Tonight has been an evening of starts and finishes. I plowed through the final 100 pages of Katie Fforde’s Practically Perfect, a sweet romance set in an English village where Anna has just bought a cottage she’s renovating. There’s not a lot in the way of character development, particularly once you reach the secondary characters, but I didn’t mind. It wasn’t overly treacly, and I found myself missing the characters when I opted to take a different book with me to Connecticut last weekend.

While in Connecticut I finished the cowl I was test knitting (and which I’ll share with you once I have the designer’s go-ahead to do so), so needed either to cast on something new or pick up something old. I opted for both by pulling out my Lightning Shawl, which is knit in strips. Yes, I did cast on the next strip just for the sake of the blog post. And, yes, it took me three tries to realize that I’d used a different cast-on than what I’d expected on the previous strips. But we’re good now (I hope) and it’s not out of the question that this could be done in time to take with me to Hungary as a completed accessory.

There has been no knitting the last few days. I was washing the mandolin on Monday night and sliced my finger with it. It wasn’t especially deep, but it’s taking its time healing since it’s right where I keep opening it back up by typing and washing.

Hopefully, we’ll be back in the saddle again tomorrow or so. When we are, I’ll be casting on a new pair of socks in this yarn, The Fiberists’ Audubon Sport in the Cornus florida colorway:

I’m still working my way through Signed, Sealed, Delivered, reading a chapter every few days. I’m enjoying reading about letters through history. Tonight’s chapter talked about how letters have been used to convict/implicate suspects in crimes, including the Lindbergh baby kidnapping. I put Neil Patrick Harris’ Choose Your Own Autobiography down for a few days in favor of tearing through the first volume of Ms. Marvel (loved it!), but I anticipate being done with it by Sunday, given NPH’s breezy style and the short “chapters.”

Yarning along about books and crafting with Ginny.
 

Look! It’s actual knitting I’ve done this week! I mean, it’s a pathetic amount (and horribly lit, sorry about that), but given how little I’ve knit the last month, I’m pleased. Plus, because it’s a test knit of a cowl pattern, I know it’ll get done in the next couple weeks.

The book I started over the weekend as I was nearing the end of a couple others. It’s Nina Bankovitch’s Signed, Sealed, Delivered: Celebrating the Joys of Letter Writing. I’m only through the introduction and first chapter, but I’m enjoying it so far.

I’m actively reading two books right now. The Amazing Thing about the Way It Goes: Stories of Tidiness, Self-Esteem and Other Things I Gave up On is Stephanie Pearl-McPhee’s 2014 book essays. They feature her typical humorous, yet poignant approach to storytelling, but this time are about things other than knitting. The two essays I read tonight, for instance, were about competing in hurdles back in school and the importance of photos. One or two in a day is about my speed, though, so the book, although small, is lasting me a few days, which is nice. The fiction I’m working on is 2 a.m. at the Cat’s Pajamas by Marie-Helene Bertino. Set around the holidays in modern Philadelphia, it’s the story of a young girl, who’s recently lost her mother and whose father is having issues coping, who wants to sing and the jazz club she discovers is not especially far away. It’s told in alternating points of view from a few different people, including one of her teachers and the club owner, in short chapters according to the time and I haven’t quite figured out how it’s all going to fit together into a cohesive whole. It appeared on several best-of lists last year, though, so I’m hopeful that it does.

I haven’t been knitting much at all the last couple months. I’ve been feeling down and getting past where I’m stuck on every in-progress project seems insurmountable. I know that dealing with that is a two-pronged approach (1) Start a new project and 2) pick one work-in-progress and knit a few rows on it each day until stops being hard/stuck/not done.), but I just haven’t had it in me to match up yarn, needles, and pattern.

I have been poking around Ravelry, though, and one of the designers I follow had a bunch of patterns she wanted test-knit by early February. One of them was a scalloped cowl that seemed more than reasonable to accomplish in three weeks, so I contacted her and downloaded the pattern this evening. I think I’m going to knit it in this pretty single-ply from Plain & Fancy Sheep Company, but we’ll see how it feels once it’s wound up. I also pulled out my Lightning Shawl and may see about making it my first reinstated project of the year.

Yarning along with Ginny.

Sunday night I wrote this post and hit publish and, in a rare turn of events for WordPress, it immediately disappeared into the ether. I didn’t have it in me to rewrite it that night, but I wanted to get it in today.

My final knit item of the year was my pair of Stripey Christmas socks:

The main yarn is Beyond Basic Knits Stripey Superwash Sock in Vintage Holiday. The heels are knit from Hazel Knits Artisan Socks in Shannypants, left over from a hat I made an important baby five years ago. And I’m not certain, but the yarn I ended up using for the toes might have been Dye Dreams Dream Sox in Cranberry (but there’s a lot of ball left, which I think means it’s probably something else, with an AWOL tag). I used US 1s.

I started this pair of socks last November, knit through the holiday season of 2013-14 and put the socks away just shy of the toe, because I couldn’t find yarn that matched the red stripe. I picked them back up in August, and finished the first sock that day. I knit the second sock off and on in October, but put off Kitchnering the toe until right before Sarah and Megan’s Christmas party on the Solstice. Yes, I am lazy.

The stripes match and I’m pleased with how they turned out.

The Vintage Holiday was a short skein I picked up at a fiber festival Sarah and I went to a number of years ago, and I didn’t want to run out of yarn, so I made the first sock leg shorter than I usually opt for. As it turns out, with the toes and heels knit out of other yarn, I had more than enough and could have gone for my usual length, but it’s fine. If I lived in New England, I’d have to come up with a way to tack a couple inches in there to make sure my legs weren’t cold. Since I live in D.C., though, our December weather is still mild and short socks are fine here at this time of year.

Corey thinks I should have knit him something instead.

I’m in a funk and find myself unwilling or unable or unmotivated to pick up the needles and finish the thumb gusset portion of the fingerless mitt you saw a couple weeks ago. It looks not especially different from that shot, except that I tinked back to where I should have started the gusset increases when I was knitting on it last year and have knit that ripped yarn back up.

Usually when I hit this point in a project it means I ought to be working on something else, but a) I don’t especially want to work on anything else and b) I wanted these gloves done this year so I could wear them for the Christmas season, which now measures three more weeks. So I should just suck it up, buckle down, and finish them. We’ll see how that goes…

The good news is that I have not suffered from similar problems with my reading. Yes, it’s slowed down some from the pace I had earlier this fall, but I’m still on pace to surpass my goal of reading 60 books this year.

Delancey (my apologies for the incorrectly focused shot) was written by Molly Wizenberg, who writes the cooking blog Orangette and co-hosts the food podcast Spilled Milk. I don’t remember how I stumbled across her blog, but I follow a handful of food writers and she is one of them. She has a light style that I appreciate, and when she and fellow food writer Matthew Amster-Burton decided to talk about food in an audio format, Rudi and I took to it right away, enjoying their humor and their willingness to visit any subject, from less common apple varieties to the junk food of the 1980s. I did not read Molly’s first book, but Delancey is a) about opening a pizza restaurant and b) has appeared on several best-of lists, so I figured I’d give it a shot. It seemed particularly timely since Rudi is currently trying to figure out what his career dreams look like from here in our 40s and how to get himself on the pathway to achieve them. I’m hoping that seeing how another couple worked through it will prove enlightening, at the very least, if not helpful.

Not yarning along with Ginny.