I've been too busy lately but I've managed to keep knitting and reading. Here's proof:



The left front joined to the back, with markers where buttons will be, so I can knit matching buttonholes on the right front. That novel is Mistborn, by Brandon Sanderson. It is the first of a fantasy series and so far so good. Fantasy worlds can be very repetitive but this one is very original. It made me want to read the first novel he wrote:



As often happens, his first novel, Elantris, was not as well written as the second. Nevertheless, I found it as original as Mistborn. It seems to me that he was testing the waters before embarking in a larger project. I finished it along with the right front of the baby jacket, which has an endless amounts of ends to weave in. I should start doing that soon.


But first I will work on the sleeves. As much as I hate sleeves (and sleeve seams), knitting them is better than weaving in ends. That last book, Twilight, by Stephenie Meyer, has my husband constantly making fun of me for reading teenager chick lit. I remember Jennifer mentioning to me that she was reading the second book. Well, if she liked it enough to read the second one, I reasoned that the first one must be good. And it is. It is not something my husband would enjoy, but hey, it's letting me progress nicely on the baby jacket. I don't ask for more.

I wish I had taken a look in ravelry before knitting this jacket, because they have a link to this pattern's errata.

Not that it did me any good. By now I am done with the first pocket. And that's a problem. According to the pattern, you place the liner, leave the pocket  stitches  on a stitch holder, and there is no further mention about what to do about them later on.

Because I did not know about the errata page, I had to come up with something, so I based myself on the pictures in the book. I did not knit the liner separately, I picked up stitches from the bottom, saving myself a seam, like my mother taught me. She also taught me to bind off my pocket edges prior to joining the liner, so that's what I did. And because there appeared to be a seed stitch border, I knit that border before casting off.


That picture was taken before the liner was finished and joined.

Now that I've checked the errata, it appears that I should have added the border after placing the liner. I did think of that possibility, but then I would have to sew the border on the right side of the jacket. Having all seams on the wrong side made more sense to me. And really, there is no difference, except that the pocket is a tad narrow.

I don't mind, and I'm sure that my friend's baby will not mind either. I will have to remember what I did so I can repeat it on the right side of the jacket.

But once more I am glad this was a library book, and that  I don't bother buying knitting books.

Not that I'm buying many books lately. That's the blessing of having a well stocked library.



That is the Name of the Wind, by Patrick Rothfuss, another fantasy book that kept me turning page after page. That is the spouse's recommendation. I am very happy I married a guy who shares my reading tastes.

In that picture you can also see the pocket after joining the liner. It needs a couple of side seams on the inside, but no seams on the outside will be needed.

I made a slideshow out of some of my pictures form Oaxaca.



And here's the new project, cable and moss stitch jacket, from a Debbie Bliss book I checked out of the library.


That's the back of it, posing next to Lia's recommendation: The thirteenth Tale, by Diane Setterfield. This novel has a little of everything: mistery, romance, madness and a few skeletons in the closet. It was a good read.

I am much less pleased by the Debbie Bliss book. The amount of mistakes and omissions in the pattern makes me wonder why they bother paying an editor. I had to figure out some stuff in order to work the back. I cringe to think of what awaits me as I begin the left front.


That novel is Comfort Food, by Kate Jacobs. I don't watch TV and I don't like to cook, so reading a novel about a cooking show host seemed like a bad idea. But I kept on reading, trusting Pilar's judgement. It is not my type of story, in that I like conflicts to be a bit less inane than a simple rivalry between TV hosts. And yet, once in a while I can enjoy a lightweight, friendly story.

This is how the socks were progressing as I was reading some of the recommended books .

First, another Hellboy comic (I'm going through a phase, I guess).



And then, The Spanish Gardener, by A.J. Cronin, recommended to me by Sandra:



This is a very bittersweet story that I would have enjoyed much more if the main character had been more credible: a very poor Spanish boy who, even though he could not afford an education and never left his native  hometown, could easily speak, read and write in English.  And though his English is perfect, the author has him constantly repeating "seņor" and "amigo", as if those were the two words he did not bother to learn. I had read another  A.J. Cronin book before: The Green Years. Perhaps that raised my expectations too much.

I took a break from sad stories and from the socks (the colors were becoming too dull to my eyes) with Letters from the Earth, by Mark Twain. This was Thuy's recommendation. The first part, the actual letters from the Earth, is very funny and invites you to reflection. The rest of the book contained many unrelated pieces of writing, some of them more interesting than others.



Those booties are for a friend of mine who is having a baby in February. Knitting them was a breeze but I hated seaming them. I am still not done with the second one. I did keep knitting the socks and finished them before packing, but I did not have time to wash them. I did so on my first day in Oaxaca and took a picture of them in my hotel room before meeting the recipient for breakfast on the day of the wedding.



