Desk & Needle, 9/25/24
What's on them?
Dear Knitter and Reader,
A new thing! I’m setting out to tell you every week about what’s on my desk and what’s on my knitting needles. I’ll include a short bit about what I’m learning and writing about, and maybe a bit of what’s outside the window. This week:
Coffee: Cold brew, heavy cream
Writing: Nalbinding and historical reenactment chapter of memoir
Knitting: Final clue of the Lunar Phase 2024 MKAL
I’ve been drinking cold brew with big, clunky ice cubes and heavy cream every afternoon. My fingers curl up like claws around the cup, they are so frozen, but I’m hanging onto the hot days. The kind of days when I can hold this kind of cup up to my face and revel in condensation. My cup is saying it’s still summer. I’m not cold, you are.
Same, says the tree outside my window. (In a perverse process, our locust starts out with yellow leaves in spring and turns gradually green through fall.)
The weird part is, I love fall. There is no reason for me to resist. I adore a trip to a pumpkin patch, love buying pumpkin spice lattes and weird bumpy gourds. I love the huge greens at the farmers’ market. I can’t get enough of crunchy leaves and the smell of bark and dirt in the park that somehow emerges more clearly during the few cold-yet-still-dry weeks we get here in Portland. These roof-replacing, house-painting, hurried-street-construction months of September and October.
Nalbinding & Reenactment
This week, I’m writing about a summer weekend at my first historical reenactment event I attended years ago. I tried to learn nalbinding—an ancient way to turn yarn into socks, hats, pouches, and other things that tend toward being tubes. I’ve been studying the Coppergate Sock, and a pair of ancient Egyptian socks that are an absolute miracle, surviving in incredible shape for so long. (They are wild to look at. You must.)
My book is a memoir about a timid forty-something knitting book author (me) trying to become a Viking woman. My big news is that I have an agent! We are getting ready to take it out to publishers.
Alongside the memoir, I’m outlining and writing snippets of my new time travel romance.
Knitting
I’m knitting the last clue in my Lunar Phase 2024 MKAL and already thinking about more. Would anyone here be interested in a Bridgerton mystery wrap? Having just finished rewatching Bridgerton, I moved on to rewatching some other fake dating trope movies, which I will admit I LOVE.
What are you up to?