Happy Monday dear readers!

I’m still getting out there and exercising, but I managed to mess up my sacrum when I had the baby and two metal water bottles in the frame backpack so this week I am splitting my time between hiking and walking. Let us note, this is the same injury from when his older brother was born, so I guess I can can count on it coming back again and again forever.

Moving on, we’re going to pivot back to knitting content this week! I briefly considered doing a WIP roundup, then looked in the basket at how many I had going and noped right out of taking that many photos.

Today we can look at one and it will be plenty.

This is the Zig Zag Pullover from Bigger Than Life Knits. I’m knitting up the Large size in a Day Trip (one of a kind) colorway, Kaleidoscope, on the Marl Me base from Traveling Yarn. The low light in this photo (ooh and now I realize dog hair too, this is why I’m not a vlogger) doesn’t show how much these colors glow, but they do, and it brings me so much joy.

I had a lovely chunk of the body worked up early last year and then realized that if I didn’t alternate skeins I was going to end up with a colorblocked sweater, which would have annoyed me to no end, and probably mean I’d never wear my sweater, so all that work came out and I started over from row four.

*small sob*

Sad as I was to go back to square one (four), it was the right decision. Not ripping back to the cast on was another good decision: this is a big cast on and I twisted my stitches several times during the first two rounds. Four rounds gave me a nice solid foundation to start helical striping atop, and now that 4×4 zigzag is perfect potato chip knitting.

I said more than one favorite, right? My other favorite thing right now is reading. Right after Christmas I needed a comfort read and turned to a favorite author from childhood…and realized how problematic they were. The girls were spunky sidekicks destined for marriage to the main character, characters of color were rare and presented in just about every problematic way possible, and it was all just very disappointing.

Cue my librarian bestie who reads voraciously and knows allll the books. She got me all set up with a reading list* and I am now chugging along through a stack of fantasy titles that is far richer than the ones I had growing up. (While knitting, of course) Currently my favorite is Lalani of the Distant Sea, but there are enough to warrant an entire book post. Do you want an entire book post? Tell me in the comments!

What are your favorites right now?

*She may not have realized it was a list. She suggested some titles, and I promptly went and put every single one of them on hold. I will read every single one of them, plus additional titles if the ones she suggested are in a series, and it will be lovely and also waaay more structured than necessary