Welcome to Day 7 of the Virtual Advent Tour!

Today’s host is raidergirl3, who takes us out on a tour of some of the lights of her Prince Edward Island town, at her blog, an adventure in reading. Incidentally, did you know raidergirl3 is the only original participant of the Virtual Advent Tour still playing along? She’s written nine posts since the event began a decade ago. (2014 was an off-year in between hosts.) And I won’t swear to it, but that first tour post may be how she and I “met.”

Thank you, raidergirl3, both for today’s post and for continuing to take part in the tour!

Check back here tomorrow for the next stop on the Virtual Advent Tour. And if you’re interested in taking part in the tour, badges, details, and sign-up info can be found here. We’d love to have you participate.

There’s less than a month until Christmas, which means all the current projects are gifts I can’t show you. I can, however, show you my latest finished project, my Christmas mitts!

I cast these on three years ago to be a pair of socks when I realized that the other stripy Christmas yarn I had, which has white stripes as well as red and green, would not hide the grime of holding onto Metro escalators nearly as well as this pair. So I switched things up and these became a pair of improvised fingerless mitts, and the other yarn became socks.

Last Christmas I bound off the first one with a sewn picot bind-off similar to the cast on I’d used, but I wasn’t happy with it. This year, I ripped that back and experimented with a different picot bind-off. Then I ripped it back again to get a unified color bind-off. And once more to add in some seed stitch in that final stripe to try to control the rolling. (It wasn’t successful.) I will give it the season to see if I can live with it, and if I can’t, I’ll try to come up with a new solution next year. I also bound off the thumb at least three times, trying to find a non-ridiculous solution to that with a picot, but eventually conceded it was beyond my ken and just did a garter bind-off.

I also had to duplicate stitch over the thumb join on the second mitt when I rejoined the yarn in red, rather than the green of the first one and didn’t notice until after I’d sewn in all the ends. I can see I’ve done it, but I don’t think the casual observer would notice.

The yarn is Beyond Basic Knits Stripey Superwash Sock in an undisclosed colorway. She seems to have shuttered her shop since I bought this yarn at the Shenandoah Valley Fiber Festival back in 2009. I probably only used half the skein, so there could be more Christmassy knits in my future, particularly since there was yarn leftover from the socks, too.

There was not a ton of time for reading last week, so I didn’t finish either book I was working on, What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours by Helen Oyeyemi and The Girl Who Drank the Moon by Kelly Barnhill. I did start three new books this week, though, to add to the collection: Jay Asher’s new Christmas YA novel, What Light, about a girl growing up on a Christmas tree farm; Dear Data, a nonfiction art book of weekly postcards exchanged between two visual data compilers, Giorgia Lupi and Stefanie Posavec; and Jane and the Twelve Days of Christmas by Stephanie Barron. I’m listening to that last one, part of a historical fiction mystery series starring author Jane Austen as the sleuth. I started that series years ago, but got sidetracked from it. I recommended it as a seasonal read to someone from my Twitter book club last year and she enjoyed it, so I decided to give it a go myself out of sequence this Christmas.

Yarning along with Ginny at Small Things.