Unraveled, Week 11/2023

Is this week over yet? No, it's only Wednesday! It's been a rough week so far. I won't go into details because they're not very interesting, but let's just say I haven't been sleeping so great this week and have been especially thankful I haven't had to drag my tired self into an office to work.

Fortunately Wednesdays are my favorite for blogging, because on this day every week I get to link up with Kat and the Unravelers. This week is finding me with just one WIP, which is a strange place for me to be!

I finally got around to trying on my Love Note yesterday; after two failed attempts at a selfie, I called Rainbow up to take a photo for me (note that I did put the yarn down to try to take a photo of myself, but I guess my arms are not the ideal length). There is obviously a lot more still to be knit, but I can confirm that it does fit over a long-sleeved tee, which is how I like to wear my sweaters. I am hoping the lace will be more obvious once it's blocked.

This is my only current WIP because I finished up another project Monday night -- that one I can't show you just yet. It's done and it turned out exactly as I wanted, and now it's been blocked and is drying. But I'll give you a little peek in the form of some background for some "knitting bling" that arrived in yesterday's mail:

These adorable kawaii charms are from Noelle at Charmed and Dangerous, who does the most incredibly cute work. There was a third one in the box that was for Rainbow -- a little terra cotta star with a succulent on it. I've got a small collection of these progress keepers, and they're always an adorable way of seeing how much progress I'm making on a big project. Noelle also posts videos of the process of making some of her charms on Instagram, and they're very fun and relaxing to watch. No affiliation -- just a fan!

The reading has been good this past week -- I've finished three books!

I'd heard about The Betrayal of Anne Frank: A Cold Case Investigation on the Down Cellar Studio podcast, and when I needed something to listen to late last week, it was available with no wait and I decided to give it a try. As someone who has read a lot of both fiction and nonfiction about WWII and the Holocaust, I found the background on the Frank family and the situation in the Netherlands to be really interesting. I was less enamored of the conclusion that the research team came to; frankly, I can see their points and their arguments, but I also think they've made a bit of a stretch. I don't think we'll ever know for certain how the Secret Annex was uncovered, and ultimately it's more important to remember Anne and the others she was hiding with than to waste time pointing fingers at people who may or may not have betrayed her. I will say that it was a really interesting book, and I was thankful to be listening to it so I didn't have to guess at the pronunciation of the Dutch names (the narrator is Julia Whelan, who does an excellent job). I gave it 3 stars.

Speaking of books I heard about on podcasts, The Violin Conspiracy is a title that Anne Bogel has mentioned quite a bit in the last six months or so, so I snapped up a Kindle copy when it was a daily deal a few weeks ago. I started it on my birthday and finished it Monday afternoon, and what a fun romp it was! The author has clearly drawn a lot on his own experiences as a Black musician in the very white field of classical music, and he's added in a mystery. The pace is fast and the story as a whole is very satisfying. Mary also let me know that the author created a Spotify playlist that contains all the music mentioned in the book! I gave it 4 stars.

Finally, over the course of Monday and Tuesday, I absolutely devoured the second book in the His Dark Materials series, The Subtle Knife. This was a reread for me, though I really remembered nothing of it from my first reading, which was back when I was in college or grad school. I have copies of all three books on paper in my personal library, but I'm enjoying revisiting them on audio, particularly as Philip Pullman himself is the narrator and is joined by a full cast. The first installment has some dark elements to it, but things get even darker in the second. I'm looking forward to getting to the third book soon; I remember very little about it, though I have a distinct memory of reading it in my favorite chair in my parents' living room when I was home for winter break. I gave book two 4 stars.

I'm currently reading The Bingo Palace, the next and, sadly, last selection for the Erdrich-along. We're back to some of the Love Medicine characters, so it feels a bit like we've come full circle. I expect to continue my reading of her books even though the formal group study is ending.

I'll leave you today with a big of spring to brighten up your day. My in-laws brought me these flowers on Saturday when we had them over for dinner, presumably as a birthday present. They were especially welcome when we woke to snow on the ground yesterday after not having seen it in a long time!

A Mixed Bag

Who else is still dragging from the time change this morning? I did not stay up to see the end of the Oscars last night, as I have in the past, but a certain daughter of mine was having trouble settling, which meant my presence was requested in her twin bed for about an hour, and that meant less sleep. Oh well.

The weekend was a mixed bag thanks to a visit from my old nemesis, acid reflux. I think I overdid it on the triggers Friday night, so I spent much of Saturday feeling a little ill. I also skipped coffee yesterday morning (that's a big trigger food for me), which I don't think helped with the maladjustment to the time change. I'm feeling back to normal this morning, though, so let's hope my nemesis has gone away again for a long time.

Despite feeling not so great for much of the weekend, I did manage to finish a couple of things. First, a skein of handspun:

This is Kingfisher on Corriedale, the April 2021 Southern Cross Fibre club shipment. If you're keeping track, this is my eighth SCF skein spun so far this year. I did my default yarn with this one -- three-ply fingering weight -- and ended up with about 380 yards. As you can probably see, there's a bit too much ply twist in it (I guess I was really excited about it and treadled just a bit too quickly when I was plying), so at some point I'll run it back through the wheel to remove that. I am delighted with how the colors worked out, though. I didn't want them to be too concentrated, so I did a little splitting of the fiber to break them up and distribute them more evenly. Here's what the fiber looked like to start:

I split the fiber in thirds width-wise first (I folded it in thirds and pulled it apart at the folds). Then divided each of those pieces in half lengthwise. This ensured that all the colors appeared multiple times in each ply, and although it can be hard to tell from the photo, I don't think there were very many spots, if any, where all three plies in the yarn were the same color. I have quite a few club shipments still to spin in similar colors, so I'm planning to spin them up in the same manner, with the idea of knitting another handspun sweater like my Shifty Pullover.

