Yarn Along

Week two of joining the Yarn Along!  There's actually wool content this time!

I started a sweater for Silas today, and we'll see if I can get it done in time for him to open it on Christmas Eve.  It's loosely based on the sweater kit I bought for my mother-in-law two Christmases ago (which was basically a Tulips baby sweater kit, but with the pattern swapped out for Diane Soucy's #214 Baby Pullover, because Beth's Yarn Basket had an example knitted up that was just so darling, and so very Ryan; I like dressing Silas as Ryan - it amuses me no end, and I love to see little boys dressed up as little men [little girls, however, should always be dressed as little girls]).

The yarn, in keeping with the Tulips idea, is Dream in Color Classy.  Instead of going with a kit of several colors, I'm sticking with a more basic two-color stripe pattern, so I bought whole skeins - one each of Shiny Moss green and Grey Tabby grey.  Green and grey is one of my favorite combinations, and Silas gravitated towards the colors as I was going through the Yarn Basket's DiC options.  That's my boy.  I've long been ogling Dream in Color's beautiful tonal yarns, and it turns out that they're not just pretty colorways - it's downright dreamy to work with, too, so soft and smooth and delicious.  It's a little more than I normally spend on two balls of yarn, but the yardage is generous and there's no price to be put on the joy of knitting a little sweater with heavenly yarn.

The book, The Sea of Monsters by Rick Riordan, was an impulsive pick-up from the library's free discards.  I haven't read the first book, The Lightning Thief, but Sea spends so much time recapping it that I probably will never need to.  The book is a decent piece of light fiction for tweens, but other than some of the fun mythological references, it doesn't really have enough to grab me as an adult.  I feel like it draws too much from Harry Potter, without having JK Rowling's storytelling mastery.  There are a lot of elements that I wish had been handled differently, like the characters' learning disabilities and sense of parental abandonment.  These are great topics for children's literature to deal with, but I don't feel like, "It's cool that I have dyslexia, because it's a sign that I'm a demigod!" or "Your dad's doing the best he can - he's a god with thousands of other children to deal with, too, you know," really address the problems in a way that will help children handle these issues themselves or in their peers.  Give me "A Wrinkle in Time" any day.