seams to me

See that blue-violet pile in the top left corner? Blech, seaming up my Drop Collar Cabled Jacket is very slow going. Initially I tried to use the sweater yarn (Beaverslide McTaggart Tweed) to seam it up. Bad news -- the loosely twisted 2-ply yarn is too fragile and tends to break, plus the seam was very bulky. I rifled through the yarn stash and found some Imperial Stock Ranch 2-ply sock yarn in a similar color, and things are going better now.

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My love for A Homemade Life and Orangette is still going strong! I made Molly's rhubarb crumble the other night. Very good -- pleasantly a bit tart and super easy to make. It's a little different from the usual crumble/crisp recipe, as it involves canola oil instead of butter (plus it's vegan-friendly). Lower cholesterol, of course, and it makes the crumble a little loose and not crisp.
I also made Baked Pasta with Homemade Tomato Sauce and Fresh Mozzarella, which turned out quite nicely. I cut back on the pasta a bit, as we tend to like our pasta dishes with plenty of sauce. Yum! Next time I might add a layer of sauteed mushrooms to the middle.

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Ysolda will be at Nina this afternoon from 4-7. I'll be there with my copy of Whimsical Little Knits in hand.

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Previews of the new Berroco pattern books are up! Booklet #228 (Blackstone Tweed) looks just fabulous -- especially Napolean, Nuss, Noisette, and Nesselrode. Too bad that the Blackstone Tweed yarn has significant mohair content. Surprisingly, Norah Gaughan #5 isn't doing much for me.

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Also, the new summer Knitty is up! None of the patterns are reaching out and grabbing me. Am I getting more fickle? Just plain pickier? Or perhaps are more people just self-publishing their patterns and selling them on Ravelry rather than dealing with all the hullabaloo of meeting Knitty's submission standards and waiting to hear if they're selected? I'm not sure, but I suspect the ease of e-publishing on your own has a lot to do with it.

On the other hand, I love the profile of Jennie the Potter in this issue! Jennie's always so friendly at shows, her work is amazingly cute, AND she's from Minnesota. All the best people are from Minnesota, right? :-)

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Check out the Slate on J.D. Salinger's latest lawsuit. Would Virginia Woolf have been pleased to read Michael Cunningham's The Hours? I'm not sure. Plus the piece brings back all that Catcher in the Rye teen angst:

Of course, anyone who brings to Catcher a somewhat more sophisticated sensibility than Mark David Chapman, an awareness that novelists often use unreliable narrators and, you know, ironic distancing, can see that it's a novel about the conflict between Holden's naive and narcissistic juvenile romanticism (the world is full of "phonies"—duh!) and the kind of accommodations he needs to make to its corruption to survive.