Yarn Along: Little Things

~knitting~

I finished a lot of little projects this week or so.  I started and finished a red cowl for Boo.  I had some cotton-wool mix in my stash that I had bought for something that I've forgotten by now, and it was such a little bit, it had to be something small.

His favorite color is red, so he was a happy camper.  The yarn is the now-retired Main Street Reserve from KnitPicks.  It is so soft and lovely to knit up.

This next piece I didn't technically knit recently; it was part of a sweater that I frogged over the winter.  I used the rest of the yarn to make my Rosemont cardigan, but I had this little piece from the back waistband of the original sweater (it was knit separately and then the top and back portions were cast on the edge) and I thought it would make a nice ear-warmer for Birdie.  She is always complaining of cold ears in the winter and often borrows something from my husband, so I figured she could use her own.  It is the Stockbridge yarn from Valley Yarns and I lurve it.

When Piglet saw me making Boo's cowl, he wanted one for himself.  (He said something along the lines of: "Boo gets all the red things, why don't I get anything red?")  I told him I didn't have enough red yarn left over to make him a whole red one, but I could do red and white stripes (I had several balls of snowy white Main Street Reserve as well)  He was happy with that, and I commenced lots of end cutting.  The worst part was weaving in all the ends!

I also finished my husband's neckwarmer and while he wasn't too keen to try in on in this heat wave, he did sort of oblige.  

Me: Will you please humor me and put it on so I can take a picture?

Him:

Me: Thank you, Cousin It.

I cast on a white cowl for Ponchik out of the leftovers from Piglet's cowl, and started working on my L'Enveloppe shrug-thingie.  I decided that the Sulka cardigan was not the best use of my bulky gray-blue yarn, and frogged it.  I cast on the L'Enveloppe, and I'm pretty excited about it.  So far, the knitting is pretty easy.  I'll try to photograph it when I'm further along.

~reading~

I think I reached Peak USSR sometime last week.  I just could not read another gulag memoir or read Svetlana Alexievich's stories of the desperate unhappiness, ethnic fighting, cultural vacuum, and poverty during the Yeltsin regime.  I do think it is important to bear witness to the history of the gulags, and the repression, and to try to understand it, so I feel like a bit of a coward for having to put some of my reading aside for the sake of my mental health. I did start reading Orlando Figes' The Whisperers, which I am finding well-written and good reading.  It covers private life during the Stalin years and as with many of Figes' books, it is quite comprehensive.  It is the sort of book I aspired to write when I was still working on my PhD in Soviet history.

I appreciate what Secondhand Time is trying to do, but it was really dragging me down.  I am half way through, and decided to set it aside for a bit.  I picked up The Fiery Cross again, after several months languishing.  I was about half way when I stopped last (I've lost track of how many times I've read the series), and it was really just the thing for my mood.

~watching~

I'm still waiting for PBS to post the final episode of Endeavour, Season 3.  I refuse to pay $3 for it on amazon when it is supposed to stream for free on pbs.

I finished Outlander season 2, and started back over at the beginning of volume 2 of season 1 to watch it again.  I find the episodes get even better with repeated viewing, as many of the layers in each episode are revealed.  I thought the season finale of season 2 was extremely well done.  I had one minor quibble with an aesthetic choice, but otherwise, I was happy with the adaptation.  Now we can get on to Voyager!

I started watching a Russian television series called The Red Queen on amazon prime and it is very very good.  It is set in the 1950s in the provinces, but quickly moves to Moscow.  It is a pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps kind of story, and I'm intrigued to see where it goes.  The dialogue is even slow enough in some places that I can catch some of the Russian without subtitles.  The subtitles have to be switched on with closed captioning, by the way.  It took me a bit to figure that out.

Linking up with Ginny for Yarn Along!