I also finished up Rainbow's latest pair of socks, which might look a little roughed up here because she put them on as soon as I finished them and wore them around the house all afternoon. I think that means they're a hit!

These were knit using my typical vanilla sock recipe, but I changed things up a bit with a 1x1 ribbed cuff, starting with a tubular cast-on. I really like the look of the cuff, and I think it would look really sharp on a pair of shortie socks (I know that with my, um, athletic calves, the cast-on might not be elastic enough).

Now that these socks are done, I'm turning my attention to my secret design WIP, which should be finished today, and then my Love Note, which I have neglected for several days and which I don't think will be done before we leave for Florida. But I do have a four-hour (virtual) workshop to attend on Wednesday, and I expect that will yield a lot of progress. I'm not planning to take it with me because I think mohair and Florida sound like a bad combination, but I will be taking another sweater project! That means I'll have to wind some yarn and swatch this week.

Here's hoping this Monday is kind to all of us. Have a good one, friends!

A Wee Break

Ah, hello Friday! Yesterday was a very long day, ending with an evening board meeting that didn't wrap up until almost 9:30, so I'm feeling very lucky that I have a day off today. It's the Friday of spring break week, so my office is officially closed. It's still going to be moderately busy today, as I have my annual check-ups with both my PCP and my gynecologist, but at least I won't have to do any work. I did think about going to Costco in between my appointments, but I think I'll save that for the weekend and enjoy my day off, especially after such a long day yesterday.

If you were wondering just how much of a sock foot I could knit during a board meeting, here's your answer -- everything above the hot pink safety pin (about 2.5 inches):

I am sorry to say that yet again I did not get a puppy for my birthday, despite asking for one for several years now, but the Mister did surprise me with some gorgeous roses yesterday:

I also received a new pair of AirPods; I've been making do with his older pair that accidentally went through the washer and somehow still worked but would crap out after less than an hour of use, even when fully charged. They're charging now and I'll give them a try later this morning when I head to the doctor's office.

I hope your Friday is a good one and you have a great weekend -- in spite of the fact that it'll be an hour shorter than usual!

Unraveled, Week 10/2023

It's a sunny but cold Wednesday morning here in Pittsburgh, and though there's snow in the forecast for the end of the week (boo), I am officially declaring it spring because I saw my first landscaper mowing a lawn in the neighborhood yesterday! Wednesday means it's time to link up with Kat and the Unravelers and to give you an update on my making and reading.

I've officially completed the yoke of my Love Note sweater, so now I'm at the point in the body where I just knit knit knit until it's the required length. It's going pretty quickly, given the big needles, but I'm needing to go a little slower than usual to make sure I get both strands of yarn in every stitch, and as you'd expect with four strands of yarn attached to the project, I also have to pause periodically to make sure they're not tangled.

I may be biting off more than I can chew, but it would be great if I could finish this before we leave for Florida (that's about a week and a half away). I was able to knit about an inch of the body in an hour last night, so that doesn't seem too ambitious, especially if I decide to do short sleeves.

My top priority right now, though, is getting the second of these socks past the heel turn, because I have an in-person board meeting tomorrow evening and I know I will need them to stay focused:

I have about an inch left to knit on the leg before I start the heel flap, so that shouldn't take me much time at all. The challenge will be tearing myself away from my spinning; I'm already on my third bobbin of my current spin and am so enjoying the colors that I don't want to do anything else!

I have only finished one book this week, but it's a big one!

It took me almost exactly four weeks of determined reading, but last night (past my bedtime!) I finally finished War and Peace. This was quite a brick, and I'm very glad I read it in digital format! I will say that I opted for the cheapest digital version, and it was very clear that I got what I paid for. There were no page numbers, just the dreaded "position" indicator, and periodically the print went from roman to italics and back for no apparent reason. Many of the character names were also Westernized (Andrei became Andrew, Marya became Mary, etc.), so I suspect I may not have had the best translation. All that aside, there were parts of this book that I very much enjoyed, notably the relationships between the characters and how they changed over the years. But there was a lot in here that was an absolute slog, especially the parts about the battles, and there's a great deal of Tolstoy's philosophizing about the meaning of war and why it happens. The entirety of the second epilogue, which was what kept me up late last name, felt completely irrelevant to the rest of the book and, in my opinion, could be skipped, and I think Jerry Seinfeld wasn't far off when he claimed that the original title of the book was "War: What Is It Good For." I am not sorry that I read it, but I also don't think it's the masterpiece that some claim it is. I think if you're interested in it, you'd be much better off watching the 2016 miniseries (which I plan to rewatch soon). I gave the book 3 stars.

I am still reading The Shipping News but hope to finish it up this week now that I'm done with the brick!

What are you making and reading this week?

A Peek at My Weekend (with a Bonus New Pattern)

The weekend went by quickly, as it always does, but this one had a lot of good things.

