Unraveled Wednesday – Week 30 of 2020

Hello, friends! On Wednesdays I link up with Kat at As Kat Knits for Unraveled Wednesday. If you’re looking for reading and stitching inspiration, check out the bloggers participating! This week I have two finished books (neither are a cozy mystery or an audiobook!), one finished cardigan, and one conundrum.

Books

Finished This Week:

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I finished my first novel by Louise Erdrich! The Round House is Joe’s coming of age story. He’s a 13 year old boy who lives on an Ojibwe reservation with his family in North Dakota. He has a relatively comfortable life until his mother is brutally attacked by an unknown assailant. I loved so much about this book: some parts were laugh out loud funny while others were heartbreaking. Life on the reservation is hard, especially when a crime is committed because of the confusing laws on jurisdiction. And it’s painful to read about how entire groups of people were brutally pushed onto small plots of land so that the US could spread their territory. I am looking forward to reading more of these stories and plan to borrow LaRose from the library in a couple of weeks.

I’ve been on the waitlist for The Guest List for quite a while, so I dropped everything else to make sure I read it before my loan expired. It was not worth dropping everything else for! It’s a thriller, which are usually duds for me anyway. I loved this premise: a fancy wedding on a secluded Irish island. Someone is murdered, so it has to be someone at the wedding. But here’s the problem I have with most thrillers: they often seem like the author writes them as if they’re movie scripts, and something about that rubs me the wrong way. And maybe that’s just the thriller-writing formula: make ’em feel like they’re watching a movie. And it clearly works because people gobble these up with every release. But I’m learning that I don’t typically enjoy these books, so maybe one day I’ll be able to calm my fear of missing out when these are published.

(PS: Despite how different they are, both of my books this week included characters named Angus. I love it when things like that happen!)

Another Book I Want to Share:

I’m sharing this today because I don’t think I’ll ever officially read it all the way through given that I’m dipping in and out as the fancy strikes, but I think many of you might be interested in this book! I bought Mason Currey’s original Daily Rituals book several years ago and really enjoyed it. Imagine how thrilled I was to learn about his latest offering, Daily Rituals: Women at Work. For both books, Currey did exhaustive research on artists (writers, painters, dancers, all sorts) and their daily habits. I love reading about how people structure their day and manage to use their creativity to overcome the challenge of carving out time to focus on the things they love.

Knitting

Y’all. My Mariechen cardigan is done.

I swatched on June 19 and was weaving in the ends on July 18 – less than a month! I’ve never completed a sweater so quickly. I can thank the engaging pattern and the DK weight yarn for the speediness. Also – my gauge was just a touch large when I swatched (only 1/2 stitch in both directions), so I went down a size. I’m sure that made a difference in how quickly I was able to finish. But it also helped with the fit – I definitely prefer the closer fit, rather than how baggy some of my other sweaters have turned out. Maybe I’m always choosing the wrong size?

Either way – I have a new sweater to cuddle into when the weather turns cool again!

I went to my local yarn store last week to pick out yarn for the Spark cardigan. I landed on this charcoal main color and the pink/gray for contrast. But – I don’t think there’s enough contrast. See the circled stitch? That’s a contrasting stitch but you can barely see it because there just happened to be a lot of gray in that part of the yarn. I really like the light pink as a contrast to the charcoal, so I’d like to find a different pink yarn with no gray. I’m married to the charcoal as the main color given how much money I’ve spent on it, but I only spent about $15 on the contrasting pink which gives me a little wiggle room. So I’m still on the hunt!

And now I have nothing on my needles. I’m okay with that because there’s a fat stack of books waiting for me as I try to find the perfect yarn for the Spark cardigan. I’d originally thought that I would start it on my own as soon as possible, but now I’m thinking my start date might coincide with the knit along date – 8/1. I might be participating in my second unexpected knit along of the summer!

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That’s it from me! I’m planning to be back on Friday with a cozy post, so I’m going to be taking as many picture as possible in the next couple of days to get ready for it. I hope the rest of your week is filled with cool weather, good books, and lots of yarn!