Here are some things I’m hoping to do this cold first weekend in January:

1. Read Turtles All the Way Down.
2. Visit the library.
3. Send the last of the Christmas cards. (Honestly! This is just sad at this point!)
4. Do laundry.
5. Watch a movie. Maybe The Showman or The Post.
6. Bake something.
7. Visit the bookstore to make a return.
8. Go to the farmers market.
9. Get some sleep.
10. Celebrate Russian Christmas.

How about you? What do you have planned this weekend?

Three beautiful things from my past week:

1. First I notice her cat-ear headband, which turns out to be part of her ear muffs. Then I notice her jewel-toned, plaid, flannel, high-top Chucks.

2. As lovely as it was to spend time with my folks and Karen, it was really nice to crawl into bed with Rudi and our cats.

3. My 24-year-old car aced its inspection.

How about you? What’s been beautiful in your world lately?

I’ll round up some photos of my finished knitting projects of 2017 over the weekend and do a look back, but in the meantime, I’ve been contemplating what I’d like to do this coming year.

Whatever I write here will inevitably fall apart as I decide that I don’t like being told what to do, not even by myself, and so screw all those well-intentioned goals set at the beginning of the year. I recognize this in myself, so these are merely things that would be nice if they happened, rather than militant must-do’s.

That said, I still have some thoughts:

First: It would be awesome to have a sweater at the end of the year. I have sweater-quantities of yarn, I have UFOs. Whatever. I also have cold wrists.

I would like to learn brioche knitting. I keep favoring patterns on Ravelry that are brioche and clearly lots of people learn how to do it, so I just need to sit myself down and follow some directions. Even if I discover I hate knitting that style, I will at least be able to discount those patterns because of dislike, rather than ignorance.

I’d like to make a few projects for other people. I have yarn I’ve bought with specific folks in mind and it would be nice both for me to present them with gifts made for them and for some of that the yarn to exit the premises (as said gifts).

I have both a lot of unfinished projects lying around and a lot of finished knitwear out of rotation in need of mending. I’d like to decrease the number of both by either finishing or fixing ones that still work or by unraveling or tossing those that don’t.

I’d like to participate in Sock Madness, the Tour de France Knitalong, and the Ravelympics and come away from all three with finished projects of one kind or another.

I’d set a specific goal for number of finished projects, but that seems pointless. But let’s say 12 projects either completed or mended anyway, just for pointlessness’ sake.

Generally, I’ve felt weighed down the last couple years both by the vast number of skeins of yarn and by the number of occupied project bags abandoned around my apartment. I don’t want to take away the joy of knitting, because then I won’t do it, but I’d just like there to be a focus on achieving more by there being less, if that makes any sense.

For my first Unraveling post of 2018, I have new things to share:

I cast this new pair of socks on the evening of Jan. 1. The yarn is Lollipop Yarn Quintessential in Purrfection, the yarn I bought in memory of Posey. I broke open some new needles I’d had lying around, too. They’re Knitters Pride Nova cubics Platina, a set of square dpns, and so far I’m enjoying knitting with them. I’ll need to go down a needle size for the foot, but for the leg, the 2.5mm needles are working.

I had mentioned a few weeks ago that Maia Chance’s Teetotaled was on my list of books I wanted to read this winter. Yesterday, Bridget mentioned she’d read the first book in the Discreet Retrieval Agency, which put the series (about a widowed society woman from 1920s Long Island who, when she finds her scoundrel of a husband has left her penniless after his death, turns, with her Swedish-born former cook, to detecting) in the front of my mind when I headed to the library after work. Lo! There was the second book in the series on the shelf, and I’ve already plowed through a third of it tonight while knitting. Such a delightful, addictive read.

I am also reading Turtles All the Way Down and The Unbreakable Code and have started listening to The Pirate King’s Daughter. Lincoln in the Bardo‘s audiobook has come back up for borrowing, so I’ll give that one more shot in the next few days.

You can visit Kat for more posts on yarn and books.

The penultimate Top Ten Tuesday as hosted by The Broke and the Bookish asks about the top ten new-to-me authors read in 2017.

I was hoping to share my top ten books of the year today, but it’s not ready, but know there’s going to be some overlap here. These are in no particular order, except as how they occurred to me:

1. Angie Thomas (The Hate U Give)
2. Kory Stamper (Word by Word), although I have read entries in the dictionary before, so she only counts if we specify that I knowingly read her work.
3. Nic Stone (Dear Martin)
4. Heidi Heilig (The Girl from Everywhere)
5. Mohsin Hamid (Exit West)
6. Jeannine Atkins (Finding Wonder)
7. Sherry Thomas (A Study in Scarlet Women)
8. Kelly Barnhill (The Girl Who Drank the Moon)
9. Robin Benway (Far from the Tree)
10. Mackenzi Lee (The Gentleman’s Guide to Vice and Virtue)

I was going to include Roxane Gay on this list, but then I decided that although I hadn’t previously read any of her books, I had read articles she’d written, so she wasn’t really new to me.

How about you? Any new-to-you authors you enjoyed last year?