We had our first dinner back at my parents' of the new year, though of course we were missing my dad. Leo the dog was there, though, while his parents were at a childbirth class. We ate homemade challah with dinner, too:

On Saturday morning, Rainbow and I drove about 20 miles away to a small fiber event. We ended up spending more time in the car than actually at the event, but it was worth it. Here's what came home with us:

I was not intending to buy any yarn, but I saw these gorgeous burnt oranges and reds and browns, and before I knew it, they were in my arms. I'll be using them for a Birch Pullover. Rainbow bought the green skein, and we'll fight it out over who gets the soaps. These all came from Rebecca of Dusty Tree Soap/Dyeworks; her yarn is all dyed in small batches with no dyelots, so I picked skeins that all looked like they went together and will be doing a lot of blending.

There was some successful lace knitting on my Love Note once I learned how to count correctly:

I promise it'll look better when blocked!

And there was some spinning as well, with the first of three bobbins of singles spun:

Kingfisher on Corriedale from Southern Cross Fibre

Last but not least, there was some brownie baking in my fancy new pan, which I purchased after Kym blogged about her even fancier one:

Now I'm starting off what is looking like it will be a busy week, but it will at least be a shorter one, because my office is closed on Friday -- one of the benefits of working for an institution of higher education is that there are random days off, in this case, the Friday of spring break week! It's also my birthday week, but my actual birthday will be a long day ending with an in-person board meeting. Ugh. In any case, I've decided to kick it off by publishing my center-out, top-down, any yarn, any gauge hat pattern!

It's called Spinning in Infinity and is available in my Ravelry and Payhip shops. It's written for five sizes (toddler to adult large) and includes a photo tutorial for the cast-on method.

I hope that your weekend was full of good things and that your Monday is off to a good start!

She Spins Seashells

TGIF, friends! It has been another long week, so I'm happy to have the end of it come around finally. I was hoping to have the beginning of the lace of my Love Note to share with you today, but it turns out that I have trouble counting after a long day, and I ended up having to tink back everything I'd knit and ran out of time to redo it. Instead, I have another skein of handspun to share.

I thought I'd take a quick break from burning through my Southern Cross Fibre stash and spin up one of the bags of fiber that Margene sent me. I picked a pretty 2 oz. bundle of 80% Cormo wool/20% angora from Wooly Wonka Fibers in the colorway Seashells, a very apt name for colors reminiscent of what you'd see inside shells you pick up on the beach. Given the small amount, I decided to spin it all onto one bobbin, wind the singles into a center-pull ball, and then ply from both ends. If you're interested in the mechanics of this, I posted a reel on my Instagram account earlier in the week (thanks to the fancy tripod I recently got to hold my phone). The result is a lovely little skein of a bit more than 200 yards of two-ply fingering to sport:

It's not the most consistent yarn ever -- Cormo is always a bit of a challenge for me, because it's so fine and so springy that it has a tendency to get neppy really easily -- but it's bouncy and soft. Don't ask me what I'll make with this, because I really just spun it to spin it. Perhaps it will be a gift for someone, one day.

Today is going to be wet and windy (the local weather report used a "where you'll find your empty garbage can" graphic to illustrate how high the winds will be, and the forecast is "in your neighbor's yard"), so I'll be staying inside. We're headed back to my mother's for Friday night dinner this evening, so challah baking is also on tap. Tomorrow, Rainbow and I are planning to head to a local-ish fiber event, our first in several years, and I'm hoping that over the weekend I can manage to count correctly and get my Love Note back in order.

Have a great weekend, friends!

Unraveled, Week 9/2023

Happy Wednesday and happy first day of meteorological spring! March is my birthday month, so I always look forward to it, even though it's typically a wild month of weather -- seems like nine times out of ten it snows on my birthday. But this year March appears to be coming in like a lamb, at least for today. The sun is out and we're supposed to reach a high in the upper 60s this afternoon, so my walk today should be very pleasant.

As usual, I'm linking up today with Kat and the Unravelers, and I'm sharing an update on my crafting and my reading.

Over the weekend I finished up my latest spinning project (well, technically I finished it Friday evening, but I didn't get a chance to set the twist until Saturday). This was last October's Southern Cross Fibre club shipment, Dragon's Breath on South American wool blend, and I split it up into smaller bits to try to break up the colors. I was hoping it would go well enough with the combo spin I finished in November that wasn't quite enough for a sweater. I'm extremely happy with how this most recent skein turned out -- a very well-balanced three-ply fingering that comes in at about 366 yards:

This colorway definitely had brighter reds than those I used in the combo spin, but I think that it'll work just fine with those skeins, especially as I'd always planned to alternate as I knit:

On today's to-do list is winding two more skeins of yarn so I can cast on my Love Note, but I've got two other smaller projects going.

 

The Felici socks are for Rainbow, and I got quite a bit of the leg of the second sock done while sitting at the orthodontist with Rainbow on Monday morning. We were there longer than expected because they put a new bracket onto a tooth that's growing in, and of course it popped off when the assistant was trying to put on the little rubber band that keeps the wire in place, so it had to be redone. The crimson project is a swatch of sorts for a possible design submission -- what's the knitting equivalent of a wearable muslin? Because it'll be something that can be used when it's done, but it's not the final version. Anyway, I'm using some very deep stash, the now-discontinued Knit Picks Merino Style, which I'd started a sweater in more than a decade ago (it was a test knit) and never finished. The start of that sweater is still in the stash, too; I should probably unravel it and repurpose the yarn, because I don't think I have the pattern anymore and am never going to finish it.

