by Kat | Jul 22, 2026 | General, Unraveled Wednesday
Greetings Gentle Unravelers!
July is proving to me that even smoky, hellscape months move along quickly. (Whew, right?) This week we are having an abatement in temperatures and the smoke has likewise receded to yellow. I have not been so aware of breathing (or rather the struggle to breathe) as I have been over the past spate of days. Frankie, with his adorable brachycephalic face, does not appreciate it much either… so walking has been non-existent.
But, indoor time is not entirely a bad thing. I have been knitting away on my Ranunculus and the body is almost done and then onward to Sleeve Island!
One very comfortable Ollie Top!
And there has been hand sewing! AC’s Ollie Top took 5 days start to finish. And really… in those 5 days… I spent maybe 20 minutes a day for the first 4 days and an hour on the fifth. Once I got the facing pinned on and I got in the “groove” I just kept going so as to keep my running stitches even. The end result is almost perfection! I have plans to make another one!
I saw some fabric in a Brooklyn Haberdashery email paired with kzstevens One Yard Minimalist Top pattern and I was in. I washed the fabric over the weekend and on Monday I gave it a quick ironing and then cut out the rectangles. A spool of button craft thread and a needle are waiting for me to stitch it up! Yes, entirely by hand!
The reading this week is peak summer reading. I am immersed in Richard Powers Playground on my Kindle. I am almost done (maybe by the time you read this, I will be done!) I enjoyed this book but not as much as I did The Overstory. But it feels very much along the lines of what he was trying to do in The Overstory. There were twists and turns I did not see coming and it has me thinking about all the water on the planet. The characters are ones I will think about as well.
I finished Belle Burden’s Strangers this week. I listened to her recount the dissolution of her marriage. I have very mixed feelings about her story, but I think her side of the retelling was well written. (I say her side as if there were two sides in this whole thing and while there were two parties involved… I believe her.) But I think the story was about more than her marriage. I have been thinking about her title and the irony of it. In her trying to find sense in what happened she discovered that she was a stranger to herself and that the biggest journey was for her to find herself again.
I also finished Yael van der Wouden’s The Safekeep. A story that had a twist that I did not see coming… and once that happened it altered my thoughts dramatically about this book and I thought the ending was a more than a bit unbelievable. I think the intimacy in the book feels awkward… I almost stopped reading it. (Thanks, Debbie for your review to keep me pushing through) In some ways it feels like a coming of age story (before the giant twist…) but perhaps it is better to describe it as a coming out story.
There you have my weekly catch up with my making and reading… what about you? What does your late July making and reading look like?
As always if you wrote a post to share please leave your link below and thank you!
by Kat | Jul 20, 2026 | General, In This Moment
Greetings from a slightly less smoky Pittsburgh!
Slightly. We are supposed to be “yellow” for the next few days… a reprieve from purple and red! But even at yellow I am having issues breathing outdoors so modified walks will continue this week.
I would so love to hang towels and sheets on the line, but that seems like an unlikely occurrence… sigh. I put off washing the sheets last week… but this week “needs must” so in the dryer they will go.
I channeled a bit of Vera’s Baking over the weekend and made a peach tart (I totally cheated and used a frozen sheet of puff pastry…) Sorry I did not get a photo but trust me…it was so good and I was reminded how lovely it is to sometimes have dessert for supper in the summer! And that thread of thinking has me putting ice cream for dinner on my list this week! I think a trek to Sarris is in order!
But now, laundry is calling… see you all back here on Wednesday!
by Kat | Jul 15, 2026 | General, Unraveled Wednesday
Greetings dear Unraveler’s and Happy Mid-July to you all!
Fifty-two days of stitching and I ended up with this beauty! I am so happy with it… and it is in the rotation of wearing! It works well with a simple shirt and linen pants and (as you can see by the fuzz) it works almost perfectly with the Airy Anne of Green Gables Ranunculus! It has been to TJ’s and the library thus far.
I have begun my next stitching project…. the Ollie Top from Tauko magazine. I have the sleeves attached and the side seams completed. Today I figure out the neck facings…wish me luck.
Another Ranunculus and the beginnings of an Ollie Top
I have begun the cousin of the Airy Ranunculus and it’s flying. I am about to divide the sleeves off. Gauge was achieved with a US 11 needle and I think the rosy pink was the perfect addition to this second iteration. It is not as light as the first one, but it is not in any way a heavy sweater. I was smarter with this version… I began the skein altering rounds earlier and did them over the course of the raglan sleeve shaping sections.
