing the movie!

I am still somewhere in the middle of The Transit of Venus and had planned to sit down with it and make some more substantial progress over the weekend, but I got distracted by the arrival of Babel from my library holds. I've been waiting for this very buzzy book from last year for quite a while, and I have gotten thoroughly absorbed by it.

What are you making and reading this week?

FO Friday: A Recalibrated Recalibrate

It feels a bit like cheating to start off the year with a finished project when most of it was knit in the previous year, but I think we all know by now that time is a meaningless construct. So here it is -- my first FO of 2023. Please forgive the awkward selfies; my in-house photographer had to stay late at school yesterday, and it was after sunset by the time she got home. Because we had sun yesterday for the first time since we returned home, I figured I'd take advantage and do the best I could.

Pattern: Recalibrate by Shana Cohen
Yarn: Fibernymph Dye Works Bounce (80% superwash merino/20% nylon) in Icy Blue (main color; used a full skein) and ten 20 g mini skeins
Needles: US 4 (3.5 mm)
Started/Completed: November 3, 2022/January 2, 2023
Mods: where do I begin?

First, let me begin by saying that this pattern is fabulous and well worth the purchase price. Shana has included just about every possible detail that you need to complete this pattern, from photo tutorials of how certain techniques are used to details about how to use different colors to several options for fit. Most importantly, she has a detailed schematic and table of measurements of every section for each size (which turned out to be critical in making mine). This is also one of those garments that seems to look good on everyone, and it's very size inclusive, with finished bust sizes ranging from 34.25 inches all the way up to 70 inches.

The garment is knit in a modular fashion, with a fair number of provisional cast-ons and picking up of stitches (if you aren't a fan of the latter, don't let that deter you -- all the picking up is done at a 1:1 ratio, making it very straightforward). You start with the panels that fall directly in the center of the front and back, then pick up along the sides (casting on stitches in between to form the side of the neckline) and knit the fronts and backs, then join the side up to the armholes. The last steps are picking up and knitting the short sleeves and then picking up all around the bottom of the sweater.

While Shana does include some ways to modify the pattern to fit your body in particular, my modification was a bit more extreme. The gauge listed in the pattern -- 17 stitches and 34 rows over 4 inches/10 cm in garter stitch -- is one that I'd expect to use with a worsted or Aran weight yarn. But the pattern calls for fingering, and while I know that Shana intended the gauge to be that loose so that the finished garment would have drape, I knew that if I knit to that gauge, my sweater was going to stretch all out of shape and look really sloppy -- and, moreover, it was likely to wear out more quickly. So I decided to completely recalculate all the stitch counts, which seemed daunting at first but soon proved to be fairly straightforward.

The first thing to do was to get a gauge that I liked. I knit a good-sized swatch and washed and blocked it, and then I measured my gauge once I was satisfied. That ended up being about 24 stitches over 4 inches using a US 4/3.5 mm needle for me, and the resulting fabric had drape but also structure. Next, I went to the table of all the measurements -- and I mean ALL the measurements. Every "block" of the sweater appears in the schematic and has a corresponding measurement in the table, so all I had to do was pick the size with the measurements that came closest to the fit I wanted. Although Shana recommends a fair amount of positive ease, I decided I wanted a bit less, so I went with the 38 inch bust (I'm about a 35 inch bust, so that would give me 3 inches of positive ease).

The next step was to go to the schematic. I filled in the measurements for each section and then used my gauge to calculate how many stitches and rows I'd need to knit to get that measurement. Because knit fabric is flexible, I knew I could fudge it a little bit if I needed to, such as if the measurement told me I had to knit an odd number of rows but I actually needed to make it an even number.

