Yarn Along: Life in Squares

 ~knitting~

Another finished object!  I've been working steadily away on my Beamer (more on that below) but took a brief break to knit up this quick little project.  

 

I had bought two skeins of cotton yarn in the spring, after I discovered how much I like having a lighter knitted layer around my neck in the "shoulder" seasons, and knitted it up quick-like one week. 

It is slightly smaller than I had originally envisioned, but it works well enough with a pin and some creative draping.  I used the Casapinka pattern as a stitch guide again, and I like the look of it on a larger gauge very much.

The Beamer is going okay.  I've probably knit every lace line twice by now, since I keep making mistakes and having to tink back to figure out where I went wrong, but I'm enjoying the process more than I thought I would.  

It's not exactly the sort of knitting I can do while watching something I have to pay attention to, but I'm still eager to work on it most days.  It will be a lighter wool layer that I'm excited to work into my wardrobe.

 

~reading~

 

Well, I wrote about Shoshana Zuboff yesterday, and it is still a slog--rather like eating raw vegetables before getting to dessert, as opposed to nice lovely roasted vegetables.  In my case, I ate the dessert first in the form of my re-reading of the All Souls Triology and am midway through a second read of Time's Convert (still think it could have used some editing, but enjoy visiting that world despite it).  I also finished Slezkine, and wrote about that earlier in the month.

But I'm more than half-way through the Zuboff and am looking forward to cracking Anthony Esolen next. Rod Dreher's latest, Live Not By Lies, also showed up this week, but my husband is having first crack at that one.  We're trading the Zuboff back and forth, both frustrated by the lack of serious editing and overly flowery writing.  Vegetables, vegetables.  

~sewing~

 Kinder Chinners!  I made a big batch of these in February at the request of our school's violin teacher.  They are used on the end of a violin to cushion the chin, and are helpful especially for younger violin students.  The teacher approached me again in September to ask for 20 more for the current kindergarten class, and I was happy to make them for him.  I set up an assembly line, and while I wasn't able to knock all 20 out in one session, I did get them done over several days time, working in small increments.  

 

For whatever reason, I've found I have to break up my working time into smaller pieces right now, or I can't finish my day with any steam at all. My entire daily rhythm is a bit different these days, as I try to front load as much as I can, since I always feel rotten by late afternoon and cannot muster much to get through the last shift of the day with the kids.  So I try to make whatever dinner bits I can do ahead in the morning, and leave an hour or two in the afternoon for sitting and staring.  

~watching~

Well.  I've hit a kind of lull with that.  I couldn't get into this season of Endeavour and gave up less than one episode in.  (I'm so sick of the labyrinthine plots that make no sense whatsoever, even at the end of the program).  I had a migraine this past weekend that laid me out flat, but it was of a piece with the way I've been dragging myself through my days since late summer.  When I'm tired and stressed, I tend to go back to old favorites.

Bloomsbury Group

 I rewatched some stuff about the Bloomsbury group, which I find weirdly fascinating.  (Fascinating in the way that you can't stop looking at a car wreck).  The first is a more recent BBC series called Life in Squares, which is mostly about painter Vanessa Bell and her sister Virginia Woolfe's lives. I also revisited Carrington, a slightly older film about painter Dora Carrington and writer Lytton Strachey, both of whom feature in the cast of characters in Life in Squares but on the periphery.  

Lytton Strachey by Dora Carrington

I'm pretty sure I read Strachey's Eminent Victorians as part of my senior college thesis on T.E. Lawrence (otherwise known as Lawrence of Arabia), but wouldn't have understood the Bloomsbury context as well as I do now.  Fair warning, the series/movie are not for everyone.  The Bloomsbury group was rather radical in breaking social conventions, and some will find that off-putting.  Personally, I found both quite thought-provoking.

Charleston Farmhouse by Vanessa Bell

 I did finally watch the entire first season of Poldark, after trying it several years ago and not really getting into it.  (I know!  I was surprised too!  But I just couldn't get into Aidan Turner, and the story line seemed tired to me at the time).  Aidan Turner still doesn't do it for me, but I really enjoy watching Eleanor Tomlinson (who plays Ross Poldark's kitchen maid-turned wife), and the 18th century context of Cornwall and the mining industry there are interesting to me.  I had to take a break after the intense season 1 finale, and don't really know when I'll get to season 2.  

Eleanor Tomlinson as Demelza on Poldark

Watching Eleanor Thompson in Poldark reminded me that she played Darcy's sister Georgiana in Death Comes to Pemberly, which I watched when it came out and really enjoyed, so I rewatched that and enjoyed it just as much the second time.  Probably more so, since I enjoy watching Matthew Goode and James Norton even more now.  Matthew Rhys' performance as Darcy is subtle and lovely.  I had forgotten a lot of the details, so it was fun to not know what was going to happen.  I rewatched Sense and Sensibility at some point this month (is there anything better than the late great, brilliant Alan Rickman as Col. Brandon?  I think not), and am planning to revisit other Austen films as I have time.

~garden~

My Mr. Stacky planter kind of went nuts with the kale and lemon balm, although the dill and thyme died pretty quickly.  The lemon balm started out as a dodgy leggy looking thing, but quickly exploded into lush greenery.  I couldn't separate the root ball, however, and so it was poking out of one small area of the Stacky planter.  Yesterday, I pulled out the lemon balm and transplanted it to a bigger area so it could spread out.  (You like my super classy plant stand?)

I am enjoying cooking with lemon balm and chives, and hope to bring the plant indoors when it gets cold.  I know there are lots of medicinal uses for it as well, and hope to experiment some with that this winter.

  I'm experimenting with seeing whether the lemon balm stems will root, so I clipped four healthy looking stems and stuck them in the empty spots left in the planter on the second tier.  I harvested some of the bigger kale leaves and made a nice sausage soup with them yesterday.

 I also took one of my bigger Boxwood basil plants (in front of the big planter box) and put it into a pot, in the hopes of bringing it indoors for the winter as well.  I prefer cooking with the Boxwood basil better than Sweet Basil (even though those did prolifically well this summer also), and hope to keep it going.

 

And in other news, the tomato plants are ridiculous.  They are taller than me now and full of ripening fruit; I'm having to get quite creative to keep them staked and vertical, hence my weird strings and wires contraptions hanging from hooks high up on the walls.

There are finally two tiny cucumbers on the vines, but they are ripening VERY slowly.  Not sure we'll beat the frost on them, but it is fun to see them there after months of nothing but male flowers.  I've harvested about a dozen pole beans, but turns out my kids don't like them, and I'm allergic to them, so my husband has been eating them raw.  I probably won't plant them next year.

Linking with Ginny for Yarn Along!