100 Books in 2014: midpoint check-in, call for help

When I overhauled my Life List earlier this year, I decided to make 2014 the year I cross off “read 100 books in 365 days.” I’ve been tracking my books here and on Goodreads, but today I decided to take a closer look at how things stand midway through the year.

This analysis is prompted in part by my friend Kendra, who ran a similar but significantly more ambitious project last year in which she read 5 books a week, meticulously blogged reviews of each one, and tracked the diversity of the authors she was reading (leading to an awesome talk at the Boston Quantified Self meetup which you should watch right now). Taking a cue from her, I created a spreadsheet today to track a couple of different things:

  • Date I finished reading the book (some of these are approximate; if I’ve been reading a lot I tend to add things to Goodreads in batches)
  • Title
  • Author (books with multiple authors have each author listed on a separate line)
  • Author sex
  • Continent the author is “from,” defined loosely as “spent formative childhood/teenage years in”
  • Whether or not the author is a person of color
  • My Goodreads rating of the book (1-5, 5 highest)
  • Genre
  • Page length

Verdict: I’m not doing so great. I need to read just over 8 books a month to make it to 100 by the end of the year, but I’ve only hit that goal once—in January.

book count

I got close in April, probably because the 7 books I read were comparatively short:

page count

I expected that most of what I would read would be fiction (by which I mean “literary fiction,” as opposed to young adult fiction or fantasy novels), but I’m reading a surprising number of memoirs, plus a fair number of other types of books—a shooting script, two books of marriage-related humor, and two cookbooks (which I tend to read cover-to-cover as soon as I bring them home), among other things.

genre

Digging into author diversity is somewhat surprising, though I had the benefit of Kendra’s experience to prepare me—I think of myself as someone who tends to gravitate to novels about other places (see this Ask Metafilter question, where I beg for recommendations for lengthy, place-oriented fiction), and I assumed that the authors I read this year would be diverse at least in continent of origin, if not in sex. Sadly, no:

author diversity

I didn’t enter into this project with any specific goals around diversity, but it’s clear that I’m reading largely books by authors from the global north. (Interestingly, over the course of the year so far I’ve managed to read almost as many female authors as male—just over 42%.)

My reading list right now is even less diverse—a quick scan of my unread Kindle books reveals nine by American or British men and one by an American woman. This is where you come in: I have six months and 70 books to go. What should I be adding to the queue?

In which I wrestle with bias tape and binding

And also utterly forget about mitered corners.

Making bias tape still sort of freaks me out, maybe because I’m in awe of the continuous method (aka the tube). No matter how carefully I mark and pin and match edges together, I still can’t quite wrap my head around what I’m doing. I persevered last week, though, in order to get one step closer to finishing the peach and gold quilt. I ended up with a lovely mound of coral and peach bias tape, which I promptly ruined by not paying close enough attention to my scissors as I was cutting it apart.

Well done, me.

I was able to patch the non-shredded bits together and ended up with juuuuuust enough to make it around all four edges of this lovely quilt.

Which I then ruined again by forgetting everything I know about how to make lovely, crisp mitered corners and instead following the (really rather asinine) instructions in the Quilting By Machine Singer Sewing Reference Library, which gently guided me through folding over the back of a quilt to bind it but totally bungled everything when it came to binding a quilt with bias tape. According to the book, one first binds the opposite long edges, then binds the short edges separately. This leaves one with four sad little tails, sticking forlornly off the corners of one’s quilt:

Why, Quilting By Machine Singer Sewing Reference Library. Why.

(Aside: you don’t have to look too closely at the photo of the back of the quilt to see that my top stitching left an awkward little 1/4″ flap of binding sticking out. I’m blaming this on the book, even though I’m pretty sure the width and positioning of my bias tape may have been at fault. I’m annoyed enough that I’m going back through and hand stitching the flap down, which means I probably shouldn’t have bothered to machine stitch it in the first place. THE DRAMA.)

I managed to hand stitch along one long edge and wrangle one ugly binding tail into submission. From the front, it looks okay. From the back…I long for neatly mitered corners.

Nevertheless: only three more edges to hand sew and three more tails to tack down. So close to being done!

Isla Wrap, part 1

I knitted my little crafty heart out this weekend. It was glorious.

When I finished my hat on Thursday I panicked a little—whatever to knit next? and what will I take to work on at the Gather Here brunch?!?—but (with a little push from a friend) decided the Isla Wrap (free pattern here), a sort of capelet/cowl/shoulder covering thing, would be a good way to teach myself circular knitting. Bonus: I could add stripes and learn how to switch yarns mid-project. Hooray!

I did things right-ish this time and actually knitted a test swatch, given that I ignored the pattern’s instructions about yarn weight and bought a worsted weight instead of a sport weight yarn (REBEL. Or maybe I just don’t know what I’m doing. Also, check out my fancy new knitting lingo!).

Isla Wrap test swatch

So far so good. The pattern specifies that “the blocked gauge of 4 inches squared is approximately 17 stitches across by 27 rows long.” Mine was 16 stitches by 19 rows, assuming I counted correctly. So I decided to make the small, following the pattern exactly, and I expect it to turn out a bit bigger (knock on wood), which is perfect because I’m actually in the medium size range. (If not, my niece is getting a sweet capelet!)

I ended up spending almost three hours at the Gather brunch talking about everything from Francoist Spain to jogging strollers to 3D printing (in other words, it was awesome and you should all totally go), after which things looked like this:

Isla Wrap

(Yes, that is an old episode of Sherlock in the background. Yes, it is as amazing the second time around.)

I made a quick trip to the Cambridge Quilt Shop on my way home to pick up fabric to finally bind the pink and gold quilt—another post for another day—then came home and knitted. And knitted. And knitted.

Isla Wrap

And now I have stripes! I’m amazed at how quickly this is coming together, though I did spend probably four focused hours of knitting on it (six-ish total, maybe, with chatting and Sherlock-ing). The circular needles—I’m using 29″ Clover bamboo needles in size 8—took a while to get used to (the plasticky cable is still fairly stiff and twisty, despite my attempts to soften it with hot water), but once I had around ten rounds on them, things started to lay correctly and make more sense.

And the stripes? So easy. I don’t know why I thought this was a crazy SuperKnitter skill. Others have explained it better, but you basically knot the new yarn around the old yarn and then start using it. Magic.

I made a hat!

You guys: my head is so. Warm.

Cobblestone Cap

This is possibly cooler than the time I made a dress, considering how soft and fuzzy the yarn swaddling my head right now is.

Despite my noise about falling behind and being overwhelmed by projects, this actually came together fairly quickly: a couple of hours while watching TV, a stint at the new office knitting club, and half an hour tonight to finish the last two rows, cinch up the top, sew up the edge, and snap a few hasty photos before dusk.

I definitely made mistakes—at one point I must have either knitted the same row twice or skipped a row, as part of the hat is knitted inside out. I (very) briefly debated ripping it out, but I decided I didn’t really care. Same with sewing up the seam: I looked this up, then realized I couldn’t really tell the different between the purl loops and the knit loops and the bottom loops and the top loops, so I winged it.

Despite this, though: it fits! On my head! And is warm and soft and comfortable! And is, recognizably so, a hat!

UPDATE: I’m on Ravelry! As are my detailed notes on this lovely Cozy Cobblestone Cap.