Finally, there was the yarn to figure out. I'd known since last holiday season that I wanted to use most of the mini skeins from my Fibernymph Holiday Countdown set (there were two or three I didn't love and didn't think really went with the rest, so I excluded them). I was originally going to go from one mini to the next, but as I was knitting my first stripe, I decided that given how variegated some of the minis were it would make sense (and give a good visual resting point) to put a narrow stripe of the pale blue in between them. To determine how many rows to knit with each mini, I weighed the first one after I'd knit two rows, then four, etc., finally arriving at 10 rows to use up just around half so I could use the remainder for the mirrored stripe on the other side. Although I have somewhat of a gradient effect, that wasn't necessarily my plan from the outset; I started with the first, then picked the next by looking for another mini that seemed to share one or more colors as the previous one so that it would look like a natural progression. The final mini I used (on the bottom of the body) was a semisolid that came with a skein of self-striping, and I think it makes a nice neutral that doesn't detract from the variegated shades.

My final modification was to do an I-cord bind-off on the body to match those on the collar and sleeves. It's not called for in the pattern, but I think it makes a nice edge finish.

In total, I used just a little more than 1,000 yards of yarn, and despite the two-month gap between cast-on and bind-off, it really was a quick knit. I completely about half of it in the second week we were in Florida, and I only did a bit more extra knitting per day than usual while we were there. I would absolutely make this pattern again, and I think it would be amazing in handspun. If you are someone who is intimidated by sweaters because of shaping and seaming and all those "at the same time"s, then I'd encourage you to give this pattern a look. It's really just a series of rectangles with some clever joining techniques!

Looking Back and Looking Ahead

Happy new year, friends! We are back home and slowly easing back into things in our last day of vacation (though Rainbow and I got up more or less at the usual time this morning so that tomorrow won't be such a shock).

I'm happy to tell you that we had no major travel issues yesterday. Our flight was slightly delayed, but it wasn't full and we got in just a little late. My brother-in-law and nephew were waiting for us in baggage claim and took us home. I'd cleaned the bathrooms and changed the sheets on the beds before we left, so all we had to do when we got home was unpack. The Mister made a quick trip to the supermarket to get us some things for breakfast, and he'll do a full shop later this morning for the week ahead. We're back to work and school tomorrow, and today will be for catching up.

Speaking of catching up, today is all about looking back at last year's crafting. I don't really keep detailed records of how much making I do from year to year, but I'd say it was a good year for me. I've certainly had more productive years in terms of total number of projects completed, but I'm very satisfied with some pretty epic projects that were done this year. Here are some highlights:

Knitting

• 9 sweaters (six adult, three baby)
• 13 hats/head things (including seven charity hats)
• 7 pairs of socks
• 3 projects made from handspun (including one epic sweater project)
• Nearly 15.5K yards used

Spinning

• 16 skeins spun, totaling more than 7,100 yards
  
• 7 bags of Southern Cross Fibre used up

Here's my last spin of 2022, which was plied but not skeined and washed before we left (so I took care of that yesterday):

These are the two skeins I spun from my Fibernymph Dye Works Holiday Countdown fiber minis. Originally I set out to separate the fiber minis into warm and cool colors and opened them only a few at a time. Then I realized that I probably should have opened all 24 and sorted them before I started spinning, so I changed my plan a bit and it still didn't entirely work out. The skein on the left is a bit more muted and the skein on the right more saturated, though you can see there are a couple colors in each that look like they should be in the opposite skein. But that's okay! I have a total of approximately 707 yards of sport to DK yarn, and I plan to use them for an Inspira Cowl (Ravelry link), a pattern I've had my eye on for more than a decade.

So what are my plans for 2023? I do have some, though I'm keeping them flexible because I know I'm often distracted by the new and shiny. First, I want to finish up my Recalibrate, and that should happen today as I have less than 10 rounds to go on the body. I have a handful of sweaters I'd like to knit, and I've set a goal of knitting at least six charity hats. I also want to spin up at least 12 bags/shipments of Southern Cross club fibre, and I'm going to pull out my entire stash of it to take another big picture to track it. I'm also hoping to do more crochet this year, starting with getting back to the blanket I started for Rainbow.

How was your 2022 crafting year? Do you have plans for 2023?

Unraveled, Week 50/2022

Good morning, friends. Take a look at that title: 50/2022 -- can you believe we only have two more Wednesdays left in this year?! I am hoping those last two weeks will slow down a bit for me and for all of us, really.