Reading has been excellent this past week. I finished two 5-star books.

Those of you who have already read Dani Shapiro's latest, Signal Fires, know just how good it is. I had a long wait for it from the library, but it finally became available to me Saturday evening. I started it then and finished it at the orthodontist's office Monday morning. Wow, is this a beautifully written book! There is not a word that's out of place in this story of two families whose lives become intertwined in heartwarming and heartbreaking ways. There's not a lot of plot in between the few dramatic moments, but it's not missed -- this is very much a book about these people, their relationships, their struggles, and their triumphs. I really loved it!

The Golden Compass was a reread for me; I first read it in my senior year of college, I think, when I had also just started my master's program and was taking an amazing course in children's literature. I wanted to revisit it ahead of the Novel Pairings episode that came out yesterday, which discusses it alongside The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. I decided to listen to the audiobook this time, even though I still have my original paperbacks of the series on my shelf, mainly so I could read it while getting other things done. I don't think I loved it quite as much as I did the first time around -- because let's face it, nothing is as good as discovering a great book for the first time -- but I still thoroughly enjoyed the world that's been created and the plucky character of Lyra. I expect I'll have to reread the other two books in the series again soon.

I am currently reading, still, War and Peace (I'm 72% through it, according to the Kindle app) and The Shipping News for the next Read With Us discussion.

What are you making and reading this week?

Embrace in 2023: February

 

It's the last Monday of the month, and that means it's time to check in with my One Little Word. Be sure to check in with Carolyn's link-up to see everyone's updates (and thanks, Carolyn, for hosting this monthly virtual get-together!).

I had to think a bit to figure out what I have embraced this month. There are the obvious things -- crafting, reading, getting outside and enjoying record high temperatures -- but those are things I've embraced in general and don't have to make a special effort to do. But last night we took my mother out to dinner, and it occurred to me that that simple act is pretty representative of something I have embraced in particular this month.

In generally, I'm a pretty cautious person. I'm a rule follower and avoid taking big risks. But there is such a thing as playing it too safe and missing out on life. And this month, even though it made me a little nervous, I did embrace some calculated risks going to out eat in restaurants, something I have not been comfortable doing for about three years. This is not something that's been easy for me. I've always been a germophobe and very uncomfortable in large crowds, so being out in public in cold and flu season when there's still a pandemic on is not something I've really wanted to do. But this month we had plans to go out with some friends, something we have not done in a long time, so I had to weigh the risks. Our community COVID levels have been low for a while, and flu cases have dropped significantly. We're all boosted (with the bivalent booster) and have had our flu shot. And truly I've been almost self-isolating at home because I'm still working remotely full time and don't go out much (and when I do go places, I'm still masking). So I decided I could accept a bit of risk. And you know what? It was okay. I won't say I wasn't a little anxious, but I think it was good for me to get out of my comfort zone a bit.

There's a fine line between being careful and living your life in fear, and the truth is that I can be extremely careful and still get sick. It's also not realistic for me to stay home and not see anyone but my immediate family, so there will be times when I'm going to need to live with risk. I don't think I'm going to ditch the mask anytime soon, but I feel like I've taken a healthy step forward in living my life in this new normal.

TGIF

Happy Friday, friends. I'm not sure why, but this week has felt especially long, so I'm very happy to see Friday finally arrive. After a beautiful day of false spring yesterday, in which we set a new record with our third day in February to hit or pass 70 degrees F, we are back to winter temps and gloom today. I will soon be bundling up for my walk and heading out into it.

I mentioned on Wednesday that I was gearing up to start a Love Note sweater, and now I can officially say that I'm ready to cast on. I swatched and am close enough on my gauge (I'm half a stitch off over four inches, but this fabric is so flexible that I'm pretty sure that's good enough).

The fabric is much lighter in color than I expected, and it's a little out there for me, but I'm going with it. When I cast on, I'll be alternating skeins, which means I'll have four strands of yarn going at once, but this seems to be such a fast knit for most people that I think I can manage. I'm going to be knitting a size small (41.5 in. bust), which will give me about six inches of positive ease. And I'll be knitting on size 8/5 mm needles, which are sure to feel like broomsticks to me!

Meanwhile, I'm closing in on the toe of Rainbow's Felici sock (the first sock of the pair), which got a fair amount of attention yesterday.

On top of today's to-do list, though, is some handspun plying. I finished up the third and final bobbin of singles for my current spin yesterday afternoon, and as long as work cooperates, I should be able to ply, skein, and wash today.

I've got a couple of Zooms this weekend, and my mother is coming home from Florida on Sunday, so I'm planning to have her over for dinner on Sunday. Other than that, I'll be doing the usual weekend chores, getting in some extra crafting and reading time, and trying to catch up on some sleep. I hope you have a good weekend, and I'll see you back here on Monday for February's One Little Word check-in!

Unraveled, Week 8/2023

It's a very gloomy morning here, so I ask your forgiveness for the quality of the photos in this post. We are expecting rain all day, off and on. Then tomorrow they're predicting a high of 72, followed by a retreat to the 30s on Friday. I can't remember such a roller coaster of an end to winter before!

