Gentle November Days

Good morning or more like mid-day by the time I edit and publish this post. A downy woodpecker climbs the birch to the suet feeder and a cardinal perches on the lip of the safflower seed feeder. The sky is cloudy and the air is humid. Today will be a warm 74 degrees and then the temperature will drop dramatically - again. Perhaps it will rain. 

In honor of my Mom, I dedicate this week to being gentle and kind with myself and others. Monday, 11/7, was her birthday. I bought a latte in her honor. Mom was smart, hard-working, kind, and gentle. She volunteered for several organizations but especially for the American Heart Association. She taught CPR for years and organized and ran a blood mobile at the community college where she worked. She scheduled the blood mobile drives on Halloween and threatened to wear a Dracula cape over her navy nurse's uniform. She never did wear that cape but she was the best kind of mother and friend. She also liked a good cup of black coffee.

I join Kat and the Unravelers today as we wait on the final election outcomes. I did some negative knitting on Norah's scarf this week. Evidently I can't keep the bias garter stitch straight while knitting during coffee with friends and the Erdrich-along zoom discussion. Somewhere I added five stitches to the width. For heaven's sake. Since I only have one skein of yarn and it was the last one at the yarn shop, I ripped back and reknit. I don't want to run short. In the meantime, because scarves are a little boring to knit, I may cast on Emmett's mittens and alternate between projects. The mittens will be green with a white stripe because he likes green and green and white are his middle school colors. Bonus because his last hat was knit from another skein of this green yarn. This second skein was in the stash.  

I finished spinning this braid of Polworth. The smallest skein contains five knots as a single kept breaking. The twist in the yarn is balanced so I think the breaks came where I joined new lengths of fiber. I am spinning a more consistent yarn circumference on the wheel. Slow steady progress is my goal. Although I didn't plan to spin a gradient, it's almost what happened. Sarah encouraged me to spin a braid with some white areas and watch what happens to the colors. Fascinating. Fiber looks one way in a braid, another as a single, and different again when plied. It changes again when knitted into fabric. I am embracing the transformations. This is good for my Type A organized personality that likes predictability.  I plan to learn more about manipulating color within a braid just because it is so interesting.  Yarn-i-tec-ture by Jillian Moreno is a good resource. Courtesy of my son, I own a copy. 

In the last few days, I read Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan. I was going to save it to read during the holidays but in the wee hours of Saturday morning, I needed a quiet book about a character choosing kindness. The writing is lyrical and I enjoyed it very much. Keegan recently published Foster, a short book that first appeared as a short story in The New Yorker Magazine. I look forward to reading it. In other book news, I was just notified that my library hold on The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O'Farrell is available. I expected a longer wait so hooray. 

Take good care of yourselves, gentle readers.