Three beautiful things from my past week:

1. Daytime baseball

2. Azaleas in bloom

3. A trip to the beach that coincides with a bonfire and marshmallow roast.

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

Look! Different knitting and different reading!

The knitting is Mum’s (2021) Christmas gift, Campfire Cozy, which I picked up again toward the end of last week. I have eight more rows of the textured stitches to get through and then it becomes mindless tv knitting. I’m hopeful I’ll be able to hand the shawl over sometime before Christmas 2022.

I put Fools in Love back into the rotation because it’s overdue to the library and I forgot to put it in my bag last week when I went to Virginia. I took that as a sign I was meant to finish this collection of YA romance short stories after all. I also started Saint Young Men, a collection of comics translated from Japanese about religious figures Jesus and Buddha rooming together as young men during a gap year in Tokyo in the early aughts. It’s less sacrilegious than it sounds, but also maybe less funny than I’d hoped it would be. I’ve also started a new audiobook, Vanessa Yu’s Magical Paris Tea Shop by Roselle Lim. I’m not yet sure if I’ll keep going with it. It probably depends on how many more times she describes food with multiple adjectives.

Want to see what others are reading and crafting? Head to As Kat Knits for the weekly roundup.

The garden has responded well to the recent spate of rain showers, growing lush and popping seedlings out in a reassuring manner. But it’s also been warm, which has led many of my cold-weather greens, including my two kale plants and all the bok choy, to bolt. ‘T’is the season.

My flowers are doing well. Rudi asked if we could plant some petunias, which remind him of his grandmother, so of course I said yes. Two of the pink ones appear above alongside the yellow pansies that overwintered and my beloved violets.

My seeds have sprouted, although I’m not fully sure which of them have grown so boldly. I think one is pak choi, one might be arugula, and one might be a lettuce, but I won’t swear to any of it at this point.

My Swiss chard, despite having been my first sprouts, have been slow to grow, and while some peas are knee-high, fewer of them have emerged than I’d hoped.

Finally, we split our first strawberry on Sunday and should have three more this week, if the straw keeps the slugs away. So sweet!

This week’s Top Ten Tuesday from That Artsy Reader Girl invites us to pick an item or design element and find 10 books featuring it on the cover. It will surprise no one that I’ve picked covers that include books and/or reading:

Covers are:
Row 1: A Rogue of One’s Own by Evie Dunmore, Jo & Laurie by Margaret Stohl & Melissa de la Cruz, and The Bookshop of Second Chances by Jackie Fraser

Row 2: Shelf Respect by Annie Austen, Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, The Dead Romantics by Ashley Poston, and Book Lovers by Emily Henry

Row 3: Meet Me in the Margins by Melissa Ferguson, The Wild Book by Juan Villoro, and The Book Jumper by Mechthild Gläser (in this instance, the cover was better than the book)

I’ve read six, am listening to the audiobook off and on of another, and have three on my TBR list.

How about you? Do any memorable covers featuring books or reading spring to mind?

Three beautiful things from my past week:

1. A long weekend at home with my parents.

2. Sleeping in every day.

3. Rudi bought me a present — a new Wild Places print of D.C. as defined by its literary outposts. In addition to pinpointing all the libraries and bookstores, all the geographic features are done in words, such as “Potomac River” or “Rock Creek Park.” I adore it.

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

I’m happy to report that the title for this post refers not to a hot mess in my crafting, but to the way I’m leveraging my leisure time right now.

I’d hoped to show you a finished sock, but I kept dozing off while knitting and watching tv, which seemed more an indicator that I should put my head on a pillow than that I should continue with pre-planned blog fodder. But I’m about four rows away from the toe decreases, so it shan’t be long now.

I finished one book last week, abandoned a second, put a dent in two others, and resumed a fifth, which seems like a pretty good way to pass seven days. These are the two I’m currently working on in print and I continue to enjoy listening to Cassandra Peterson’s memoir.

You can visit As Kat Knits to see what others are crafting and reading.