I’m up to the heel on my cheery In the Wildwood socks, which I should be able to put a good dent in during a meeting tomorrow. Should that go fine (with the striping), it will have been a good decision to move to these socks. If not, they will join a list of projects that I need to deal with. Keep your fingers crossed for me.

As for the reading, it’s been Killers of the Flower Moon and Little Fires Everywhere, which is now the second “literary book with surprise twist” that everyone’s been talking about that I’m pretty sure I have figured out from near the get-go. I don’t know if this comes from a background of reading mysteries or if literary writers just really aren’t that good at writing plot twists. Or maybe Celeste Ng is and I will be totally shocked that what I think has happened in the past didn’t actually happen.

I’ve also been listening to The Bear and the Nightingale, but that’s expiring tomorrow without my having finished it, so I’ll have to wait for my turn to come around again. Hopefully it won’t be terribly long, but luckily it’s YA Sync season, so I have new audiobook downloads to listen to every week for free and Norse Mythology came back around for download tonight.

Head over to As Kat Knits for more books and knitting.

This weekend was the Maryland Sheep & Wool Festival, and today I drove myself north to have some fun.

I arrived earlier than I have in years, just after 2, which gave me slightly under 3 hours to soak up the whole festival. Even with that, I still didn’t have enough time to see the last section of vendors, so I’m thinking next year I should aim for an hour earlier.

The first thing I did was head inside the animal barns. While some are quieter than others, generally these are busy, loud places. Farmers are shearing sheep. Sheep are bleating. Announcers are calling for animals and their handlers to get into place for judging.

They want to make sure everyone looks their best:

There were adult sheep:

And there were lambs:

I was able to catch the final sheepdog demonstration of the day. The shepherd who runs it has brought a new partner on and the two women had six dogs to help with the task, ranging in age from one year old to 14. Each of them felt that they should be the dog to keep those sheep in check and were quick to judge their compatriots’ work.

Then, it was off to look at yarn. There was a lot of yarn. I didn’t take pictures of most them. I also didn’t take photos of the plant vendors, where I bought tomatoes, peppers, tomatillos, potatoes, and basil.

Finally, as I promised, I didn’t go looking for yarn, but my plan was to remain open to a skein or two speaking to me. Well, here’s the one that shot straight to my heart:

This is Coquette Sock Yarn from Bumblebee Acres Fiber Farm. It’s a Corriedale/nylon blend. And the obvious reason this yarn was able to call out to me? The colorway is Soot Sprites 💜 Rainbows.

It’s like they knew me, don’t you think?

Look how cheerful my new sock is! I haven’t had enough time to sit with it to make a ton of progress, but I’m carrying it around with me and knitting on it a few minutes at a time and that’s enough right now.

On the reading front, I am listening to Katherine Arden’s The Bear and the Nightingale, which folks in my book group compared to Uprooted, which I loved. It’s unclear thus far whether that’s just because it’s set in Eastern Europe and fantastical or if there are more meaningful comparisons that will become obvious later on.

I am nearly done with Morgan Parker’s poetry collection, There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé. It’s full of sex and the music and the Black female experience, both positive and negative, and I recommend reading it.

I have started Down and Across by Arvin Ahmadi, but ran straight into the problem that a lot of books that are set in a place you know really well experience and that’s the incongruenties with your lived reality. The book references early on row houses on M Street. M Street in the section of D.C. where the story is taking places, is exclusively a retail section. And I know this is a minor detail and that I’ll get past it, but it just grated and something else came along in the meantime that I’m enjoying too much for me to go back to.

That something is A Dash of Trouble, the first in a planned series called Love Sugar Magic, a middle grade story of brujas who run a bakery and the youngest sister who stumbles onto the family secret a little earlier than she’s supposed to. This was also recommended to me from my book club (and apparently I have a fondness for magic bakery stories), and so, when I found it during Independent Bookstore Day blurbed by my favorite D.C. bookseller as being her favorite new series since Harry Potter, I bought myself a copy.

Next up (as soon as I remember to retrieve it from the bedroom when Rudi’s not sleeping in there) will be fellow Conn alum David Grann’s Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI, which has won many accolades and which I hear is the sort of narrative nonfiction I particularly like. It’s a little more grisly than my normal reading, but is in keeping with the sort of books I read in college and grad school (when a lot of my studies focused on marginalized American cultures), so I’m hoping I can handle it.

As usual, head over to As Kat Knits for more of what folks are reading and crafting.

