Popping in with a quick update on my crafting and reading for the week! As always, thanks to AsKatKnits for hosting this linkup.
I finished my traincation socks! These turned out really great, I love how the pattern looks like train tracks, they’re a nice memento of my trip. The yarn is some Angora Online Mernio/Nylon I got at Rhinebeck several years ago.
With those being done, I’m sort of in a weird spot with my knitting. My other projects are just sort of at points where I don’t really want to be working on them, there’s a bit of “so close yet so far” going on that’s not super motivating. I’ve mostly been working on my Butterfly shawl, and the way the shawl works, you do all the short row shaping on the WS with the main color, so one of every four rows is very long. It’s a little hard to get the energy to work on the shawl knowing this. I’m also working on a project that I started last summer but haven’t talked about on the blog. This is Cabanarama by Julia Madill which I got when I bought Laine’s Let’s Crochet at an LYS near me. As you can tell by my last test knit, I dig the cabana shirt vibe, so I’m hoping to be able to finish it this summer. I’m definitely making good progress, but those granny squares are definitely tedious.
The next project I want to make is a knitted Seattle Storm jersey. I have the yarn for this, but there’s going to need to be a lot of planning/ pattern creating so I haven’t wanted to start it. At this point, would I even be able to finish it during the season? I don’t know. Do I want to try and finish the Cabanarama before starting this one? I think I’m going to take some time this weekend and really do some planning.
Now on to the reading! I’ve got a few good things to share.
Ok wow, A Botanical Daughter by Noah Medlock was really something and has stayed with me for a bit. It’s definitely weird, wild, and wonderful. How can I describe it… it’s gay gothic horror but also a bit of a love story. I went in pretty blind to what this was going to be and every twist was an adventure. I believe I took this out via Queer Liberation Library, which is a free database of queer books which is connected to Libby. Anyone can apply for a free library card and check out books! I highly recommend if you want to expand your LGBTQIA+ reading list.
A World of Curiosities is the 18th Inspector Gamache book. I really love this series, and this was another good one, though not necessarily in my top 3 of the series, due mostly to the seriousness of the crimes involved. This one definitely had a much stronger sense of terror running through it than some others. I read most if it in one night because I just needed to know how it was going to end. One of the things I love about these books is that you have some of the elements of a “cozy mystery” – village life, loveable characters, no one questioning why murders keep happening in or near this small town, but that there’s also a sense of real life, real emotions, real terror and stakes that aren’t always there in other mystery series. I’m also enjoying how the later books in the series call back to plot points in earlier books, though this one also explored Gamache and Beauvoir’s first case together which we hadn’t learned about.
Not a whole much more to say yet about The Grey Wolf, which is the next Inspector Gamache book. I’m about a 1/3 of the way through and yet again enjoying the throwbacks to one of my favorite books in the series, The Beautiful Mystery. This is the second to last currently published book, with one more coming this October. Something I’ve really enjoyed while reading these is putting together a playlist to listen to while reading. I read a book a while back where the author put together a playlist, and then one of the books in this series mentioned a song so that gave me the idea to do this. It’s mostly acoustic songs from Quebec artists, often in French. It just fits the mood of the books really well. If you have Apple Music, you can check it out here.
Have a great week!
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