Yarn Along: Down the Rabbit Hole

~knitting~

As promised, photos of the Saucy Librarian sweater!  I confess, I'm a little meh about this sweater too.  

Blocking helped the length issues considerably, but also made the neckline much wider, and some of the shaping given by the ribbing was lost in how I blocked it.  I realize I could reblock it slightly less aggressively to fix that, but I dunno.  

I just can't decide if the color suits me--it is so dark!  The fabric does feel slightly better on that the Sapphire sweater, even though they are the same yarn, so that is something.  

Having a layer underneath seems to help too.  I guess I'll just put both sweaters in the bin until the winter and reassess then.

This photo shows the color most accurately--it tends to read quite dark at a distance, but it really is a lovely shade of green.

But!  I also promised a yarn stash post.  Since I've discovered some new-to-me yarn lately, plus taken advantage of some sales and overstocks, I've got a lot of projects in the hopper!  This is just a small selection of what I've got planned (I have yarn for kid projects that I'll get to as I have time)

First is O-Wool.  It is super local to me--the shipping address is less 2 miles from here, as the crow flies!  I bought some overstocked Balance, which is a cotton-wool mix, and this stuff is delightfully squishy and soft.  My primary complaint about cotton yarns is that they are too round and feel really awful to my hands while knitting, and then don't hold their shape afterward.  I've had some really great wool/cotton sweaters in ready-to-wear that felt similar to this yarn, so I'm hopeful that this will be a great sweater.  I'm planning to make the Rincleau sweater, also from O-Wool.

Next is Quince and Co.  I've been sort of peripherally aware of their yarn for a while, but never really took the time to check out the offerings.  I decided to start with Lark, which is their basic worsted weight, and bought the Cypress colorway.  It is not quite as bright as I was expecting, but I think it will make a superb pullover.  I'm planning to make the Stokey cowl neck from Amy Herzog's book with it.

I bought some Valley Yarns Northampton in charcoal gray to make a button down vest for my husband to wear with his cassock (he has a linen kombu, and I have to remake his woven woolen one, as he just lost the old one...tragedy!) but he wanted a knitted one as well.

I was sad to discover that Valley Yarns has discontinued their Stockbridge line--I made my Rosemont cardigan out of it, and I really like the yarn.  They still have plenty in stock at yarn.com, and it is on crazy good sale, so I bought the red-purple colorway to make a sweater for next winter.  I've not decided on the pattern yet.

After much trepidation at the price, I also bought a couple skeins of Malabrigo Rios over the winter, just to try it out, and I think I'm going to make it into a L'Enveloppe.  I find in the winter I often want something extra over my shoulders, but a scarf feels too bulky or something.  I really like cowls and neck warmers, but wanted something more like a shawl that I didn't have to hold or pin together.  This pattern intrigues me.

I've had some navy blue Misti Alpaca that I got on clearance last year and have been dithering about what to use it on.  I think I've finally decided to make Clouds in My Coffee by Elizabeth Smith.  I was debating between it and another cardigan pattern, but I think I will get more use out of a Clouds cardigan.  I'm simultaneously intrigued and daunted.

As for my current projects, I decided to scrap my plans for another Ramona, and use my bulky gray yarn on a Sulka cardigan instead.  It has a nice shape and texture to it, and so far I'm enjoying knitting it.

It is knit in pieces from the bottom up and then seamed, so I'm currently working on the back part. I'm debating adding waist shaping because I'm making it longer than the pattern calls for.  I'm not feeling that great this week (GI flare) so I'm not really getting a lot of knitting done.

I'm also still working on my dad's vest.  I'm shaping the arm holes right now, and have a few more rows to go.  Now that the lower body is done, it is going pretty quickly.

I'm not sure about the look of the arm hole bind off--I wasn't expecting such a strong line along the edge, but it doesn't look that obvious in the finished photo on the pattern, so perhaps it just gets subsumed into the ribbing on the edges at the end.

