Sock Madness, the sock knitting competition I enter each March and rarely advance through the play-in round, commenced on Saturday with the pattern Senbonzakura by Natalia Vasilieva. It has smocked stitches and beads and twisted stitches meant to create an overall effect of cherry trees in spring.

I’m using a skein of Hobbledehoy sock yarn in the colorway “Crosswords,” which I’m finding to be a pleasantly round, bouncy yarn. It tolerates the tiny crochet hook I use to add beads well. The beads are blue-tinted with a silver core and they were the best of the batch I had on hand against the variegation and red undertones (overtones?) of the yarn.

(You can see the four Rudi and I gave serious consideration to. The clear ended up not being right, the blue was just too blue, the red was matte and I didn’t love it as much as I wanted, and then there’s the silvery blue I picked.)

And, yes, I am already significantly behind where I should be if I want to advance. It’s great if I move on and also fine if I don’t. Either way, I should have a great pair of socks at some point.

I started From the Desk of Zoe Washington by Janae Marks this evening. It’s a middle-grade novel about a girl who, on her 12th birthday, gets a letter from her birth father in prison. It’s the first one she’s ever received from him, but his letter suggests there have been others through the years. I look forward to finding out what happens next.

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

I spent a portion of today, poking through my yarn stash and looking for a skein for the first pattern of Sock Madness. I thought I was hunting for a solid yarn, since between the twisted stitches and the smocking, there’s a lot going on. But then I came across a skein of purple, pink, grey, and white yarn (the one in the middle below) in a colorway called “Crossword” and there could be no other choice. Sometimes the universe speaks to you and it’s up to you to be listening.

I suppose it may turn out that the yarn is still wrong for the pattern, or, rather, that the pattern is wrong for the yarn. Because short of a yarn called “Muriel” suddenly appearing in my stash, this is what I’m meant to be knitting with today.

(If I need to find a new skein, I also kept out a couple skeins in pink/red that work for a pattern that means roughly “a thousand cherry trees” and that can be cast back on on Monday.)

I’m not quite sure how I missed processing it was Wednesday until now. But it is. Or was. I’m glad the weekend is a day closer, but am not happy that I misplaced an evening in there, particularly one I usually enjoy.

As you can see, it’s been a productive week for knitting. I’ve been trying to knit during meetings in which I take more of a listening role than a presenting one, and that’s definitely helped. Also, the tail end of Recipe for Persuasion was great for knitting while reading, which really can’t be done when reading books with fraught conclusions. (It messes with my tension.) I’m into my last set of colors before I start the toe decreases, so there’s the possibility I’ll have a new pair of socks by the weekend.

Sock Madness begins sometime in the next two days, and I have several weekends with more me time than usual coming up because Rudi’s ski team has some end-of-season races that he needs to coach. I haven’t finished the timed round the past few years, but maybe the extra alone time will motivate me to knit faster. Or it won’t, and I’ll just move on to another project — like last year’s unfinished pair … or 2019’s.

I know I said last week that I was going to move on next to a novel set during spring training, but I wasn’t able to renew Undercover Bromance, so I decided to pick it back up and see if I liked it any more than I did the first grumpy night I tried to read it. The two main protagonists are now on each other’s radar, so I’ll give it two more chapters to get its act together, but I still may ditch it.

I’m also listening to The Midnight Library, which two local Twitter book pals loved and which Karen decidedly did not. It struggles to live up to its selling point — who amongst us wouldn’t like to try on the alternate stories of our lives if we’d made different choices? The author does too much telling and not enough showing, and the protagonist’s life spiral is rushed in an effort to get us to the most interesting part of the story quickly — and thus seems a little insulting to those of us who struggle with mental health issues. But as I wrote earlier this week, I’ve been doing a lot of self-rumination recently, so the concept is pulling me through so far.

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

Look! It’s the start of a second sock. Now if only work weren’t back to being so stressful that I can’t keep my eyes open in the evening, I might get further. (That fact doesn’t bode well for my progression in Sock Madness, which kicks off next week.)

To go along with a shorter attention span, a graphic novel (in translation) about a rebellious princess who would rather be off on adventures than learning her royal lessons.

Saturday was a particularly productive evening for sock knitting, so I now have half a pair of socks.

I am still reading Recipe for Persuasion, but since catchers and pitchers have officially reported for duty in Florida and Arizona, I thought it was time to turn my attention toward a spring training novel, The Cactus League by Emily Nemens. I’m looking forward to starting it this week.

Head over to As Kat Knits for a reading/crafting roundup.

I’ve been lazy this past week. (To be fair, I suppose there was also a lot of work, cake baking, and a visit with an old friend. But still… ) Please see last week’s post for the most recent knitting and reading works-in-progress. I’m a little further along in both, but really not enough to bother boring you with a photo.

I have a four-day weekend coming up, though, so I do anticipate having new progress to show you next week.