A Bluestocking Knits

Our dishcloths are looking a bit, well, antique, so I’ve spent the last two days with my crochet hook smoking from the speed of whipping out four new ones. (The “Dahlia pan holder”, with the swirls, was actually on my Year-of-Finishing-Things list, having been sitting around for a considerable time with the ends needed to be worked in, so — check! done! I’ve written about the pattern elsewhere.) I lost my Dishcloth Gallery with TypePad’s desertion demise, but will have to figure out some kind of replacement or substitute, since I don’t think that WordPress has something like it. The purple variegated one at lower right and the purple and weirdly-pooling reds-and-pinks one (using up scraps of the cotton) are really just swatches, of even moss stitch and Suzette stitch respectively, but the other two are new-to-me patterns, Made by Gootie’s “C2C Moss Stitch” dishcloth at lower left, and Nordic Hook’s “Clara“. The latter I resized a bit, as with Lily Sugar ‘n Cream it would have come out about 9 inches wide, and I prefer smaller dishcloths. It’s still quite a handsome cloth, although again, the colors pooled strangely! The corner-to-corner one gave me a bit of trouble with the decrease half, but I think that was entirely my own fault, as watching the accompanying video after I think my fourth attempt, it narrowed down quite obediently!

I just finished reading Sam Kean’s Dinner with King Tut, wh. I came across on the public library’s new-books shelf. It’s about experiential archaeology — there is in fact a short debate in the introduction about the term, but I prefer “experiential” to “experimental” which sounds to me like people are experimenting being archaeologists, not investigating the experiences of people in the past! Kean is exercising his novel-writing chops in this book, weaving fictional stories around his research into particular details of life in the past — mediaeval catapults, Polynesian canoes, Egyptian mummification. I’ve always enjoyed the “living history” series on television, from “1900 House” to the side journeys in “Time Team” about how a certain kind of snake bracelet was made, or Bronze-Age bread, and such, and so I found this book an easy and enjoyable read!