SSS + C

Self-Stitched September is going swimmingly despite the lack of updates. It helps that the weather in Glasgow is unpredictable at best, so I get good use out of my woolly projects despite it being early September. SSS also helps me focus on what I need to make for myself and not what I would really like to make. Anyway, a photo of today's outfit. Forecast is a perennial favourite of mine and at the moment it makes for a great jacket. Depending upon the season I either use it with vintage looking shirts peeping out (like the one I am wearing today) or I stuff several layers underneath it and button it up. Either way, I love wearing it and the fit continues to be great. I'm also wearing my Vancouver socks. I need to knit more socks. Despite my unease about knitting socks, I like wearing them on autumnal days.

I look really tired in the photo. I'm actually okay, so I presume lack of makeup + lack of enthusiasm = tired face.

SSS round-up: Kaiti/Kiri shawl (Saturday), Snorri (Sunday - in the evening I switched to a Rowan Kidsilk Aura vest I haven't blogged about), Dragonfly (Monday) and Serenity/Haematite (Tuesday).

I am obsessed with knitted dresses at the moment although I know I don't have time nor the willpower to knit a dress, let alone the confidence to wear one. I love this Drops pattern and think that Kid Classic would make the perfect substitute. Imagine this dress in deep red or maybe dusky purple? Oh yeah. I'm also loving the 1960s vibe of the Grouch pattern and there's a terribly cute cabled dress, Georgia, in the recent Homestead Classics booklet. I think I might just stick to buying a knitted dress (if I find one I'd feel comfortable wearing) because I have too many things to knit already.

Finally, some non-knitting content: just like ten years ago I put Joyce's Ulysses aside circa page 250 only to find myself being engulfed by Life. I tried returning to the novel earlier this week, but my head was not in it. If I find my life slowing down, I shall restart the novel because apparently that is what happens when I try to read it. So I have decided to squirrel it aside for the moment and focus on Tom McCarthy's C which is on this year's Booker short list. All I know about C is that its author rejects the realist mode of late 20th British fiction (HOORAY), claims a kinship with early 20th C High Modernism (HOORAY) and that a review ended thus:

"Will he turn out," McCarthy asked recently of the French writer Jean-Philippe Toussaint, "to have been deconstructing literary sentimentalism or sentimentalising literary deconstruction?" It's a sign of his writerly horse sense that this skilfully realised, ambitious, over-literary book finds the time to leave a similar question hanging.

Clearly my kind of book.