Three Little Things of Completed Loveliness

 although to be fair perhaps the loveliness is in the completeness, rather than the things themselves. 

First up, and rather to my surprise, the jigsaw is done. 

Very pleased to see the back of it, or I will be once it is on its way somewhere else. It's a very pretty picture but it got harder rather than easier on the way through, until about the last 50 pieces. 

The there's a book.

Ariadne by Jennifer Saint. I'm generally a sucker for retold Greek myths cf the several occasions when I have gone into raptures here about the work of Natalie Haynes, and to a lesser extent - but possibly only because she has written less - Madeline Miller. I was looking forward to this and sadly I was disappointed. Honestly it's such a downer. It's just so relentlessly downbeat. I'm not going to argue that women in Ancient Greece, especially royal or noble ones , didn't have a rough time. But the strength of Miller and Haynes is that although they allow for the particular difficulties of women, they don't pretend that men have wonderful lives either. They also often allow their women agency, give them justice (albeit sometimes through the actions of men) and show that some of them manage to circumvent the limits of their time and build something of value for themselves. Saint is having none of that. Her men are all weak, flawed and nasty, and her women come to bad ends. Not a book to pick up when you're miserable, unless you want to finish it and say 'well however bad things are for me, they aren't that bad.'

And finally some knitting. I finished this a few days ago having picked it up at the beginning of the week when all it needed was a second sleeve. 

It's in a beautiful Irish aran tween that was gifted to me by a friend. I chose the size that would use up most of the skein so that's 1 - 2 years. Sadly I don't know anyone with a little boy that age but I'm sure one will turn up in due course. There should have been another piece of knitting to show off too, but sadly ... it's a tubular cowl and I have now twice, using two different methods, tried and failed to join the two ends together. It was languishing in my craft room because I had messed up the first try, and wasn't very confident about taking out the grafting that had somehow managed to join a wrong side and a right side together. But with my new found zeal for finishing stuff, I picked it up thinking, all I need to do is undo this very carefully and find another way to join it up. I unpicked the incorrect grafting, found a YouTube tutorial that showed me how to do a three needle cast off for a tubular cowl and tried that. I can't quite explain what the problem was with that but when I came to tun it right side out having done most of the cast off on the wrong side as instructed, only half the thing would turn through. There is obviously something about the geometry of a tube that I can't get my head, or my needles round. So  that has gone back to languishing until I feel brave enough to tackle it again. I've also worked very hard on a crochet project this week but without managing to quite finish it. 

I did allow myself a new cast on on Friday. I got a free pattern from a designer last weekend and although I wasn't convinced I would use it, it suddenly struck me that I had some wool that would do perfectly for it. In addition to this I needed something calming to knit after the jangling of the nerves that came with the failure to join up the cowl, and preferably  mindless to knit too, so that I could take it  away with me, as we are off to the Central Belt for 5 days tomorrow.  So  this is my take away knit and with a bit of luck and a following wind I will finish the thing in time to take to Vienna in December. 

So progress on the irritating unfinished stuff is being made. Even if only slowly.