Thank you for all your lovely comments on my hat pattern on Monday -- and many thanks to those of you who purchased the pattern as well! I really had not expected much because the pattern is so similar to others out there, but I've been very pleasantly surprised.

It's Wednesday, which means it's time to link up with Kat and the Unravelers and to give an update on my making and my reading! I am very happy to report that I have an FO to share today:

Pattern: Hive Mind (Ravelry link) by Adrian Bizilia from Yarnitecture by Jillian Moreno
Yarn: my handspun, a combo spin of two Southern Cross Fibre colorways
Needles: US 3 (3.25 mm)
Started/Completed: February 13/February 21
Mods: corrected the errors in the pattern

These are technically not finished finished finished because they still need a good blocking (as you can tell from their slight wonkiness), but the knitting is done and all the ends have been woven in. And I am very glad to have them done, because they were not the best knitting experience. I've already expressed my frustration with the errors in the pattern, though those were easy to correct. The other issue was just the general fussiness and discomfort. I generally enjoy stranded colorwork, but the small circumferences and dealing with some tension issues meant that these were physically uncomfortable to knit when it came to the thumbs and the tops of the hands. While the patterning on the thumbs is very clever in that, if you look closely to see it, the pattern is uninterrupted from the hand, there are some stretches of the background color across the transition from front to back of the thumb that can result in some tension issues if you're not careful.

I also generally don't love the placement of the thumb on the palm side of the hand like it is in this pattern. I know that's a sort of feature of a certain tradition of mitten knitting, but anatomically, that's not where my thumbs are. I much prefer a thumb that comes out of the side of the hand. But they're done; they fit Rainbow (so she'll get them once they're blocked); and I still have a bit more than 300 yards of yarn left of the combo spin, so I can use the remainder for some other mitts/mittens or even a pair of sock for me. I've posted specifics about the errors I found on my Ravelry project page, which is one of only a handful. No one else seems to have noticed the issues, though one other crafter did note that the ribbing should be longer (and, in my opinion, done on a smaller needle) and the hand shorter, and I agree with those assessments. I also did a tubular cast-on for 2x2 ribbing for the first time with these, and while blocking might help, I'm not terribly impressed with it at the moment.

Now that those are done, I'm still working on a pair of Felici socks for Rainbow, but one knitting project is never enough, so I'm planning my next cast-on. I've been craving some sweater knitting, so I think the time is finally right to cast on a Love Note sweater. This seems to be one of those patterns that everyone has knit, and I've certainly had my eye on it for a long time. I've even had some yarn for it for quite a while!

The four darker skeins are Hedgehog Fibres Skinny Singles, a fingering-weight 100% superwash merino yarn. I won them a number of years ago in a giveaway that Bonny had on her blog. They've been waiting for just the right project to come along, and when I got these two skeins of Fibernymph Dye Works mohair/silk laceweight, I knew the two combined would be perfect. So I have some winding and swatching in my future.

Reading has been a bit more plentiful this week thanks to some audiobooks. I've finished three books

Over the weekend, I finally finished up the interconnected short story collection The Tsar of Love and Techno. I have not read a ton of short stories over my reading career, mainly because I find them to often be unsatisfying -- either because they're not fully formed enough or they are really good and end too soon for me. But I think this may very well be the most perfect short story collection I've ever read. While each story can stand on its own, there is a thread that runs through all of them that ties them together in a really interesting way. They aren't chronological, but in reading all the stories you can see the evolution of the Soviet Union to (nearly) modern-day Russia and how the political climate shaped its inhabitants. The book is incredibly well written and thoroughly enjoyable. I gave it 4.5 stars.

When I needed an audiobook for my exercise listening, I decided to try one that many of you have read and recommended (and that was very short to boot). Grief Is the Thing with Feathers imagines a family's grief at the sudden loss of its wife and mother as a physical manifestation, a loud and troublesome crow that takes up residence in their home. I thought it was a really original and clever way to think of grief as something totally illogical and completely disruptive, but it was all a little weird. I think perhaps audio was not the best format for this, and perhaps I'll have to give it another go in print sometime. I gave it 3 stars.

As I said, Grief was a very short book (I think less than 2 hours on audio, which took even less time than that when listened to at faster-than-normal speed), so I started another book right away. This time, it was another Gabrielle Zevin novel, The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry. This novel about a widowed bookstore owner on a fictional island off Massachusetts who finds a toddler left in his store is a bit predictable and a bit unrealistic, but it's also just a lovely story that, at its heart, is a love letter to books and stories. It's no Tomorrow x3, but it was thoroughly enjoyable to listen to (even if the narrator sounded a bit snooty). I gave it 4 stars.

I'm currently reading -- still -- War and Peace, though I have officially passed the 50% mark, and I've started The Shipping News for the next Read With Us discussion. This is technically a reread for me, but the first time around I was 14 or 15, so it's a very different experience in addition to my not remembering much of it!

What are you making and reading this week?

The First Pattern of 2023

Do those of you who have been reading the blog for a while remember the days when I'd release a pattern a month? Hard to believe I used to be able to manage that. Maybe someday I'll be able to quit my full-time job and focus more on designing, but for now, I'm pretty happy with releasing patterns when I can.

