Yarn Along: August

 ~knitting~

I finished a thing!

This is the linen scarflet I've been noodling away at since late May, although I'm not sure how much use I'll get out of it this season. 

It is a nice little layer when you need a little something, but it has been so hot and humid this summer, and I'm at home in my non-central AC home, so I'm just sticky all the time.  Even in air-conditioned spaces, I find I'm hot because the humidity is so high. 

That said, I do think it will be great in the spring, as I'm generally still wearing scarves, but it is too mild for wool ones. 

I wear my yellow cotton-linen Chinook a lot in the spring and fall, so this should be a nice transitional piece.

I'm also still working on my textured shawl, and am getting near the end of the first ball.  I was planning to knit two full balls, and probably still will.  

 I did a couple repeats of the Simply shawl pattern that I used on the linen piece, but wanted to add in more texture, so I'm adding in some repeats from other patterns that have easy to follow patterns with high texture.  

~reading~

Still working through Yuri Slezkine's House of Government.  I'm about half-way through (475 pages or so of 900) and am still quite riveted by his work.  

I also read a few light novels when I needed a break from Slezkine. 

~sewing~

Underwear, mostly.  (Ha!)  I never thought I'd get into it, but I'm tired of unders that don't fit well, or meet my requirements, and while I've altered some of my RTW to meet some of those requirements (more on that in a separate post), I'm kind of enjoying these little projects.  I'll blog about the specs in a separate post at some point.

~watching~

I finished season five of Grantchester and went back to the beginning and have enjoyed that very much.  I find Sidney's sermons to be a bit better than Will's on the whole, but Will's sermons are more theologically sound (with the caveat that most of it is borderline on the theology to start with).  Also, Robson Greene is the man.  The scenes between Geordie and Kathy this past season were pure gold, and Greene should get an award for the episode with Kathy's mother.

I also saw Mr. Jones, which is a very important film that everyone should watch if they can.  My husband wanted to see it too, so I ended up seeing it twice, which I was glad for, as I missed a couple of details the first time round, plus the story packs just as big a wallop the second go-round.  James Norton plays the real-life Gareth Jones, a Welshman who worked at Lloyd George's foreign advisor who speaks Russian because his mother spent time there and he studied it at Cambridge.  He questions how the Soviet Union can be on a spending spree in the middle of a global depression, and goes there to investigate the question.  He pays a high price for being unwilling to lie.  There are a number of great reviews floating around, and I found these two quite illuminating.

~garden~

A tomato harvest!  This bowl was half full last night before dinner, but we ate them before I got a proper picture.  We have two red tomato plants and one orange pear, but the orange pear has been slow to ripen and there haven't been as many fruits as on the other two red tomato plants.  Which is a shame because the pear tomatoes are more delicious!  

My cucumber vines are a disappointment--lots of leafy growth, tons of male flowers, but no females.  I've pruned and trained the vines, but I don't know what else to do to encourage female flowers--it's not a pollinator issue, it's a flower issue.

 

 Linking with Ginny for Yarn Along.