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.

As some of you know, I play recreation volleyball with a team. Some of us are newer to each other, while others of us have been playing together for several years. But we travel as a unit, picking up new players as need be to keep the season going.

We’ve been playing indoors and masked since September, so it was very exciting when we saw outdoor volleyball was an option once more. For the first time, we’re playing on the Mall, a few steps from the MLK Memorial near the Tidal Basin. Most of D.C.’s sand courts have been offline since the start of the pandemic — first because it was thought outdoor sports might be an illness vector and later because the National Park Service wanted to do some upkeep. (It just would have been so much handier if those had been concurrent decisions, rather than consecutive ones.) So we’re playing on grass for now, which I actually prefer. (I grow too much glass in my garden to feel excited about romping barefoot in D.C.’s parks.)

Today was our first match, which also coincided with the return of early March weather — biting cold and strong winds — that kept all of us in sweatshirts and guessing about the direction of hits and serves.

But in the end, none of that mattered — we were playing volleyball and playing it together!

This week’s Top Ten Tuesday topic from That Artsy Ready Girl asks us to share ten bookish items we’d love to own. I thought I’d share ten bookish knitting patterns I’d love to make:

1. Wonderland Socks
2. Hundred Acre Woods socks
3. Alice in Wonderland mittens
4. Snow Queen socks
5. Christmas with the Marches shawl
6. Rivendell socks
7. Brighton mitts
8. Nancy Drew sweater
9. Anne’s Sweater
10. Anne Elliot’s Fichu shawl

For my crafty friends, are there literary-inspired items you’d like to make?

Three beautiful things from my past week:

1. My new glasses, complete with their progressive lenses, arrived. The woman who’d sold them to me warned they weren’t for everyone and that there could be a learning curve. I was pleasantly surprised to find that I mostly got the hang of them pretty quickly, although there are certain head angles that invoke fun house mirror moments, so I can see how someone might be put off by that.

2. A grand slam is pretty special in any baseball game, but even more so when it comes from your team’s clutch hitter in the first game of the season you attend in person.

3. A late afternoon rainstorm caused some cancellations for the volleyball practice I’d scheduled for tonight. Eventually, there were only three of us standing and we opted to go out to supper instead. It was nice to talk and laugh, and my friend, Neal, and I chatted until quite late.

What’s been beautiful in your world lately?