Sometimes when I find myself getting stuck in a reading rut, I opt to return to an old favorite. When I was young, it was Little Women or, less often, Anne of Green Gables. These days it’s the Harry Potter series. Because it is familiar in a comforting way, but no matter how many times I read it, I find something new in it, whether it’s because different details pop out at me or because I’m a slightly different person than I was the last time I read it.

As I said yesterday, I’m feeling stuck with my knitting. And, to be honest, none of what I’m currently reading has grabbed my soul either. So while yes, I do want to finish all the things I’m knitting and some of the things I’m reading (and need to do so soon in some cases), a change was in order.

I could head back to Harry, but the version I want to read now is the illustrated one, which does not lend itself to Metro reading. So I’ve picked up Down and Across, a book Jenn recommended last year and which I bought months ago after hearing the author read from it and which takes place partly in my neighborhood. I’ve completely abandoned Amelia Peabody (the thing I liked best about the book was the narrator; otherwise the story reminded me of an overly long Scooby Doo episode with about the same level of sophistication). Instead I’ve started Katherine Arden’s The Bear and the Nightingale, which folks in my book group have compared to Uprooted, which I loved, and which I’ve enjoyed the first two chapters of tonight while washing dishes and doing some other nighttime chores.

The Harry Potter equivalent in my knitting world is stripey socks. And, yes, you would be right that the Posey socks are also stripey, but they are tinged with sadness, I think, and while I will definitely return to them — and not too far in the future — I needed something that made my heart sing with joy and that tonight was Knitterly Things’ Vesper Sock in In The Wild Wood, with stripes of verdant green, calming brown, and brilliant fuchsia. They are the colors of the azaleas that are coming into season right now and I think they’ll be just what I need to spring clean my soul and give it some space to return to other projects.

Sometimes it’s necessary to power through a problem, but sometimes it’s good to remind yourself that it might not really be a problem unless you make it one yourself.

Onward!

I finished Strange the Dreamer over the weekend, so I’ve returned to Sing, Unburied, Sing as my main book, since it needs to get back to the library this week in order to avoid a fine. Happily, it finally seems to have picked up its pace, so I think I should be able to read more than 10 pages at a time. I’m once again listening to Crocodile on the Riverbank, but am seriously considering abandoning it. If you like the Amelia Peabody books, please tell me why, because it feels like between the racism and the obvious bad guys that this book should fade into oblivion. And I read pieces of short stories from Kidnapped! Abductions in Time, Space, and Fantasy when I feel like sitting at my laptop for an additional ten minutes at a time.

You’ll notice no knitting in this photo. I’ve got nothing new to show. I’m stuck. Nothing interests me, except for the hat, for which I need to acquire the beads I want (rather than what the bead store has) in order to move forward. I know once I get past the heel with the Posey socks those should get me unstuck, but I admit that I’m contemplating just casting on a new pair of socks in the meantime. I know I’m feeling grumpy toward my knitting right now because my knitting is feeling grumpy toward me. Time will fix it all, I’m sure. If not, there’s no shortage of yarn in this apartment to try something new with.

Head over to As Kat Knits to see what else folks are working on.

I am stalled on several knitting projects, having not yet bought the beads I need to move on with the hat and having found a fatal flaw in the green stripey socks that will require ripping back to before the heel flap. So here I show you the knitting project I’ve already done the ripping on that’s ready to move forward. I bought some grey yarn to make heels from, so now I can get knitting on my Posey socks once more.

I spent the weekend reading Obsidio, so that’s one 600+-page book down and now I can finish Strange the Dreamer, which will let me check off the second one on my list. Both Sing, Unburied, Sing and We Were Eight Years in Power are both overdue, so I need to wrap them both up and get them back to the library. I’ve enjoyed listening to Norse Mythology, but it’s going to expire from my Overdrive app before I finish it, so I’ll need to wait to conclude my audiobook experience, but Crocodile on the Sandbank, Flat Broke with Two Goats, and The Bear and the Nightingale are all checked out to me for faunal listening. Finally, I’m reading my friend’s book, Kidnapped! Abductions in Space, Time, and Fantasy by Danny Atwood et al, on my laptop because that’s what you do when loved ones publish ebooks. I don’t particularly love short story collections and find they work best for me if I space the stories out with a couple days in between them, so that’s what I’m doing. So far, I’m liking it and recommend it if you do like short stories, particularly in the fantasy/sci fi vein.

Head over to As Kat Knits to read what else people are reading and knitting.