Today I'm linking up with Kat and the Unravelers, but I have a pretty short update on my making and my reading. As I predicted would happen, work has gotten really, really busy and has, unfortunately, reminded me why I so rarely take time off. The good thing about being the only person who does your job is that is brings a strong sense of job security, but on the flip side, it also means that when you are off, there is no one to fill in for you. And that means that when I plant to take time off, my coworkers like to throw everything at me so that they can then move projects forward when I'm not there. Added to all the last-minute prep we've been doing for the bat mitzvah and you can imagine that I don't have a lot of time left to do much crafting or reading.

I am still determined to finish up two projects before we leave. The most important is the baby sweater, which is about 95% complete. I've finished the short rows on the shawl collar, so now I just have to finish the button bands.

I have one more round to knit on my hat before I start the crown decreases, and things should move pretty quickly after that.

Spoiler warning: I have finished spinning all my Fibernymph Dye Works Holiday Countdown minis ,so if you don't want to see, scroll no further!

I have started plying the first bobbin (the gray one), but only just. I'm hoping I can get both skeins plied before we leave, but I may have to wait until we get back to skein and wash the yarn.

I don't have much of a reading update this week because, thanks to the aforementioned work influx, I have not had very much time for reading and haven't finished any books in the past week. But I'm getting close to finishing the three I'm in the middle of. First, I've been listening to the 10th Maisie Dobbs book, Leaving Everything Most Loved, and should be able to finish it on this morning's run. I also started the second Monk and Robot book, A Prayer for the Crown-Shy, over the weekend and have less than 50 pages to go to finish. Finally, I've got 140-ish pages left in Demon Copperhead, which means I need to read about 30 pages a day to finish it before we leave on Monday. I've been trying to squeeze in a few extra minutes of reading it here and there in addition to my bedtime reading, and I'm still feeling pretty good about getting it done despite all the shenanigans of the week.

Well, friends, I need to go get my run in before I'm buried under work for the rest of the day. I'd love to hear what you're making and reading this week so I can experience them vicariously!

Feeling a Bit Scattered

I won't lie -- it was hard to get up this morning. Monday mornings are always a little rough, but Rainbow was feeling a bit anxious about things last night and so had some trouble settling down for sleep, which meant the two of us were squeezed into her twin bed for a couple of hours. I did sleep a little, but it's not the best sleep.

Now I am properly caffeinated and planning to go out for a run soon, but first, a crafting update. We had a fairly quiet weekend, so I was able to do quite a lot of crafting, though lately I've been jumping from project to project. As much as I was trying to focus on finishing Rainbow's Hitchhiker, I realized that I'm under no actual deadline to finish it because she knows about, so I could take it to Florida if it's not done by then. I do, however, want to finish up the baby sweater before we leave so I can give it to my brother and sister-in-law as a Chrismakah present, so I gave it some attention.

Those red strings at the front are holding the stitches for the pockets, which are created in a very clever way. First, you slip the live stitches onto a stitch holder or waste yarn. Then you pick up the same number of stitches by putting your needle into the purl bump at the back of each stitch on hold. Eventually I'll put the stitches on waste yarn back onto the needles and knit the front of the pockets. Yes, I realize the uselessness of knitting pockets for a newborn, but they're too cute not to!

Because working on the shawl and the sweater weren't enough (yes, I am ignoring my Recalibrate for the moment), I cast on for a charity hat last night.

This skein of Cascade 220 Superwash Handpaints was in my leftovers bin, but when I weighed it, it turned out to be a full skein. I know it's leftover from a baby sweater I knit years ago, and clearly I had wound it thinking I'd need to break into the second skein to finish, but I guess I didn't. In any case, this is the very small start to a Twirl Away hat, which I am knitting both for the Giftalong and for the Pigskin Party.

