A Bluestocking Knits

Booking Through Thursday: Just Wild About Harry

be sorted @ nimbo.net

Okay, love him or loathe him, you’d have to live under a rock not to know that J.K. Rowling’s final Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, comes out on Saturday… Are you going to read it?  I read the first two books when I was working at a high school library, and thought I should see what all of the fuss was about.  (Can you imagine a time when there was only one copy of The Sorcerer's Stone on the library shelf?  Not that long ago, either.)  To be honest, I thought they were okay -- not brilliant, but a fairly entertaining diversion.  Actually, I wasn't impressed by the first one, but read it again along The Chamber of Secrets when I realized that my husband was besotted with them, somewhere around the eleventh reading of the then-four-volume series!  I thought a bit better of them on second reading.

David is flying off to Florida on Sunday morning, and plans to snatch up a copy of the new one on his way to the airport, as it were -- he tells me he will also be taking the next few Aubrey/Maturins in the series.  (His favorite HP characters are the Weasley twins.)

If so, right away? Or just, you know, eventually, when you get around to it? Are you attending any of the midnight parties? If you’re not going to read it, why not?  I'm more interested in the series since I've gotten this far, but I can certainly wait until David gets home to read the new one! and I can't even think, realistically, of who it would have to be for me to stay up past midnight to see!  (The Queen, perhaps, but then I don't think she'd be up past midnight, either.)

I would, however, be tempted to dress up as a character for a Halloween bash.  Professor Trelawney, I think ....!

And, for the record… what do you think? Will Harry survive the series? What are you most looking forward to?  Putting myself in an author's position, I think that Rowling would have a hard time killing off a character that means so much to her, although I understand how the requirements of a storyline might compel one to do so.  If she does, I suspect that it would be something in the line of Gandalf's transformation into something more powerful, greater than he had been before. 

And yes, as you can see, I've "been sorted", into Ravenclaw House.  I suspect that the Sorting Hat would have had rather a time making its decision, wondering whether to put me with the other duffers into Hufflepuff!  David, as you may remember, would be in Gryffindor.

For more answers to this week's Booking Through Thursday question, visit here.

All Socks, All the Time

Now, that was a nice long blog break, wasn't it?!  Not intentional, I assure you.  It's funny how summers for parents are busier than the school months.  We've had day camp -- long, hot, exhausting, but lots of fun -- swimming lessons, birthday parties, a bout of 'flu for Laura -- whew!  Not a lot of time for knitting, let alone blogging about it.

But if you're wondering if a skein of Jitterbug is enough to make a pair Jaywalkers for a size Australian 8/US 10 foot, the answer --

is no.  My feet are smaller than the recipient's, so it's not just a matter of an inch and a half, either.  Gaah.

I did think about ripping them out altogether and making them shorter in the leg, but frankly I like them a bit long, and so suspect that it would be better to have them "too long" rather than shorter, so that was out.  I ran to the yarn shop and bought another skein, which was quite obviously not the same dyelot, and then had to decide whether I should just carry on or pull out half of the foot and alternate skeins -- I decided that it would be apparent either way, and that it would be much less likely to show if the new part was further down the foot.  Much less work for me, too! so it was an easy decision.

The colors, curiously, are not as variegated in real life as they are in the photos -- the reds and yellows don't pop out as much as they seem to here.  I tried all sorts of various settings on my camera, but none seems to capture the essence of the stuff.  You'll have to take my word for it.  The second skein is definitely more subtle, as well as -- rather alarmingly -- of a finer gauge.

And here is a pair of socks for Julia, which I finished last night.  The pattern is from Ann Budd's Handy Book of Patterns, with a picot edging and 3x1 rib, lined up with the picots because that's the kind of knitter I am.

Posed by Julia on the edge of the bed.  She doesn't like having her picture taken unless she's in the right mood, so I may have to wait for a modelling shoot!

I found the picot edging to be extremely fiddly at this gauge, and will most likely not attempt it again with the Wildfoote, which was not only very splitty, but I had chosen a color (Columbine) which made it difficult to see what I was doing, with its "tri-color twists."

Nevermind -- Julia is happy!