Halloween Stitching

"Haunted House" by the Snowflower Diaries.

"Fall Pumpkins" by Elizabeth Talledo, from the October 2014 issue of Just Cross Stitch.

A Fall of Leaves

I fell in love with this pattern immediately.  It's not even the main design -- that would be "Autumnal Equinox" by Leann Baehman*, a statement necklace with a bead-embroidered centerpiece and a riot of leafy fringe.  Off in the corner of the third page they had a small photo of earrings made from the toggle clasp Baehman designed for the necklace.

so pretty ...

I found making the teardrop base fiddly, I think because my size 11 beads were not very consistent in size.  But the fringe more than makes up for it -- fun to plan the colors, fun to make, fun to play with, fun to wear.  My new go-to earrings.

*From the August 2015 issue of Bead & Button.

The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach

Chad Harbach's The Art of Fieldingis the best novel about baseball I've ever read.  Ok, it's the only one, but it is still an excellent work.  The story follows four characters at a midwestern college during spring semester; each person's life go abruptly askew (like oh, say, an errant ball that must be fielded), forcing him or her to reevaluate expectations and assumptions.  Schwartz and Henry are on the baseball team, which thanks to Henry is on the verge of winning a title for the first time ever; Affenlight is the president of the college, who up until now has led a very predictable and contented life; and Pella is his daughter, home for the first time in years to recover from a bad marriage.  Just a chapter or two in I found myself peaking at the last pages to make sure things turned out ok, I was that invested in the story and characters.

Of course, the book isn't really about baseball, despite the wonderful, nitty-gritty depictions of that sport; that's just the tool Harbach uses to explore the characters and their relationships with each other as they each face a crisis of their own doing. The relationship between Henry and Schwartz in particular drives most of the book, extending out in rippling circles and ensnaring the other characters. Affenlight is famous (in academic circles) for a book he wrote years ago about Moby Dick and "the cult of male friendship in nineteenth-century America"; The Art of Fielding could be seen as a twenty-first-century riff on that. Modern American notions of masculinity, combined with both homophobia and a growing acceptance of homosexuality, have resulted in an odd distrust of close male relationships unless there is the cover of something else like whaling or baseball.  And so, because of team loyalty and a shared goal, Schwartz and Henry don't actually think about their bond, especially the pitfalls, until it is almost too late.

Pella's story, and her relationships to the other three, do not fare quite as well.  Unlike all too many male authors, Harbach gives her an actual personality, thoughts and opinions of her own, and goals independent of the men in her life, but all the pieces don't quite fit together.  This is just a minor flaw, however, in an overall engaging and wonderful novel.

Fall Crocheting

I just can't stop.  I made a cute little pumpkin to go with the others, from this pattern:

I used a mystery yarn from my stash (used for this jack'o'lantern), which I think is a worsted but seemed a little thicker than the other worsteds I have, so I used a K-sized hook, which is supposedly on the upper end of the recommended range, but I think it was too big -- you can see the batting, which I don't like.  I'm learning that for a lot of the projects I'm drawn to, one is better off using a much smaller hook than recommended.  I also didn't realize I was supposed to make the stitches in the back loop only, so the ribbing was lost.

I tried again, with a smaller hook (H, I think? or maybe G):

Much better!  I'm sending this one to my mom.

Next up was a leaf, with pretty, pretty variegated yarn that was also bulky and bumpy and tended to split.  Having learned my lesson, I used a smaller hook for this project, but of course that was a mistake.  The fuzziness of the yarn and the smallness of the stitches made it very difficult to make sure I was actually putting all the stitches where they were supposed to go, and the result is kind of messy:

I tried again with a larger hook, and that was much neater (and easier).  However one of the downsides was a visible gap in round two, between the chain stitches used to represent the first stitch and the last double crochet:

When I wove in the ends I ran a stitch just behind this gap to close it up.

Here it is with a metal mesh leaf I made a number of years ago:

For good measure, I made another out of the pumpkin yarn:

The pattern is even easier with "normal" yarn!