My first new pattern of this year is one that's pretty simple, but I'm excited about it nonetheless. The double-ended double-thickness hat has been a big trend in the knitting world in the past couple of years. There's one pattern in particular that I'm sure you're all aware of that it seems like everyone has knit. But I have never knit one because I didn't love the crown shaping. So I knit my own version of it, knowing only the gist of how it was knit, and used the swirly crown shaping I prefer. I still wasn't entirely satisfied with how its started, and so I did some experimentation with the inside-out cast-on. Finally I "unvented" (to quote Elizabeth Zimmermann) something that worked well and looked virtually the same as a bottom-up hat finish.

And after all that, I wasn't even intending to publish what I did -- I really only was doing it to see if I could! But when I shared my finished hats on Ravelry, I had a number of people ask if would write it up as a pattern, so I did! And this morning I published it.

My version is designed to use every bit of a skein of fingering weight yarn. As you can see, it works really well with self-striping. How it's knit isn't a big mystery: You start at the center of one crown, increase until you've reached the stitch count for your size, then knit until you have just enough to knit another crown, and decrease back to the 8 stitches you started with. You'll need a scale that weighs in grams to help you use up all your yarn. It's that easy -- my tech editor even joked that she was really stretching to add some useful comments because there wasn't much to actually edit when I sent her the pattern.

The one thing that I think makes my pattern unique is the cast-on technique, which is fully explained in a photo tutorial in the pattern. I'm particularly proud of it. And I'll be using it again in my next pattern, which uses the same beginning as this pattern to create a top-down hat (with the same swirled crown) using any yarn and any gauge. I'm still debating whether to include instructions for combining the two to get a double-ended hat with any yarn, but I'm guessing many of you could figure that out on your own.

In any case, I'm happy to have this pattern out today. You'll find it on Ravelry and Payhip. And keep an eye out for the next one!

A Long Weekend (Sort of) Ahead

TGIF! This has been a strange week that has included water advisories and an unexpected school closing and a record high temperature. Work has also been a little unusual. So I'm quite happy to see Friday arrive.

It's President's Weekend here in the United States, and yesterday marked the end of Rainbow's second term of school, so she has today and Monday off. I'm working both days, but having her around and not having to leave at 3 to pick her up in the afternoon is a nice change. We've been invited to have dinner at my brother and sister-in-law's house tonight, so we will be baking challahs to take with us. 

Because of the weirdness with work, I had a couple of days where I didn't get as much crafting done as I'd hoped, but everything is moving forward. The mitten is growing very quickly; I finished the hand last night and got started on the thumb:

That locking stitch marker is indicating a little oopsie. I got a bit tangled in my knitting Wednesday evening and when the mitten fell, the needle fell out of some stitches and a few got dropped. When I picked them back up, I only realized later that I picked up a stitch in the wrong color. I didn't want to tink back (colorwork knitting in small circumferences is hard on my hands, and I do have a deadline for these), so I'm just going to duplicate stitch over that one later.

Rainbow's sock is also ready for a heel flap! I was able to get in some time on this while doing a work project (I was reading on my screen and only periodically had to type some things, so most of the time my hands were free). This isn't the most exciting project for me, but I feel like I have to knit her socks quickly if they're going to stand a chance of actually getting worn before she outgrows them, and they're fairly mindless knitting anyway.

Finally, there's the spinning, which is going slowly but steadily. It's what I've primarily been working on while reading War and Peace on my iPad. I'm closing in on finishing the first bobbin of singles.

We have no plans for the weekend other than dinner tonight, and I'm hoping that means extra crafting and reading time. The weather is supposed to be much colder, so I won't be tempted to spend more time outside, and it will be a perfect excuse to curl up with a cup of tea. Judging from the number of spring flowers I've seen coming up this week and the increasing level of birdsong I've been hearing in the mornings, our days to stay inside are dwindling. Stay cozy and have a great weekend, friends!

Unraveled, Week 7/2023

What a strange week it has been! With Rainbow being home on Monday unexpectedly and planning for her to be home on Friday (for a planned in-service day), I'm all mixed up on what day it is. But thanks to Kat's weekly Unraveling link-up, I can be sure that today is Wednesday. So, here's what I'm working on this week!

After finishing up the second combo spin skein on Sunday afternoon, I needed something to work on that evening while watching the Super Bowl, so I started a new pair of socks for Rainbow using more of the Knit Picks Felici she picked out a while back. I thought I'd so something a little different and use a tubular cast-on for these, in part to see if I could make a slight adjustment and end up with a tidier edge. All I did was make my yarnovers backwards (and then corrected how they sat on the needles on the the next round). Reducing the amount of yarn used for each yarnover ever so slightly seemed to work well -- look at this edge!

This colorway is called Friendly Skies, but I can't help to think that the one section of the stripe sequence looks like candy corn.

On Monday afternoon I wound the two skeins of handspun so I could start my mittens that evening, and all went well until I tried to start the colorwork and found that my stitch count was off (specifically, I had two more stitches than I should have had). I took another look at the chart and found the reason why. Can you spot it?

