New things are afoot on both the page and the needles. I have a new stripey sock started, and I’m sure you can see why I’m excited by it. I’ll give you details about the yarn next week; the tag is in one bag, but the yarn was in another, and I don’t feel like hunting right this moment.

I finished Veronica Speedwell and could move on to Charlotte Holmes. This is the most recent in Sherry Thomas’ excellent series, but there’ll be a new installment in the fall. It’s nice when favorite authors publish works in time for birthday and Christmas gifts.

I also wrapped up the audiobook I’d been listening tonight while I was knitting. Tomorrow I’ll be starting up The Bounty, the latest in the Fox and O’Hare heist series by Janet Evanovich and friends (this time Steve Hamilton). I haven’t liked the series as much since she stopped collaborating with Lee Goldberg, but Hamilton is pretty well-respected in his own right, so maybe this will be an improvement on the last book, which she wrote with her son.

A couple years ago, Rudi and I found ourselves at the beach on a very breezy day. I didn’t think much of it and enjoyed the day for what it was, reading my library book as usual. Until we got to the end of the day and it was time to pack up, when I went to close my library book and found I couldn’t. So much sand had blown in between the pages as I’d read it that it no longer lay flat. I literally ended up pouring sand out of the plastic cover and shaking out each page before it even remotely resembled something I could return to the library in good faith.

So this week, when faced with a breezy forecast, I brought two books to the beach. One, An Unexpected Peril, was my current read, a new book of which I am the first reader of the library copy. There was a breeze, albeit a gentle one, so I opted to keep it in my bag. Instead, I started Silva Moreno-Garcia’s Gods of Jade and Shadow, which I procured from a Little Free Library sometime in the last year. Set in Mexico in the 1920s, it focuses on a teen girl who accidentally frees a Mayan god from a locked trunk in her grandfather’s room and who then must help him on a quest in order to save her own life. So far, so good.

On the knitting front, I’m down to a handful of rows on my Smock Madness socks, so I decided to pull out Wohin?, the pair of socks I didn’t finish from Sock Madness 2020. I only made it halfway through the heel flap before the world started to shut down and with it my desire to knit. I’ve done nothing more than find the UFO, so I have no info on whether this is the right project to tackle next or not, but I figured I’d at least take a look.

Head to As Kat Knits for the weekly roundup of reading and crafting.

Say hello to my Winter 2021 Stripey Socks:

They were knit in Havirland Pax Socks in the Holiday Hangover colorway on US 1.5 dpns.

I started them in mid-January, finished knitting them in early March, and finally got around to weaving in the ends on Palm Sunday.

They are perfect for wearing to (but not really on) the beach on a bright spring day, and I love how happy they make me.

It’s been several weeks worth of days so far this week, so neither the sock nor the book has changed since Sunday.

With last week’s realization that I’d need to figure out how to solve my Sock Madness socks, I decided to spend some time revisiting old projects and wrapping them up. Maybe this weekend you’ll get some modeled stripey socks. If I’m productive, you might also get these Smock Madness. I’m a repeat away from the toe decreases, which means less than two hours until two finished pairs this week. That would be a nice feeling.

I’m also wrapping up some books that I’ve had lingering around the house and that the library is now adamant about wanting back. Sal and Gabi Break the Universe is a perfectly enjoyable middle-grade read (thanks for the recommendation, Rebs!), and, in any other situation, I’d have been done with it right after I borrowed it from the library. This being what it is, it keeps getting put aside and buried under work and whatnot near my couch.

Head over to As Kat Knits to see what others are reading and crafting.

So … Sock Madness 2021 … We can now officially chalk it up as the year I wasn’t paying attention.

See how we have two flowers next to each other?

We should not. They should be set off from one another, by half, so that they alternate down the leg like garden stepping stones, rather than like the rectangles of a hopscotch board. I just absolutely read the pattern wrong, which is a little irksome because I thought to myself that if I’d been designing this pattern I would have alternated them … exactly the way the designer did … rather than spacing the flower rows out by a couple dozen twisted rib rows.

It’s fine. I had already missed a smock on the other side, which would have eliminated me from competition anyway. But now I am left with the decision of what to do with the sock. Obviously it would be silly to keep knitting it the way I thought the pattern had been written, since I already didn’t think it should be done that way. I could rip it back to the start of the first flower and knit it right. In the grand scheme of things, I haven’t gone far past it, but I do not love twisted stitches and would prefer not to redo a couple dozen rows. I could decide I’m doing a variation, with a row of flowers at the top, not dissimilar from a band of colorwork and then just alternate from the nearest spot it makes sense to begin down the leg, which could look a little wonky with flowers that close together vertically, but also might look fine. I could come up with some other sort of variation that stops the twisted stitches once I get to the foot. Or, I could rip back to the cuff, which is pretty and not so many twisted stitches I would resent having to replicate them on a second sock and knit some other pattern down the leg. Thoughts? Other ideas?

I started Ring the Hill tonight and have not gotten very far, because I’m having to stop myself from wanting to tweet out/highlight gems of quotes every couple paragraphs. I’m in a bit of a reading funk, so finding something where I like the language is helpful, but not really for finishing a book quickly. I’m also still listening to The Midnight Library, but it’s also not hooked me so much that I want to listen nonstop.

If you want to see what others are knitting and reading, head over to As Kat Knits for the weekly roundup.