Monday Mishmash
Grab a cuppa’ and a snack, and hunker down. We’re going to play catch-up. See, it’s a rainy day at work, and that means I’m just sitting here in case the phone should ring. Slow isn’t the word for it. Pop is napping, and so is Shadow.
Firstly, I have to boast. My dear friend Aviva has finished her Jupiter Shines piece, for which my hands were the model.
Please follow any of the links to her post, because her art is PACKED FULL of detail, and you don’t want to miss a thing! It’s a part of a fabulous series she’s doing, so I encourage you to poke around her site.
Next, it’s time to share the Secret Project. It’s really called Mary’s Omega.
(Modeled by MJ.)
Details:
Pattern: Omega Wrap by Chris Bylsma Designs This is my second Omega, and I think the pattern loves contrast. I really enjoyed matching up the yarns for this one. I did leave off the special bind-off and the little flappymadoo at the seam, because I find it uncomfortable when driving. (It presses into my back.) I just mattress stitched the two ends together, and MJ agreed that it was a better finish.
Needles: My trusty #10.5 Harmony Options.
Yarns: The purple and the berry are both Cotton Fleece. The boucle is Lion Brand Homespun, and the novelty yarn, which coordinated perfectly with both Cotton Fleece colors is Squiggle, by Crystal Palace. I very randomly changed yarns as I knitted along. The yarn did all the work; I can’t say enough about this pattern!
I hope it fits Mary and she loves it. I selected the yarns with her Vegas climate in mind, and I hope it arrived early enough for her to wear it a few times before summer grips them hard.
I also have a book review for you. I mentioned Laura Moriarty’s The Rest of Her Life earlier, but I finished it Friday afternoon. It’s a great book that reads quickly, for me anyway. I soon got emersed in the lives of Leigh and Kara, and I needed to know how it all turned out.
SPOILER ALERT!!!!!!!! Don’t read the next paragraph if you want to be surprised by the book.
This isn’t The Glass Castle. Ms. Moriarty’s work is fiction, and it has a rather peaceful ending. (Not happy, but I close the back cover with a feeling that Kara and Leigh were both going to be okay.) Kara - the daughter who accidentally hits and kills a girl in a crosswalk while driving through town - is very much aware of what she’s done, and takes a more responsible path than her father would have liked her to take. She and Leigh - her mother - begin the novel with that rather stereotypical (and yet real!), strained mother-teen daughter relationship, and that impacts much of the book. In the end though, there’s a real climax, where Leigh’s maternal instincts REALLY kick in, and the reader knows instantly that the very public display will make all the difference to Kara. It does.
Leigh is not the soccer mom whom every kid wishes was her mom. She’s not even a particularly empathetic friend, but through the course of the book, we learn why she is the way she is. I’m sure some of my wonderful mom friends would be aghast from the first chapter at Leigh’s rather clinical approach to the crisis her family finds itself facing after the fatal accident. However, I think I would have related to Leigh without Ms. Moriarty’s in-person plea that we try to understand where Leigh was coming from before we judged her too harshly.
Kara is a remarkable young woman, the kind of daughter ANYONE would be proud to claim. Even in her response to the accident, she remains a model teen. I’d like to think there are young adults like Kara out there. She’s truly a good kid, and she handles a horrible situation with tremendous sensitivity.
I liked this book so well that in my rainy day tedium, I’m going to go order Ms. Moriarty’s first book, The Center of Everything. She’s the first of our Literary Feast authors about whom I can say I want to read more. I liked two of the other three books well enough, but not enough to seek out more from the author. I’m eagerly awaiting the announcement of next year’s author-speaker.
If you read it, or have read it, let me know your impression of the book. I’ve found that while I cannot knit while I sit on the front porch playing with Sissy, I can read, so look for more book reviews in the future. This book gets a “couldn’t put it down to knit” rating, which is eclipsed only by a “couldn’t sleep until I finished it”.
