Today kind of felt like summer, so I thought I’d share an FO from July (!!):

This is my Lazy Katy Shawl, designed by Birgit Freyer.

It’s knit with pretty much a whole skein of Lang Yarns Jawoll Magic Dégradé in colorway 85.0059.

I liked the yarn and loved the colors, but was irritated by the fact that the yarn had broken at the factory, and a knot had been tied, breaking the color patterning. I should have done something about it, but I literally just shoved the tied bit to the back of the piece and kept going. By the time I realized that was a dumb thing to have done, it was inches later and I decided I could live with it.

I cast on back in April and finished it up as part of my Tour de France knitalong on July 26. (I particularly love the lacy edging.)

The photos are from my parents’ garden, which is truly spectacular in the summertime.

Now I just need the weather to feel more like November so I want to wear a wool shawl!

I’m between portable knitting projects again, which means I’ve picked up my Lightning Shawl again. But I’ve been eyeing hat patterns on Ravelry (Remember when I declared 2015 would be my year of hats? I haven’t knit one.), so maybe that will be cast on in the next few days.

On the reading front, in addition to Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, which is my audiobook of the moment, I have the three blue books you see here in progress:

Hotel Bosphorus is a mystery set in contemporary Turkey and features the owner of a mystery-themed bookstore. The Thing about Jellyfish is a highly touted middle-grade read that had me tearing up on page 19 and full-out bawling by page 50, which led me to pick up Come Hell or Highball, about a 31-year old Long Island widow who takes up sleuthing after the death of her (it turns out) no-longer-so-rich husband. (I was hoping for Nora Charles or Phryne Fisher, but I don’t think she’ll be as charming or funny as either one, although, to be fair, Nora is both smarter and less interesting on the page than on the screen.)

That, there, is a photo by someone who was very tired. So tired, in fact, that after she took the picture, she uploaded the photo, opened the laptop, and then dozed off without writing a post to merit the shot.

The sock, which is inside-out because I haven’t finished weaving in the ends, is the first of my Halloween socks. I hope to get some serious knitting done on sock #2 over the next few days so I can wear them a decent amount for the rest of the season.

I’m also hoping to finish Julie Murphy’s Dumplin’ this weekend. I meant to get more reading done while up in Connecticut, but there’s just never enough time when visiting. I’m enjoying the story so far: it features an overweight teen girl who is (apparently) going to decide to try out for the local beauty pageant run by her mother. The book’s gotten great reviews in the YA book community, so I’m excited to see if the buzz is deserving.

Belatedly yarning along with Ginny at Small Things.

I’m a day late for Ginny’s Wednesday Yarn-Along, but I’m posting here and now anyway. Better to publish a few hours behind everyone else than just in my head, which is where an awful lot of writing happens these days (book reviews, for example).

You can see there this year’s fall/Halloween socks, made in Knitterly Things’ Candy Corn colorway. It’s the traditional picot-edged 64-stitch stockinette sock that I favor for fast, public, self-striping knitting. That’s sock #1, which I started at the beginning of the month and then got ripped out and restarted over the weekend. I have probably another inch or so of legging before I start the heel. I had a long, boring work meeting yesterday, and some reading time the other night, which made for a lot of fast progress. Here’s hoping to being done by the end of the month!

On the reading front, I’ve been listening to final Harry Potter novel in my audio re-read of the series. It has to be returned today (and Overdrive is excellent at making sure I don’t keep books past their borrowing time), so I’ve paused just before our favorite trio head out to the Ministry of Magic. It seemed like the only safe place to leave them until it becomes available to borrow again.

I am still plodding through Unrivaled, which I keep reading out of loyalty to the subject matter (the rivalry between the UConn and Tennessee women’s basketball teams) rather than to the book itself. The author was a journalist who covered UConn’s women’s beat and it feels like much of the book is pasted together from contemporaneous media interviews/stories, rather than analysis or interviews with former players, fans, etc. I’m up to 2000 and the era of UConn basketball I loved best (the teams that included Sue, Svet, Shea, and Diana), though, so that’s something.

Ana of California is a book I feel a lot of you might enjoy, although admittedly I’m only a quarter of the way into it. It’s a modern retelling of Anne of Green Gables, focused on Ana, a mouthy 15-year-old Latina foster kid from Los Angeles who loves reading, drawing, and music and who’s run out of options in the system. She’s got one final shot, a month-long trial placement working on an organic farm upstate run by a pair of middle-aged siblings. But she’s not the boy the brother was expecting to help him run the farm and his crew of workers, so will it work out or will Ana be forced into juvie until she’s of age? You’ve read the original, you know what happens, and you totally won’t care because this version stands on its own, relying more on Neil Young lyrics than Tennyson quotations than in L.M. Montgomery’s classic.

I have a few finished knits from last month to show you, but that will be later this week. In the meantime, August is the annual Sockdown in Ravelry’s Sock Knitters Anonymous group, wherein we all work on clearing off our needles by finishing lingering sock projects. I have two I’d like to finish, with two more as a stretch goal. This is the second of Rudi’s pair of 2×2 ribbed mummy socks. I’ve got about an inch more of leg before I start the heel flap.

On the reading front, a weekend away meant that my audiobook, Amy Poehler’s Yes, Please, expired before I was able to finish the last few chapters. As the weekend was otherwise delightful, I have no regrets and have re-requested it from the library. I hope it’ll be back before the end of the month, since I’d like to count it in my library summer reading totals.

I took Dietland up to Connecticut with me, but didn’t get much read. I did spend a lovely hour or two in the park this evening reading it, though. And I picked up Circus Mirandus at the library today after a dentist appointment when I didn’t have a book to read on the train trip back across town. I am optimistic about both of them, although in decidedly different ways.

I finished the final chapter of Saint Mazie earlier tonight, so it’s on to a new book tomorrow. Another work of historical fiction, All the Light We Cannot See, already read by so many of you, is probably next up, although I have several other choices if it doesn’t grab me.

Having finished my two-at-a-time socks over the weekend, I’m back to working on my Lazy Katy shawlette. I’m working on completing works-in-progress and unfinished objects for my annual Tour de France knitalong contenders (the polka dot jersey, in case you were wondering). I’ve got less than nine rows to go in the lace border, and then I’ll be done with this project. I’m excited. You should see some other long-neglected projects next week.

Yarning along with Ginny.