Domesticity, and 2 related book reviews

Like everyone else, I have become even more domestic during this strange period in our lives. We have always made our own bread, and our own pasta. I've always had a couple of plants around. In the last three months though - I brought in my outdoor plant, because of the renos and it thrived. Then one day when I was sad, I went to Pop Wilder and bought this little beauty, but Princess Daisy kept trying to eat it. So planted some grass for her.

Did you know you can grow grass hydoponically? Easy as.

When NetGalley had both The Ultimate Pasta Machine Cookbook by Lucy Vaserfirer and Houseplant Party by Lisa Eldred Steinkopf I said "yes please" pretty fast, even though I knew it meant I would be dealing with the nightmare that is Adobe Digital Editions. Which turned out not to be a problem, since NetGalley now has it's own app and it works much better for me.

Houseplant Party is a lovely book. fairly simple, so perfect for a relatively inexperienced "plant parent" like me. It has lovely pictures, and would, in paper form, make a great gift. it gave me a bit more confidence around my plant care. If I have one criticism it is that it is a bit too Instagram ready and a bit too apolitical - at one point the book mentions GMO plants and that it's illegal to sell clippings from them and I squirmed at the idea of a corporation being able to own a plant in that sense, but pretty plants and decorating your house is the point of this book, not tearing down capitalism and starting the revolution.

The Ultimate Pasta Machine Cookbook is also a very pretty book. the first half is divided into thirds, with one third each dedicated to each of the main types of pasta machines. After that it's sauces and fillings. Yum. It is a bit odd having an instruction book where there are whole chapters that are are irrelevant to my kind of pasta maker (I use a Phillips machine) but this is a pretty, useful and tasty book.

Both these books had useful information, but were also a lovely journey into a tidy, plant filled, delicious home based life.

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Unravelled wednesday and WAYRN - the one where I prepare

We are heading off for some camping and hiking and general R&R on Friday, so I'm currently in planning and preparing mode. Of course that mainly means deciding what to knit - I'm going to make the Old Romance cardigan by Joji Locatelli. The yarn is wound and I'm ready to go. I completed Leon's Winter Set (2023) just in time, and it's currently blocking. I'm reading Georgette Hayer's Fredrica , which I am enjoying very much. Regency romance is so sweet and, unlike current romance offerings, I know it won't suddenly tumble into gynaecological territory! For unexplained reasons, NetGalley is offering some Georgette Heyer books at the moment - (maybe it's re-release?) and I'm taking this opportunity to read a few more of them And that's my week in knitting and reading. To read my all my book reviews, and to see everything I knit, you can find me on Ravelry as Sharondoublekni t and on GoodReads as Sharondblk . I'm joining in with Kat ...

Yarnalong - the one with the final bit of transport

Remember how I took every form of transport known to man a fortnight ago? Well, I was missing just one thing, suburban trains. But today I got to remedy that, knitting my way to Dandenong for work. Yay? My Char jumper has been knitting up ridiculously fast. It's easy, pleasant and a well written pattern. I'm reading Rachael Herron's latest book The Ones Who Matter Most . It's a good read so far, family centered fiction, easy to read but still emotionally challenging. I'm listening to Evelyn Waugh's Men At Arms . I'm enjoying it, I didn't really know what to expect, but some of it reminds me of Catch 22, in that it catalogues the absurdities of war and bureaucracy. The narrator has the perfect upper crust English accent and I'm very pleased it's the first of a trilogy. And that's another week of reading, knitting and catching trains everywhere for me. Do pop along to Ginny's blog to see what she and the rest of the yarnalong ...

Why Andrea Mowry, why? (A rant and a rather nice finished object)

As mentioned, prior to our hiking trip I suddenly, and rather randomly, decided to knit Andrea Morwy's Traveler Shell . It's basically an open fronted rectangle in a knit purl pattern. The pattern is FOURTEEN pages long. Why is the pattern 14 pages long? Because, instead of explaining the ten row repeat and then putting the shaping on top of that (e.g. decrease while continuing to knit in pattern), she writes out the entire ten row knit purl sequence every time something changes. Additionally, most of the time she starts with even number being the right side and wrong numbers being the right side,which is just plain odd. It's confusing and it's like she wants to keep you looking at the pattern for every row, rathe than following the very intuitive stitch pattern, which I had memorised after one repeat. The instructions for the band just say 'pick up x number of stitches'. No ratios, no acjnowledgement that different bits of the band have different ratios. Afte...

What I made, by Sharon

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