Winding the Skeins

I haven’t worked on Winding the Skeins for almost a year. What with all the frustration with the skin color on her hand, I just didn’t feel like it. She’s been starting to call to me again, finally, and so when I finished Stepsisters I picked her up. Sometime between July and now I decided that going back and forth between two charts was just too much work, and so not worth it. When I picked it up again I ditched the second chart, pulled out the stitched hand, again, and dug in.

As a reminder of the sequence of events last summer, I went from this, to this, to this, and finally this. This month, before forward progress was made, I went back to this.

Frogging all those tiny little over-one stitches was a royal pain in the you-know-what. Ack! But, I finally got it done, then re-stitched the area, the rest of the page, and the beginning of page two.

To give you some idea of how big this thing is, the 8,240 stitches done account for only 6.5 percent of the whole. It’s entirely possible that I’ll be stitching on this for the rest of my life. It’s a good thing I like the design.

Forget-Me-Not

I finished the second sock. Now I get to tear out the first sock and re-knit it on smaller needles. Joy. It’s a good thing I like the pattern!

Mystery read along starts tomorrow

Liz has given us permission to start books by new-to-us mystery authors a few days ahead of the official June 1 start date. This is great for me, as I finished the last of the Carolyn G. Hart mysteries (that we currently own) Tuesday night. One of the fun things about Hart’s books is that her protago­nist, Annie, owns a mystery book store. Annie knows a lot about mystery books and their authors. As a result, the stories are chock full of references to other writers’ works. In the last book I read, A Little Class of Murder, Annie taught a class at a local college, which featured authors she considered to be the three grand dames of the mystery: Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Mary Roberts Rinehart. I’ve read most of Dame Agatha’s stories, quite a few of Sayers’ books, but none of Rinehart’s. Figuring that a mystery author of such acclaim must be around here somewhere, I started a search of the house, beginning in the leather/mystery room. I came away with a beautiful leather-bound book from the Franklin Mystery set called The Door. Have to say that I’m definitely enjoying it so far. Rinehart has a charming writing style, most engaging. The book doesn’t want to be put down when I pick it up. This is a good thing in a book. Of course the fine leather cover, the gilt tooling and page edges, and the sewn-in ribbon bookmark don’t hurt a bit. I just love a nicely bound book, don’t you?