By the way, Oaxaca was great. The people are fun, they dress beautifully, they cook wonderfully and the roads are a disaster. But every sight was worth the drive.  I wanted to make a collage of all my sightseeing, but I hardly found the time to make this post.

I already started another project because those booties seem like a smallish present. I will post about it later.

Don't ask me why, but I enjoy Hellboy comics.



For me to like a comic book, the art and the plot must be good enough. The drawings are wonderful, no question about it. The stories... well, those are quite absurd, but amusing, and I've always liked fantasy.

Talking of fantasy, here's some from Lois McMaster Bujold: Passage, which is the third book of a series called The Sharing Knife.



I believe I have read all of her books. I liked her more when she was writing militaristic science fiction, though she's also written excellent fantasy books, my favorite being The Curse of Chalion.  I don't think that The Sharing Knife is as good as other stuff she's written, but maybe it's just that her style has changed, or she may be trying to accomodate other type of readers. I do feel she is now concentrating heavily on the romance, which she was not doing before.

The idea of not doing any patterning made these socks go fast, didn't it? I do want to finish them soon, because I will be going to a wedding in Mexico and these are a gift for a friend I will be meeting there. And no, they are not a wedding gift! The couple will be getting money.  Boring, but that's what they asked for.

I might not be blogging, but I have been knitting and reading.



That is Zoe's Tale, by John Scalzi. My library owns the first three books on this series, and yet when I suggested that they buy this one, which could qualify as the fourth, I got a message stating that Scalzi was a fairly unknown author and that the library would not be getting this book. So I let it drop, hoping that the book may become available later on through interlibrary loan (oh, I am so cheap). Well, all of a sudden, I got another message from my library that the book was ready for me to pick up. Apparently, enough readers requested it that they went ahead and bought it. And the best part was, I was the first to read it.

It took me about two evenings to finish it, but that is not surprising, it happens to me with all of Scalzi's books. This is the same story of the third book, but written under a different character's point of view. Not boring at all, even when you already know what is going to happen.  I thoroughly enjoyed it.

The second book is The Nuclear Jihadist, by Douglas Frantz and Catherine Collins. Now that's a depressing book. You see, A.Q. Kahn, the scientist who developed the Pakistani nuclear bomb, went on to traffic nuclear technology with countries like Lybia, North Korea and Iran, all the while under CIA surveillance. And nobody stopped him, because nobody wanted to cause any turmoil in Pakistan. Well, Pakistan is in turmoil anyway, and now the genie is out of the bottle. Depressing indeed.


So let's talk about something more cheerful, shall we? How do you like the sock striping, so far? I like how it is coming out and I am thinking of making a plain stockinette sock without any bells and whistles. Any attempt to incorporate texture would ruin the wide stripes, don't you agree?

This was not a recommendation from a fellow knitter, but from my husband. So I trusted him and read the comic. I confess that I enjoyed it a lot. It was a good beginning for the toes.


But now it's time to start reading some of the recommendations I got from knitters visiting this website. Luckily, my local library has them, so I will get to them eventually. Thank you so much for your suggestions!

Finally, here's a finished pair of sunset socks:




To celebrate, I decided to start a new pair of socks with some Knit Picks yarn. To my dismay, the skeins were wound up from different ends. I kept unraveling while searching for the same sequence on both skeins until I discovered what was wrong. By then, it was just easier to manually wind one of the skeins backwards:



Has anyone had this problem before? For me, this was the first time ever.

Anyway, please help me celebrate the completion of my eternal socks by suggesting me a few books to read for the current pair.

 Yes, this pair of socks is almost finished. And I also finished Valerie Plame's Book: Fair Game. It is full of "redactions".



Luckily, you can still make sense of what's going on. And the afterword, by a different author, fills up the gaps with information already available to the general public.

I feel sorry that someone who was working so hard to keep her country safe was betrayed by her own government.

Back in Mexico, I used to scan the section of English language books in Sanborns, searching for science fiction. While not strictly SciFi, Robin Cook's books were a neat substitute: medical thrillers. But I often felt, after reading a few pages, that I might have bought a book I already owned. Checking my shelf, I would then notice that no, I had made no mistake and this was, in fact a new book. The problem was that Robin Cook was repeating himself. So I stopped reading him.



I was browsing the new books section in my public library when this Robin Cook's book, Crisis, stirred some memories. Maybe I should give him another try, I thought. Guess what? Even after so many years, I recognized the same recipe: A few mafiosi, a good doctor, a bad doctor, and something to criticize about modern health care, in this case, concierge medicine.

The good thing is, he's still a page turner. It was over soon.