Trade Beads Necklace

I found a packet of trade beads on sale just begging to be made into something, so I linked them together with eyepins:

More more more!  I wanted something long enough to wrap around both my neck and my wrist, so I added more beads I found in my stash:

Perfect.  It fits six times around my wrist, without too much slack, and two or three times around my neck, depending on the look I want.

Pretty.

Crocheting Along

A few weeks ago I picked up a packet of Lion Brand's "bonbons" -- eight mini skeins of yarn -- in the brights colorway.  This was perfect for me, since I'm not looking to crochet any big projects and I don't want to buy huge skeins of yarn when I only need a little bit.

First up was the brightly colored mandalas from issue 54 of Mollie Makes:

The yarn (and, correspondingly, the hook) was larger than the pattern called for, so let's attribute any wonkiness to that and not my lack of experience.  I have no idea what I'll do with the mandala.

There was plenty of yarn left over, so on to granny squares:

As usual, my persnicketiness required that I balance the colors: eight skeins + four "positions" in each square = eight squares with every color used four times.  I made a ninth with a pretty colorway I hadn't used yet, to end up with a square number of squares (so to speak) (there wasn't enough yarn for 16).  Want to exercise your brain?  Figure out which one is the extra square!

My two favorite:

I was almost out of yarn at this point, but a politely-worded email to the fine folks at Lion Brand about the fact that one of the mini skeins had two large knots in it (hidden on the back of the mandala and one of the squares) resulted in a free replacement package of bonbons.  Yay!  And thank you! As my father would say, el bebé que no llora no mama.

More crocheting to come ....

Book Round-Up

Trigger Warning by Neil Gaiman:This is yet another collection by the prolific author.  What I like about his works is that they vary wildly in form and content -- novels, comics, short stories, poems, photo captions, storybooks, interviews, fantasy, fairy tales, science fiction, horror, comedy, hagiography, children's -- and yet there is an overriding sensibility that is unmistakably his.  That said, this collection was a little weaker than others.  I loved many of the stories: "Lunar Labyrinth" and "Black Dog" (wonderfully English and pagan), "The Thing about Cassandra" (I don't think I've ever read anything quite like it), Sherlock Holmes's final case, "A Calendar of Tales" (12 very short stories inspired by the months), and "The Sleeper and the Spindle" (a mash-up of Snow White and Sleeping Beauty).  Others left me cold, particularly the ones inspired by his relationship with his second wife and the Doctor Who story (the Doctor is just not my thing).

The Peach Keeper by Sarah Addison Allen:I hate to say this, but I did not love this book as much as I loved Allen's other works.  The characters and plot were interesting enough, but the magic realism was almost absent, the secondary story set in the past (and with a fascinating antagonist) was far more interesting than the main story set in the present, and the resolution was a bit anti-climactic.

Father Brown: The Essential Tales
The Scandal of Father Brown
Watching the BBC's Father Brown series made me want to seek out G.K. Chesterton's short stories, which are nothing like the TV show.  Father Brown is somewhat of an enigma, and we learn very little about him (not even his first name) except that he is continually underestimated.  He does solve some mysteries, as one would expect, but in many of the stories it's not so much that he figures out what happened as he is simply witness to a bizarre crime, the motives of which only he can fully understand, even though the identity of the perpetrator is not in doubt.  What ultimately makes these stories interesting is not the puzzles and solutions themselves, but the remarkable insight Father Brown (and Chesterton) have into human behavior.

Apprentice to the Flower Poet Z. by Debra Weinstein:One of the upsides to Beadboy3's penchant for taking all the books off my bookshelves is that I'm rediscovering books I loved and want to read again.  One of those is Weinstein's academic and literary satire, set in the New York City poetry scene.  Annabelle is the titular apprentice, both too talented and too naive for the world she finds herself in, and while I was cringing at her acts of unwitting self-sabotage I was also rooting for her to escape and find her own way.  Weinstein herself is a poet, which means we are treated to a number of actual poems in the novel, some very good and some really not good (on purpose).