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Found some in-progress photos of a knitted poncho I made for my grandmother (who liked butterflies). After she passed away, I was given it back by her daughter (my mother-in-law), along with a spectacular butterfly blanket she'd crocheted, and a sweater with butterfly detail that she'd knitted. The sweater and poncho are tucked away special (both are really for Spring/Summer), but the blanket lives on My Chair, where it gets used every day.
Anyway, here's the original post: My grandmother has a butterfly theme going - her rooms are full of pretty butterfly things, I noticed at Thanksgiving. And I had a thought (yep, worry) that it would be kinda cool to make her a poncho with butterflies on it for Christmas (yep, that's me finishing something IN A MONTH). I was able to give it to her yesterday, finished!
First, bits of poncho:
And a closeup, so you can see the lovely butterfly:
And me modeling it, so you get the full idea.
What I read last week:
"Where Serpents Sleep", C.S. Harris (aka Candice Proctor and C.S. Graham) - fourth of the Sebastian St. Cyr mysteries. In publication (and story chronology), the order of these books is: "What Angels Fear", "When Gods Die", "Why Mermaids Sing," "Where Serpents Sleep" and the just-released-in-hardcover "What Remains of Heaven". (I was really hoping for a title starting with "Who"...) I originally read the second book, and was pleasantly surprised to be reading about a Regency England with a more realistic approach than many modern romances take - and yet, there was still romance and, of course, mystery - so tracked down the rest.
"Where Serpents Sleep" is set in England at the time of the Napoleonic wars, in the days leading up to the assassination of Prime Minister Spencer Percival by John Bellingham, a disgruntled merchant with a chip against the Government (which was likely justified). The story contains the series regulars: Dr. Paul Gibson, Kat Boleyn and Miss Hero Jarvis. The tale moves quickly, and the only historical inaccuracies I spotted are the ones pointed out by the author herself in the afterword. There is a nice balance between "clues I spotted" and "clues the characters had to give me", which makes it an entertaining read.
The back of the jacket: Troubled but compelling anti-hero Sebastian St. Cyr returns in a thrilling new mystery as he joins the daughter of his most bitter enemy in a murder investigation that uncovers rich layers of hypocrisy and depravity in the highest echelons of power in Regency England.
London, 1812. The brutal slaughter of eight young prostitutes in a house of refuge near Covent Garden leaves only one survivor - and one witness: Hero Jarvis, reform-minded daughter of the Prince Regent's cousin, Lord Jarvis. When the Machiavellian power broker quashes any official inquiry that might reveal his daughter's unorthodox presence, Hero launches an investigation of her own and turns to Sebastian St. Cyr, Viscount Devlin, for help. Still struggling to come to terms with the loss of his lover, Kat Boleyn, and the resultant estrangement from his father, Sebastian is at first reluctant to agree. But the callous violence of the murders - combined with the opportunity to provoke his archenemy, Jarvis - prompts him to act. Working in uneasy alliance, Hero and Sebastian focus their efforts on one particular victim of the carnage: Rose Jones, the terrified nineteen-year-old-girl, with the unmistakable accent of a gentlewoman, who died in Hero's arms. As they unravel a dangerous thread of lies and deceptions, Hero and Sebastian follow a trail of clues leading from the seedy brothels and docksides of London's East End to the Mayfair mansions of a noble family with dark secrets of its own to hide. Risking both their lives and their reputations, the two must race against time to stop a killer whose ominous plot threatens to shake the nation to its very core.
Genre(s): Mystery/Thriller (Historical)
Audience: non-squeamish adults
Online Extras: read the author's "Fun Bio!"
Reading Time: Two days
Recommend: Obtaining the first book, What Angels Fear, from your local library, to see if the series is to your taste.
I read a lot. Given how much I knit, I really shouldn't have time for eating - but I tend to eat at least two meals a day at work (by myself), and I don't want food on my knitting, so - I read. I'm not reading as much as I usually do, since the Monster Yarn Pattern Project thing is taking over chunks of my evenings (it's going to be a while before there's little enough yarn left for it to be a "portable project"), so I'll share what I've been reading. It's pretty eclectic, and I'm not a critic. Pretty much anything I pick up, I read; I don't tend to pick up things I don't think I'll finish. Don't expect anything in-depth, but you may find something you hadn't heard of that you might want to track down to read yourself.
EEEE! My Ravatar (the "I can too pay attention to... OOOO, YARN!" one) got nominated for a Bobby Award!! Wheeeeee!
For those of you who don't get this... Um, it's somewhere between a graphic-design-geek and knit-geek thing. There's like half a million people with a zillion little pictures with which to identify themselves, and out of all of those, my tiny Ravatar is one of, I think, ten up for the award. EEEEEEEEE!!!
My Ravatar is famous!!
Just a quick note today - I didn't get a lot of knitting done. Well, I guess I'm strange in counting 130 rows of knitting as "not a lot", but.... anyway, here's the Flower Block of the Hello Kitty Illusion Scarf:
You can sort of see in the upper right a spot where I knitted when I should have purled with the black yarn, but I am SO not going back to fix it. You can still tell there's a flower there, so I'm good.
Here's photos of the first two panels of my Hello Kitty scarf, which is turning into a bigger project than I'd anticipated. Turns out that I'd like it reversible - which means once I knit the five panels going up this way (Hello Kitty, Smiley Heart, Flower, Smiley Star, Hello Kitty), I'm going to do the same five panels in the same order, with the colors inverted. I'm going to crochet the two scarves back to back and upside-down from each other, so if the correct face is up, there will be an illusion from either end of the scarf.
It's tempting to do the whole thing so it looks like the illusion on the front is the same as on the back of a particular panel - just mirror everything as I swtich the colors - but I also like the illusion-from-either-end possibility. I have a minimum of three more panels before it becomes an issue!
We'll see what I wind up doing!