The reading… oh boy. I finished Land… and though I found the writing lovely, the story was the furthest thing from lovely one could imagine. Frequently, in the listening, I found myself wondering how one family could have so many tragedies. The saying, “if it weren’t for bad luck, they’d have no luck at all” was definitely a theme. I confess, I skipped one particularly horrid bit with a puppy and Rose… I just could not. The story conveyed the misery of life for the Irish but I think it could have been conveyed with a bit less tragedy. It is not my favorite O’Farrell story and there were times I contemplated quitting it but I persevered… perhaps a good way to describe my feelings for this story and maybe what O’Farrell wanted for the readers: to minutely understand what it was like for the Irish… to persevere in ungodly conditions. It won’t be a book I recommend to others.
What about you all? What are you focusing on as July reaches the midpoint?
As always, if you wrote a post to share please leave your link below and thank you!
by Kat | Jul 13, 2026 | General, In This Moment
I confess to feeling a bit of sadness that Norway is out… I am so enjoying fútbol and all the antics around it but particularly Norway… and the delight that is Erling Haaland. Oh, and all that RO-ing! (FYI, there’s a mitten for all that…) Who knew that in my 65th year I would find such delight in a sport I literally know nothing about!
But Monday has arrived and it brings what feels like the 975th day of heat and humidity, ushering in another week of heat and humidity… and I am so, so over it! My choices… the blast freezer indoors or the steamy hellscape outdoors… yes, it seems like poor choices surround me.
Though, curiously, the mushrooms seem to have adapted to the heat because my yard is overflowing with them… even as the temps soar… I am sure there is a lesson in there for me. Sigh.
I hope that if your Monday includes a lesson that it is a gentle, easy one.
See you all back here on Wednesday!
by Kat | Jul 8, 2026 | General, Unraveled Wednesday
Greetings dearest Unravelers!
I have finished the Airy, Anne of Green Gables, Ranunculus and I am entirely smitten! I was reminded how brilliant the designer, Midori Hirose, wrote this pattern. The directions are clear and there are multiple videos of techniques! Want a narrower neck… no problem, clear directions! Want short sleeves, again… clear directions! Worried about binding off too tight? Yep, you got it… CLEAR DIRECTIONS! With this iteration, I followed her long sleeve with I-cord bind off. However, I knit a lot more than 7″… I knit 70 rounds, did the decrease round, and then the I-cord bind off. It needs a bit of a bath and some ends woven in and then I am putting this baby on and wearing the heck out of it!
The Airy Anne of Green Gables Ranunculus.
And I will be casting on another… Anne of Green Gables with a Rosy Hue Ranunculus as soon as I confirm the larger needle size for gauge.
I want to talk a minute about The Farmer’s Daughter Fiber… they have amazing customer service. I had these skeins of Foxy Lady… merino/silk singles that I really wanted to use… it is gorgeous yarn! But… I did not need another sweater of the same color so I emailed Farmer’s Daughter and their help was really as if I was standing in their shop. They sent me multiple photos of several color combinations that will allow me to utilize the Foxy Lady in another Ranunculus. If you have not discovered the joy that is The Farmer’s Daughter Fiber… you should!
And…if you are following along on my stitching on the AC Varigated Stripe Shawl… I have just one stripe left… which will take me two days! I am kind of sad to bring this all to an end. I have so enjoyed this project. I have loved the deep dive into the variations on stitches from the Geometry of Hand Sewing. Up next… learning all the in’s and out’s of seaming a garment! The journey continues!
My soon-to-be-finished Variegated Stripe Scarf and the Ollie Top waiting in the wings!
The reading… oh my. Summer Reading might be the best thing ever! The NYTimes Summer series made a suggestion in the “sleep edition” about good books to read before bed and one of their suggestions was Kate DiCamillo’s The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane. I had never read it, so okay… I gave it a try! It was brilliant. Moving. Heartwarming. And perhaps the most perfect bedtime stories ever. I wish I had read this with my kids but it is now on my list to send to my grandkids!
I finished A Good Animal… and the finish did not disappoint. At all. I highly recommend. Sheep! Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan! And a young man who will stay with me for a very, very, very long time.
I did have one very disappointing finish, Téa Obreht has a new novel coming, Sunrise. And I had such high hopes! I loved her previous novels… so much. So I began Sunrise with very high hopes. Sigh. Those high hopes were crushed flat and quickly in this really awkward book. Nothing in it is even remotely believable. Nothing. And it goes from wait… what? to are you freaking kidding me. And the ending… in a book that needed to have something… anything… to pull all the nonsense together was even more unbelievable. I wondered multiple times in the reading if the author was on mind altering drugs while writing. I do not recommend. This novel will be published August 11, 2026.
My current listen… Land… Maggie O’Farrell’s latest. So far, so good… but I am still in Part One (iykyk) and, I watched Hamnet yesterday on Netflix (thanks for getting me through Sleeve Number Two!!) It was very good… but I still loved the book more.
Are you surviving this blast of hot and humid summer days? How do you take your mind off the heat and humidity?
As always, if you wrote a post to share please leave your link below and thank you!
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