One thing I did manage to finish was the first bobbin of singles from my Fibernymph Dye Works Holiday Countdown set using half of the fiber (shown in black and white here to avoid spoilering anyone):

After opening all the bags of fiber and seeing the colors, I changed my mind on a couple of them, so the ones in this bobbin aren't completely in order, not that it really matters. It wasn't possible to do an even split of warm and cool colors, so this bobbin is generally softer, more muted colors, and the second bobbin will be brighter, more intense colors. I'm planning to chain-ply both, so this one will sit while I spin up the second half of the fiber.

Right, time to get moving if I want to get my run in before my team meeting! Here's hoping Monday is kind to all of us.

Unraveled, Week 46/2022

Happy hump day, friends! It's another gloomy one here, and it feels quite a lot like winter. Yesterday we got our first measurable snow of the season -- a bit more than an inch, according to the National Weather Service. It was coming down in very big clumps for a while there, and some of it stuck to the grass and the tops of things like garbage cans, but it's all melted this morning (I'll have to be very careful about wet leaves on my run this morning). I have the lights on in my bedroom/home office already, so you know it's very dark outside, so I apologize in advance for the poor quality of the photos in this post.

It's Wednesday, which means it's time for my weekly link-up with Kat and the Unravelers and a check-in on my crafting and reading.

Truthfully there has not been a ton of knitting since Monday because I've been focused on finishing up my combo spin. As of this morning, this is all that's left to be spun for the third bobbin of singles, and I'm very confident that it will be completed today:

I was anxious to get this wrapped up because I was expecting my Fibernymph Dye Works Holiday Countdown Set to show up this week -- which it did, yesterday!

I decided to get the fiber set this year, so I have 24 bags containing 10 g of fiber each. I will not be waiting until December 1 to start spinning because, aside from the fact that I won't be home all of the month, we have some big things happening mid-December and I have a feeling my crafting time will be seriously curtailed. So I'm hoping I can wrap up the combo spin this week and get started on my spinning of this fiber next week.

It has been a heck of week for my reading, with five finishes (though two of those were extremely short, so don't be too impressed).

The first and my favorite of the bunch was The Marriage Portrait, the next Read With Us selection. I think by now you all know how much I love Maggie O'Farrell's writing, and this book just blew me away. The subject of the novel is Lucrezia de'Medici, the teenaged daughter of Cosimo de'Medici who is married off to the duke of Ferrara after her older sister, who had been betrothed to him, dies suddenly. At the very beginning, the couple is in an isolated hunting lodge, and she is convinced that he will kill her while they are there. The story then goes back and forth in time, giving us a full picture of Lucrezia's short life in the dazzling setting of Renaissance Florence. The writing is absolutely spectacular and the story compelling. I won't give any spoilers, but I will say that I was very pleasantly surprised by a twist at the end that I did not see coming -- and I expect we'll be discussing it in depth when we meet in January! I gave it 5 stars.

Over the weekend, I listened to the audiobook of The Boys, which Bonny recently recommended. Following her advice, I did not read any synopsis or reviews of the book before I started it, and I'm glad I did. This is one of those books where you will have a particular opinion of the characters and then there will be a moment where everything you thought you knew gets flipped on its head. I will not share any details beyond that because I think, like Bonny, that it's best to go into this book as a blank slate. I found it to be really well written and thought provoking, though I will caution you that it is, in many ways, a pandemic book and one that deals with the isolation and loneliness of the pandemic, so if that is something you're not ready to deal with, you may want to skip this one. I gave it 4 stars.

I picked up A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance several weeks ago when it was a Kindle deal because the author is one of those featured in this season's lineup in the speaker series I'm subscribed to, and I find I enjoy the lectures even more when I've read the book the authors are speaking on. This is a nonfiction work that explores the contradictory role of Black artists and performers in American culture -- how the Black body can seem to be simultaneously invisible and invaluable depending on how it serves white culture at any given moment. It's also partly a memoir, and the writing reflects the author's work as both a poet and a critic. I suspect there's a lot I didn't fully understand as a white reader of this book, but I found it to be really interesting and learned a lot of new things. I'll probably have to reread it at some point. I gave it 4 stars.