That little loopy symbol in the first and last squares on the first row of the chart is the symbol for make 1. Except that if you look closely, you'll see that the number 1 along the bottom of the chart falls not beneath the first stitch of the chart but rather below the column of row numbers. While the numbers at the bottom seem to indicate that you should have 28 stitches on each side of the mitten, you actually only need 27, so when I increased two stitches on each side, I ended up with those two extra stitches. I'm not sure how this error was missed in editing, or how the fact that the decreases also aren't indicated for the top of the mitten were also missed. These errors don't seem to appear anywhere online, either. I'll be sure to note them on my Ravelry project page. The good news is that as soon as I tinked back and removed the two extra stitches, everything was smooth sailing, and I'm now about halfway through the hand of the first mitten:

The white is waste yarn where the thumb will go.

Lest you think I'm letting my wheel sit idle, I also started a new spinning project yesterday. Remember my combo spin from last fall? I wanted to spin a bit more yarn to go with it so I could use it for a sweater, so I've pulled out last October's Southern Cross shipment, Dragon's Breath, and have split it up a bunch to mix up the colors. This will be a three-ply fingering weight (or at least I hope it will!):

I've continued to read quite a bit in the past week, but because of what I am reading (hello, brick that is War and Peace!), I have only finished one book.

Fresh Water for Flowers came highly recommended by both Katie and Mary, and it was available as both an ebook and an audiobook on Hoopla. I was out of podcasts to listen to toward the end of last week, so I opted for the audio. This translated work tells the story of Violet, a French cemetery caretaker. It's a bit of a mystery that jumps around in time as it tells the stories of her life and how she ended up caring for the final resting places of others. The book itself is quite good, but I found that my enjoyment of it was somewhat diminished by the fact that the reader was butchering all the French names and words in it. I may be a bit more sensitive to this than others because I'm trying to relearn my French, but you would think that for a book with so much of a foreign language in it, the publisher would try to find a reader who had some familiarity with that language. I wouldn't let that dissuade you from reading the book, but if mispronunciation is something that bothers you, you may want to read this with your eyes. It really is a beautiful book. I gave it 4 stars.

I'm 37% of the way through War and Peace (I've been reading while spinning, mainly) and have less than 100 pages left of The Tsar of Love and Techno. I'm reading the latter primarily before bed, so I don't get a lot read in each reading session, but I'm enjoying it so much that I may need to sit down and finish it during the day.

How about you -- what are you making and reading this week?

In the Nick of Time

It's a strange Monday morning here, but to explain why, I need to back up a bit.

Like many men, the Mister frequently gets up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom. Often I'll wake up just enough to notice he's getting up, look at the clock to see if it's time to get up or not, and then roll over and go back to sleep. In the early morning hours yesterday, the Mister got up, and as I was rolling over, I heard him making some noise in the bathroom. Then he went downstairs before coming back to get his phone. It turns out that we had almost no water pressure, and when he went to investigate, he found it wasn't an issue in our house but rather with the water utility -- a pump in the system had lost power, which caused the loss in pressure. It did come back a short time later (we could hear the tank in the toilet refilling), but when we got up, we learned that some areas of the city were under a boil water advisory (luckily not us). 

Fast-forward to yesterday afternoon, when we got an email that Rainbow's school would be closed today because it is in one of the advisory zones -- so she gets to be home with me! Hence the unusual Monday morning. I did not mind at all not having to drag her out of bed this morning!

But back to the usual blog content. Yesterday I was determined to finish up one last project for a make-along I've been involved with that went along with the NFL football season. I spent several hours at my wheel yesterday, but I did manage to finish up the second skein of my combo spin. This is a really crummy photo because I took it before the sun was fully up in order to get it entered, but here are both skeins:

The purple skein comes in at approximately 254 yards, and now I can officially say that I have plenty of yarn for the pair of mittens (Ravelry link) I have planned for it. These will be cast on very soon because they're for another make-along; I think I mentioned that I'll be heading back to SSK this summer, and there are monthly knitalongs leading up to the event featuring patterns from the teachers. This month's featured teacher is the amazing Jillian Moreno, and all of her patterns and all the patterns from her book are eligible. So I'll be doing my very best to knit up a pair before the end of the month!

For those keeping track, I've officially spun up six bags of Southern Cross Fibre shipments so far this year. That's already halfway to my goal of spinning up a total of 12! I can't imagine that I'll keep up the pace for the entire year, but I'm pretty happy with how well it's going thus far.

PSA

Hi friends! I noticed yesterday that for some reason Blogger has stopped sending me emails with your comments. I'm trying to find a fix for it, but in the meantime I wanted to post this quick message to let you know that I'm not ignoring you. I do try to respond to every comment, and that's usually by email. It seems I've now got a backlog of comments to respond to and will be working through them, so please excuse my tardiness while I try to figure out how to get things working as they should. (And if anyone who uses Blogger has had this issue in the past and knows how to solve it, please let me know!)

EDIT:

I did manage to figure out how to fix it, with some help from Bonny. I was going to delete this post, but then I figured that someone (including me) might have this same issue in the future, and it was probably more helpful to explain what I did to fix it. Most of the solutions I found online said to go into settings and to delete and then add your email under Comment notification email. But when I clicked on that, I just got a pop-up that said something like "there are no emails" and didn't give me the option to add. Instead, I had to invite myself (ha!) to receive notification emails of comments by clicking here:

Once you add the email here, you get a message in your inbox asking you to subscribe to receive blog comments, and that seems to do the trick!

Friday Finishes

How is it that the days go by so quickly but the weekend always seems to take so long to come around? That's certainly been the case this week, likely because I've had a grumpy teenager on my hands for several days (nothing major, she's just moody). So I'm looking forward to the weekend.

