Knitting.

I finished the purple socks that are intended to harmonize with my kimono sweater from 2010. I had made a pair of purple and red socks back in 2018, but gave them last year to Elder Son’s then-girlfriend-now-wife. The new pair of purple socks has red toes and cuffs, with the foot and leg knit from two strands of Knit Picks Felici in shaded/tints of lavender. The sock purples are brighter than the sweater, but it is what it is.

I wanted to copy the commercial socks on the left, above. Lookin’ pretty good!

There were a few glitches along the way. I had ordered some gray sock yarn from Knit Picks, but when I knit it together with the white yarn, it seemed…blah. So I dug in the stash and found some charcoal sock yarn. But when it was knit together with the white it looked black, which was not what I was going for. Back to the stash for a skein of Lang Jawolle in oxford gray; perfect. It seemed like I would run out of it before I finished even the first sock. Most yarn stores that I buy from no longer carry Jawolle in a a gazillion solid colors like they used to. But Google found a store for me, Fillory Yarns in Silicon Valley, that still carried the solids. So I ordered 4 skeins.

Now I have 4.5 skeins in my stash; never ran out.

These are my attempt to duplicate the socks in the first photo. Going well…

No photo of the other mistake, but I was nearly done with the cuff ribbing on the second sock when I remembered it needed a red stripe. More frogging.

That much tinking and frogging is par for the course in my knitting. Happily, these errors were all easily correctable.

My inspiration for these socks was remembering the hats the Yarn Harlot made for her family for Christmas a couple-few years ago, but I can find only one on either her Rav project page or her blog. I am considering making a hat like the socks, but with brown instead of gray to match my winter coats. Have to think on that one for awhile. I already have two three hats planned for myself.

Next up will be the hats requested by my bro and SIL. They live near Toronto, so I thought they probably need the hats ASAP. But after looking at climate zone maps I now know that their climate is milder than ours. But I will still make theirs before embarking on the one for myself using some Schoppel-Wolle Zauberball Crazy I found in the stash whilst searching for gray yarn.

[digression] Yarn companies that reuse colorway numbers should be invaded by moths. Just sayin’. [/digression]

Reading.

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I was nearly halfway through this book when I realized that I would not be able to attend the book group discussion. Since I was not necessarily enjoying the book, I stopped reading. My rating for it would be significantly lower than the 4.22 on Goodreads. It was rehashing some of the same story as The Giver of Stars, which I listened to last years and which told the story better, imho. Plus I had just read another book that talked about the blue people of the Kentucky mountains. 2.5✭

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Billy Summers by Stephen King. The author, well-known for his horror- and terror-filled books, wrote a crime novel this time. And he does it very, very well. (Take those two adverbs, King!) Protagonist is a hit man, but only kills people who are bad. He decides that he will take on One Last Job before he retires. Of course, that *one last job* turns out to be his last, although not in the way he anticipates. King is a master storyteller, and this book is definitely up to his standards. He also makes references to some of his earlier books — The Shining, others I do not remember. 4✭

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West with Giraffes by Susan Rutledge. This is a light, sweet, coming-of-age story that I enjoyed. In the summer of 1938, with the Depression in full swing, the Dust Bowl killing people with dust pneumonia and sending thousands of others to California, and Hitler threatening Europe, a teen-aged boy from the Texas panhandle is hired to drive a custom-built trailer full of two giraffes from New York to the San Diego zoo. The characters — including the giraffes, which the San Diego zoo man on the trip always refers to as “darlings” — are endearing, the trip is full of adventures and misadventures, and the whole thing is a delight. 4✭

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The House in the Cerulean Sea by T. J. Klune. I read this last winter, but my (other) book group is discussing it at our next meeting. So I got a copy to skim (turns out I suck at skimming; I am re-reading it) before we meet. [digression] Remember that cerulean blue crayon in the 64-crayon box when we were kids? Never having encountered that name before in my ten years on earth, I pronounced it SER-you-leen. Many years later I saw the X Files episode where the bad guy could make people do what he commanded by repeating that word, which turned out to be pronounced ser-U-lee-an, much to my surprise. [/digression] 4✭

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Listening.

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The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson. I shall be listening to this until the heat death of the universe; the audiobook is nearly 23 hours long. But it is a valuable listen, being the stories of three Blacks who left the South during the Great Migration. 5✭

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Watching.

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Cold Case. Smokey found the complete series on DVD on eBay several years ago. We watched most of it but got distracted by Outlander on Netflix. It has been long enough that we started over from season 1, episode 1; I have not seen anything that I remember.

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