The two very short works were both read yesterday, so that should give you an indication of what I mean when I say "short"!

I was delighted to find that Claire Keegan's newest work, Foster, was available on Hoopla, which meant no wait. The digital version claimed it had 60-some pages, but I think it actually had fewer than that. As you'd expect from something so short, the writing is very spare and leaves a lot to the reader to intuit. The gist of the plot is this: the unnamed narrator, a young girl who is one of many children in a family that is struggling financially, is taken to live with a childless couple over the summer, and while she's there, she learns what it's like to live in a home where there is affection and care. My main complaint about this book is the same one I had about Keegan's last novel: There's just not enough. This felt to me like the start of a novel but not a complete one. But there is skill require to evoke strong emotions without saying much, and for that I give her credit. I gave it 3 stars.

As the cover indicates, Alice Hoffman's The Bookstore Sisters is, truly, a short story at just 36 pages. It was a title I picked up for free through the Amazon First Reads program; I'm much more selective about picking up books through this program now, but because I know I have enjoyed the Hoffman books I've read, I was willing to take a chance on this one (and it's so short, even if it was bad, I wouldn't have spend much time on it). It turned out to be a quite enjoyable about two sisters who have long been estranged and the family bookstore that brings them back together. It was a pleasant way to spend a half an hour or so on a gloomy afternoon. I gave it 4 stars.

I'm currently tackling a brick of a book -- Demon Copperhead, which I'm reading in hardback. I'm only 30 pages in but am enjoying the voice of the title character, and I'm hoping I can find some extra reading time (so far I've only picked it up before bed) so make some headway, because this is not a book I want to carry with me on our trip!

Tonight the Mister and I are attending the WQED Cardigan Party, back in person after two years off for COVID, and our cardigans are ready!

What are you making and reading this week?

FO Friday

Rainbow and I have been in agreement that this week should already have been over at least a day ago, but today is, in fact, Friday. I'm hoping it goes by quickly and easily!

I'm finishing this week with two finished projects. First, the as-yet-unnamed cowl:

I still have to block it, which will smooth out the surface a bit and stretch it a bit widthwise, but I did weave in all 10 ends (the only real downside to using five different mini skeins). On my to-do list is writing up the pattern, which shouldn't take too long. I'm also planning to adjust the stitch pattern for a hat, likely in a thicker yarn and using only two colors.

Yesterday afternoon, I finished up yet another scrappy charity hat. I called this one "Bottom of the Scrap Barrel" because I really didn't have much yarn left in my bag of Fibernymph Dye Works scraps -- as evidenced by the concentration of blues at the top.

To give you an idea of just how much yarn has been used up recently, here's the current state of the Giant Bag 'o Scraps:

I went looking back through my archives to see if I had posted a photo of it when it was full but couldn't find one, so suffice it to say that this bag is around 17 inches wide and nearly 20 inches deep and was overflowing at its fullest. Most of what's left in there now is non-superwash scraps. The ziplocks off to the side are exclusively Fibernymph leftovers, and most of those are sport weight. So I think it's fair to say that we have done a good job of using up the scraps.

After finishing up these two projects, I found myself without any active knitting (shhh, I know I still have Rainbow's long-languishing Hitchhiker in progress), so I finally cast on a project I've been meaning to start for a while -- my Recalibrate.

After doing a bunch of swatching, talking with the designer, talking with other knitters, and generally pondering this project, I've decided to go with the gauge I like (which is quite different from the gauge given in the pattern) and the measurements I want to have in the finished garment and basically recalculating the whole pattern. Fortunately this pattern lends itself well to this adjustment, or at least it seems it does at this point -- I have only just started, after all! I am using -- surprise, surprise -- Fibernymph Dye Works Bounce, my go-to fingering weight, in a semi-tonal called Icy Blue (which in reality is more blue and less green than it appears here) as well as my set of mini skeins from last year's holiday set. I may omit one or two of the minis that don't quite seem to match my color scheme, but generally these are the colors you can expect to see.

Happy weekending, friends!