Yesterday ended up being a busy work day, so I'm delighted to finish up the week with a couple of finished projects. First, after speeding through all the singles of my first combo spin skein, I was able to ply and wash Wednesday afternoon. I had to play with some photo editing to get the colors to come out something close to reality for this photo (the gloom we've been having makes everything look totally washed out on camera), but here it is:

The yarn came out pretty much perfectly sport weight, which is what I was aiming for, though I only have about 238 yards in this skein, which is less than I would have expected for the amount of fiber. So the yarn is pretty dense and perhaps a tad overplied, but I am planning to use it for colorwork mittens, so both features should add to the durability. The purple fiber underneath the finished skein has now been split up into a bunch of little bundles, divided into three, and is ready to be spun to match. I plan to start that spinning today.

Just before bed last night, I finished another WIP:

I tried several times to get a photo of this on my head, but between the bad lighting and my not-so-great selfie skills, every shot was a fail. So you'll have to settle for a flat lay for now. This is my version of the Musselburgh-style hat, using the pattern that's currently with my tech editor as well as my recipe for a top-down swirl crown hat using any yarn and any gauge. I used size 4 (3.5 mm) needles for this one and used up nearly all of my yarn -- I had a heavy skein (108 g to start) and used 104 g. The hat is large enough that I can fold up the brim a couple of inches and it's still got a bit of slouch in the length. And I just love the colors. I will have to have Rainbow take a photo of me or model it for me so you can see it on an actual head.

My plan for today (assuming work cooperates) is to start spinning the purple fiber, because I'd love to have a finished skein by the end of the weekend. The Mister and I have plans to go out to dinner with some friends and my brother-in-law and sister-in-law tomorrow evening (Rainbow will be hanging out with my in-laws and her cousins), but we've got nothing else on tap, so I expect I'll be able to get a lot done. We're likely going to watch the Super Bowl, though we're not too invested in who wins (I suppose we should root for the Eagles, given that they're from the same state and I lived in Philadelphia for a number of years?). I've promised the Mister I'll make Ina's Chicken Chili, but now that he's recovered, he'll be doing the shopping again.

Here's hoping it's a good weekend for all of us. See you back here on Monday!

Unraveled, Week 6/2023

Happy hump day, friends! I'm happy to report that while the man cold hasn't fully left the house, the Mister is mostly feeling back to normal. He's gone back to work and has resumed his daily runs, both of which are key indicators of how he's feeling. I'm still sleeping in the guest/stash room for the time being, however, both to keep myself free of germs and because I know the snoring will continue to be unbearable for a while, and being in the other room has resulted in two good nights' sleep in a row.

It's Wednesday, and that means linking up with Kat and the Unravelers. I've been fairly monogamous with my crafting this week, focusing on my knitting project and one spinning project. The former is my hat, which has grown since Monday:

If you click on the photo to enlarge it, you'll see the progress keeper that I placed at the beginning of my time working on it yesterday; I got at least three inches knit up just yesterday. The scale is showing that I have 44 g of yarn left, but considering that the skein was 108 g to begin with, I am well past the halfway point. I have used the pattern that's currently with my tech editor but combined it with another that I still have to write up and get to her that is more of a recipe for a top-down spiral-crown hat using any yarn/any gauge. Writing that up is on my to-do list for this weekend.

What I've really been into this week has been my combo spin -- I've already finished half of the singles!

I'm really excited to see how this looks plied, and it's highly likely that plying will happen today.

I've finished two books since this time last week, one hit and one miss.

Chouette had been on my radar for a while; I know many of you have already read it, and I'd heard some good reviews. So I borrowed the audio from Hoopla. I was really confused at first. I didn't know if the main character was meant to be having a psychotic break, if having an owl baby was meant to be a metaphor for having a baby with several disabilities and special needs, or if the story in general was meant to be a rather extreme metaphor for how becoming a parent changes you. The author's note on Goodreads explained a lot to me, but I can't say it helped me to enjoy the book much more than I was. I will say that it was inventive and the writing was good, but I found it to be just too weird for me. I gave it 2 stars.

A much better read for me was Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times. I had bought the Kindle version of this book when it was on sale a month or so ago, and I'd been waiting for the right moment to get to it. This book was pure delight. May talks about the concept of "wintering" -- allowing the body to rest and replenish at difficult times, just as nature does during the winter -- in the context of challenging times in her own life. I found her writing and her stories to be so soothing. It felt like the reading equivalent of sitting with a cup of hot tea, wrapped in a warm blanket, and watching the snow fall. I am glad I purchased it, because I can easily see myself rereading it multiple times. I gave it 4 stars.



I am currently reading two books. First, The Tsar of Love and Techno, Anthony Marra's collection of interrelated short stories, which came highly recommended by Kym and which I purchased a copy of at my local bookstore last summer. That's my bedtime reading, and it's been delightful thus far. And I've also finally started my Big Russian Buddy Read with Katie by starting War and Peace. I'm reading the Kindle version, which annoyingly does not give page numbers, only "position" in the book (I hate that!), but supposedly I am 14% through it. 

Yesterday I also finally signed up for StoryGraph, something I've been meaning to do for a while. Are you on the site? I'm there as fiberreader -- feel free to connect with me if you are.

What are you making and reading this week?