Almost all the leaves are gone and it’s time to start preparing for winter. That means pulling out the sweaters and blankets, stocking up on candles to brighten winter nights, and dusting off the snow shovel. But it also means getting ready for spring.
The promise of spring
I’ve gotten back to work on my Fall Seasons Shawl. Looking at my notes I realized there were less than 5o rows to go. No problem, I thought, I can finish this up in a few days.
Was I ever wrong!
My Fall Seasons Shawl
It’s time to settle in for some Gilmore Girls marathons. To me this is the perfect autumn show, it just smacks of crisp fall days and the promise that comes alongside a new school year. I loved that Rory’s academic pursuits were usually such a prominent plot point – I’m just a few years younger than her and I could totally relate to the excitement and pressure that came with school.
A Stars Hollow visit is the perfect time to catch up on my knitting
Can we just take a moment to appreciate how awesome Stars Hollow is? I wish I could take a stroll past Miss Patty’s and then pop into Luke’s for a coffee. And the fact that there was a town knit-a-thon? Perfection!
This is project #6 on my WIP list. It’s the Fall Seasons Shawl from Knitpicks. It’s a big complicated project that’s been languishing for almost two(!) whole years now. I’m sure once I get back into it it’ll be okay, but right now I need to figure out what exactly I was doing. Lucky for me I made notes, placed lifelines, and used plenty of stitch markers.
I got this, right?
Now where was I again?
I had big plans for using up scraps and making a complicated pattern on the back of the quilt. But I decided against it because I’m a little obsessed with the focal fabric and wanted to showcase it.
The back of the quilt
After crossing another WIP off my list I decided to indulge in a few hexipuffs for my Beekeeper’s Quilt. I was dying some roving a while back and threw some miniskeins in the pot as well.
Pretty hand-dyed yarn
I must say, as much as I love my ball winder, there’s just no beating how pretty tiny handwound yarns balls are.
Forget turkey, pumpkin pie is what Thanksgiving is really about!
Remember that sewing WIP I mentioned a while back? Well, I’ve finished piecing together the top of the quilt. It’s the Library Stacks quilt kit from Connecting Threads, using their Bookish fabric collection from a few years ago. At roughly 50″x70″ it’s the biggest quilt I’ve made to date!
The Completed Quilt Top
I’ve finally finished my brother’s Recess for Grownups mittens.
Recess For Grownups Mittens
These were project #5 on my WIP list, so there are just 3 more to go. I think I’m going to reward myself with a handfull of hexipuffs before getting back to one of my larger WIPs.
Open Wide!
I’ve finally finished Guy Gavriel Kay’s River of Stars, all 630+ pages of it. It’s one of those books that I struggled through (and struggle I did – this one took me more than a month to read!), but I’m glad that I did. I’m not sure that that I actually enjoyed it, it was such a sweeping novel that looked at how key people and moments can have a large and lasting impact on history.
Personally, I prefer smaller novels. I don’t mean shorter, but rather smaller in scope – I like to know about the day-to-day lives of ordinary people. For example, fairly early in the novel we meet a fascinating brother and sister and start getting to know them, and then they just disappear. They do pop up again in passing during the last ten pages or so, but it was just enough to pique curiosity all over again. I’d like to know their story.
And that was the last title on my list. What shall I read next?