~reading~

I finished Putin Country in two afternoons over the weekend, and I will say it is a mixed bag.  I would recommend it to anyone with a serious interest in Russia but with caveats. The book is part-journalism, part-memoir of Anne Garrells' many years visiting the Chelybainsk region, which is just to the east of the Urals; it was closed to outsiders during the Soviet period because of was the site of many military and nuclear installations.  There are still several closed cities in the area, because of ongoing nuclear projects.  I like her writing style, and mostly appreciate her perspective on things, but I think there are some deliberately misleading sections that blatantly ignore the longer history of the region (for example, she calls the Bashkir and Tatar peoples that live in the region "indigenous," which is far from true; they are what is left of the Mongol hordes that brutally occupied the country for 400 years...a fact she conveniently forgets to mention and which goes a lot of the way to explain why ethnic Slavs don't have a high regard for them)  The past is longer than 200 years, and Garrells seems quite short-sighted in this regard.

She brings a totally secular eye to religion in the area (and in Russia more generally), and seems incredulous that people might really believe what they say they do.  She has a fairly jaundiced view of the Orthodox Church in particular.  She doesn't seem to understand faith, or the historical role of Christianity in Russia.

It is true that Russia is a huge multi-ethnic, multi-faith country, and that historically, keeping it all together has been a gargantuan task.  It is also true that the Soviet period was one of tremendous secularism and enforced atheism, but Ms. Garrells seems to discount the earlier history of religion on the country, and the different ways that the churches and other faiths coped and struggled to survive under Soviet rule.

Her reporting on the environmental degradation in the Chelybainsk region is superb, as well as her chapters on medical care, parenting special needs kids, and the basic poverty of the villages and the lack of prospects, combined with galloping corruption.  It made me think of some of the Rust Belt areas in the United States, or even my own poverty-stricken, corruption-ridden city.  There were a couple of chapters where I was left wanting more information, and wished she had given more space to topics like Memorial and its being shunted to the periphery of public discourse.  (She has a few paragraphs on the legacy of the purges, but I really wanted to know more about that, both what people think about it today, how it is being "officially" handled, and the effect on the region as an historical matter)

I think the weakness of her book is basically that she interviews people she meets here and there, and it seems a little unrepresentative, given the title of the book.  She says that the region is largely supportive of Putin, but her interviews and friends would seem to fall mostly into the opposition camp (or at the very least, sodden despair and resignation).  She only profiles a few people who are staunch Putin supporters, and they are one-dimensional portraits.

Ms. Garrells also assumes a fairly intimate knowledge of Russia, Russian political figures, and the history of the past 30 years.  I happen to be familiar with much of it, so casually throwing around names like Boris Nemstov or Chernomirdov or referring to the economic turbulence of the mid to late 1990s without any context was fine for me, but would be confusing for a reader with only a passing knowledge of Russia.  The book is quite brief for the ground it purports to cover.  Still, I'm glad I read it.  It makes me eager to get to my Mandelstam, Kolyma Tales, and the other Russia books in my stack.  I may have to revisit John Thompson's primer on Russian history, Russia and the Soviet Union, vol. 4.  The title is basic, but it covers a lot of ground in a relatively short space, and and covers it well.

As for other reading, I'm about 2/3rds through The World Beyond Your Head (helped along by a middle of the night stomach issue that had me up most of the night on Sunday night!) and am still finding it very useful. I have a lot of dog-eared pages and am wondering how to cohere my thoughts about it into something written.

War and Peace is on temporary hold, and Ivan Turgenev's Sketches from a Hunter's Album is next up in my queue--I started it yesterday afternoon.  So far it is interesting.

~watching~

Nothing new to report from last week.  I tried Julian Fellowes' Doctor Thorne on amazon but I just couldn't get into it.  I could tell from the second scene with Ian McShane exactly where the plot was going, and my flagging interest was gone by that point.  I also didn't really take to the actors playing the parts, so that is some of it too.

Linking with Ginny for Yarn Along!