Yarn Along

I’m continuing to try to keep ahead of Silje’s reading this year.  This book, Johnny Tremain has been on several reading lists that I’ve been looking at over the last few years.  I gave it to Silje last year to read, and she turned her nose up at it, so I pushed it off for this year (even though it would have been better to study when we were studying the Revolutionary War).  That way I could go through it better, and have a better idea of how to get her through it.

Then once again, one of my favorite literature “authorities,” Sarah Clarkson, made some mention of this book again, and I decided I had to see what all the fuss was about.

I cannot put this book down.

I’ve literally lost hours of sleep, because I want to read “just a few more pages.”  I can’t wait to introduce Silje to this more properly.  I think she just didn’t want to read it because it was about a boy.  However, I pushed and made her read Tom Sawyer which she is still working on right now, and it’s turning out to be one of her favorite books.  She’s starting to ask if Mark Twain wrote anything else, because it’s so funny.  So she might be getting to the point where male protagonists really aren’t so bad after all.

This is one of those books that I avoid reading because my house completely falls apart after I pick it up, because things get left undone.  I don’t have time for this.  On the other hand, I suppose that’s the price we homeschooling moms have to pay.  Since this is a school book, and I’m preparing my lessons for my students, then I suppose you could say I’m just being really responsible.

Yeah…let’s go with that.

I’ve been playing around with swatches this week.  I’ve been wanting a cozy, cabled, oversized shrug.  I’ve been debating about the cable designs for awhile, and Ingrid and I spent awhile the other day going through tons of stitch patterns in my books.  She kept turning back to one page over and over.  It’s one I had marked as potential, but seeing it so often in our “reading” I somewhere fell in love with it.  I did one swatch, but was not quite pleased with how it would lay in larger shrug form.  So I’m re-swatching now, changing the background to the cables to garter stitch.  I think that will play with the overall concept a bit better.  I hope I’m close to casting on for this project, because I’ve been craving a project just like this for awhile.

Linking up with Ginny’s Yarn Along.