Knit One Purl Two

Some time ago, I downloaded from Quince and Co. a pattern named Camilla, a baby blanket featuring an echo of one of my favorite nature shapes - the scallop shell. Like most pattern downloads, it sat in my pattern file waiting for some attention. Then as the weather got colder and colder, I started thinking how nice it would be to have a bed runner across the bottom of our bed to keep old feet nice and warm. Then I saw a luscious color in Debbie Bliss Cashmerino Aran called Mallard. The result of this downloading, thinking, and seeing was a Camilla bed runner. The width is the same as the baby blanket measurement, but I just kept knitting until it fit nicely across the end of our bed.

If you're into knitting, check out Debbie Bliss Cashmerino Aran on the next visit to your local yarn shop. It's soft, luxurious, and oh so nice to work with. You will soon be searching for the perfect pattern to knit up in this beautiful yarn.

And best of all? It has the Lucy seal of approval!

The Joy of Reading...on My Kindle

As I began to buy more ebooks, I felt a sense of surprise and delight and wonder that I could carry around a library in my pocket. It is a library, arranged alphabetically or, if I like, in order of buying, and nothing shelved in the wrong place. The relationship with my library on a Kindle feels more intimate, like a shelled animal carrying its home on its back. Wherever I am, there is always something to read.

~Linda Grant, I Murdered My Library

Outside the Back Door...

Joy of Reading...

Two quotes from a recently finished, hug-it-when-last-page-is-turned book...

A seasonal observation...
It was one of those perfect fall days when the air is cool enough to wake you up but the sun is also kissing your face.

Babies...
It's a good thing babies don't give you a lot of time to think. You fall in love with them and when you realize how much they love you back, life is very simple.

Bookticipation

Releasing on Tuesday, February 10...

From indiebound.org

“It was a beautiful, breezy, yellow-and-green afternoon. . .” This is how Abby Whitshank always begins the story of how she fell in love with Red that day in July 1959. The Whitshanks are one of those families that radiate togetherness: an indefinable, enviable kind of specialness. But they are also like all families, in that the stories they tell themselves reveal only part of the picture. Abby and Red and their four grown children have accumulated not only tender moments, laughter, and celebrations, but also jealousies, disappointments, and carefully guarded secrets. From Red’s father and mother, newly arrived in Baltimore in the 1920s, to Abby and Red’s grandchildren carrying the family legacy boisterously into the twenty-first century, here are four generations of Whitshanks, their lives unfolding in and around the sprawling, lovingly worn Baltimore house that has always been their anchor.

Brimming with all the insight, humor, and generosity of spirit that are the hallmarks of Anne Tyler’s work, A Spool of Blue Thread tells a poignant yet unsentimental story in praise of family in all its emotional complexity. It is a novel to cherish.

~~~

A thoughtful description of Tyler's appeal from Elizabeth Taylor, Chicago Tribune, shortly after the release of State of Wonder:

From the pleasant opera-loving terrorists in Bel Canto to the endlessly fertile Amazon women in her new novel State of Wonder, Ann Patchett creates magical stories. No wizards or vampires, no triumph over dysfunctional past, but rather an alternative universe where unlikely characters come together in a transformative way and make new, and surprising, lives for themselves.

Reading with Teddy...

Books about cars and trucks were found aplenty under the Christmas tree for Teddy. His favorites so far are Cars and Trucks and Things That Go and, the book he's reading in the picture above, Cars and Trucks from A to Z--both by Richard Scarry.

Reading with Mum on Christmas morning.