This is not my hat

I have to thank Hicklebee's for making it so easy for me to stalk authors.  Today Jon Klassen was there for his new book This Is Not My Hat, a follow up, nay, a companion piece to his first, best-selling book I Want My Hat Back, which I wrote about here and here.  I loved I Want My Hat Back so much that I was inspired to make Bear's hat.  Now I am working on a hat for Little Fish so he won't have to steal Big Fish's hat anymore.  Sadly, I didn't think about doing this until last night and couldn't finish it in time to give to Jon Klassen.

Here is the book trailer for This Is Not My Hat

You can probably guess that everything will not be fine for this little fish.  Whereas in the first book, we shared in Bear's pain and anguish at the loss of his hat, the horror of discovering that it had been stolen by some one with whom he was acquainted, no less, and the needling self-doubt as he ponders his ultimate course of action; in this book, we are privvy to the thief's tale.  And he nearly convinces us that what he's done is not such a bad thing, but in the end, the bigger animal always gets his hat back.

Jon Klassen has long ago given up being coy about what happens to hat thieves in his books but I prefer to leave it ambiguous.

Last time I saw Jon Klassen at Hicklebee's, I gave him the pointy hat I had made.  This time, I gave one to Miss Valerie, the co-owner of Hicklebee's because I didn't want her to feel left out.  Here's a picture of her wearing the hat:

And here she is with Jon Klassen and Mac Barnett who showed up for the heck of it:

Thanks again, Hicklebee's!!

Once again the fabulous Hicklebee's Bookstore is hosting amazing authors.  Now that it's fall, there are lots of great books coming out.  Last week, Lois Lowry's new book Son was released and Lois Lowry was at Hicklebee's today to talk about the final book of The Giver Quartet.  Son takes us back to the time of the first book, The Giver, and tells us the story of Gabe, the infant that Jonas kidnaps and takes with him when he leaves the community, and of Gabe's birthmother and how they each long to find one another again.

I picked up a copy of Messenger while I was there because we don't have that one in the library.  They are both signed by Ms. Lowry.  Tomorrow I will process them and I'm hoping they'll be ready to check out by lunch time.  While you are waiting, go here and read this lovely article about Lois Lowry and her new book.

Kitchen Utensil Anomaly

When the Space Shuttle Endeavor made it's final flight recently, we at Marshall Lane were lucky enough to catch a glimpse of it. One of our teachers was able snap a picture.

It was pretty awesome.  I thought it would be a good idea to pull out and display some space shuttle books for the students check out.  One of the books I pulled out was To Space and Back by Sally Ride and Susan Okie from 1986! Today I was considering weeding this book because it's pretty old and we have plenty of up to date books about the space shuttle.  But it's by Sally Ride and I felt kind of sad about weeding it.  I started to flip through the pages and the book is full of really great pictures of the astronauts in space doing their daily routines; eating, sleeping, exercising.  Then I came across this picture:

Yep.  That's a space toilet.  I thought, well, that's interesting.  Then I noticed something in the upper left corner.  That's a spatula.  What do you suppose that is for?

Aaaaaand we're back!

I hope everyone had a wonderful First Day of School today.  It's really good to be back at the books.  And speaking of which, there were two boxes of new books waiting for me at my desk.  Inside these books were some titles I know the students will be excited for, including these:

 

Some other books that will be coming out soon that I'm pretty excited about are:

 

I have lots to do to get the library ready for classes, but hopefully it'll only take 2 or three weeks.  While you are waiting, you can go to the Marshall Lane Catalog and add reviews of books you've read over the summer.  Also, you can email me with any book requests you might have. 

See you around campus!

More knitting than reading

Holy cow!  Some time since my last post my blog got it's 10,000th hit.  That's kind of mind boggling.  My blog has been viewed, to date, 10,086 times.  I don't think I've won the Internet yet, still, I'm kind of excited about that.

Anyway.  I've been doing quite a bit of knitting this summer but not so much audio book listening.  This is because I've been reading A Storm of Swords, the third book in the A Song of Ice and Fire series by George R. R. Martin.  This is the series on which the HBO show Game of Thrones is based.  I finished the book last week and it was pretty amazing.  Mr. Martin has a way of getting you emotionally invested in certain characters and then stabbing you in the heart.  More than once I found myself shaking my fist at the ceiling and shouting "Curse you, Martin!"  I was going to wait until next summer to read the 4th book, but I find that I just can't wait to see what happens to these characters.  So I'm on to A Feast for Crows.  I'll get back to kids books soon.

So what have been knitting you probably are not asking yourself.  Well, I'll tell you anyway.  I've designed and written another pattern.  This time for a hat.  Here's a picture of it.

And here's a picture of it in a smaller size.

I'm calling this one the Spider Lace Summer Hat.  I call it that because the lacy part has 8 "legs" to it.  The yellow one is made from a hemp and cotton blend yarn, which makes light and cool and perfect for spring and summer.  The blue one is made from a lovely alpaca yarn which makes it perfect for the fall.  I'm going to be selling this pattern on my Ravelry site so if you'd like to make this hat for yourself, you'll be helping me support my yarn habit.  I'll add the link here as soon as it is up.

As promised, here is a link:

Twitter links and a scarf design

I wanted to share a couple links that I came across on my twitter feed this week.  First, this link to the Weird Book Room on AbeBooks.com.  It's a collection of books with weird titles.  It's pretty amusing.  Then I realized I actually own one of these titles and have read one other.  Can you guess which ones?

The next one is a link to a blog in which the blogger has collected photos of authors dressed as superheroes. You will definitely recognize some of these authors!  Really amusing.

And now to the scarf design.  I have designed a scarf!  You probably wouldn't think to look at it that it would take a long time to do but I've been working on this for quite some time.  Now I've finally finished it and I call it the Lattice and Leaf scarf.  Here's a picture:

If you'd like to try knitting this for yourself, you can download the pattern from my Ravelry page.  download now
If you do knit it, let me know what you think of the pattern.

Summer days

Summer days are piling up on me.  One just becomes another and soon a week has gone by.  But I've been up to stuff.  Mostly knitting, spinning, baking blueberry pies, and reading with a short trip to Lake Tahoe in between.

Some time ago, I promised to put up the pattern for the coin purse that I designed for our beginning knitters in the after school knitting class.  And I finally fished it out of my files so here it is:

Garter Stitch Coin Purse

By Sandy Richards

Materials:

Worsted weight cotton yarn, such as Sugar’n Cream by Lily

Size US7 needles

Button, ½ - ¾ inch

Tapestry Needle

Sewing needle

Thread

Cast on 15 stitches using short tail cast on or preferred method.

Knit 2 rows

Row 3: Knit 7, yarn over, knit 2 stitches together, knit 7

Remaining rows: knit

When piece measures 6 inches from cast on edge, bind off.  Weave in ends.  With right side facing, fold bottom of coin purse up about 2 ¼ inches.  Sew edges and weave in ends.  Turn purse right side out.  Fold closing flap over to determine the position of the button.  Sew on button.

Photo by Colleen Balough

I've been working on some other designs, a couple of scarves to be precise.  I'll post the patterns for those here as well as soon as I get good pictures of them.  

I've had some time to spend with my spinning wheel lately and have finished a fairly large skein of yarn.  It started out as pre-dyed fiber:

I spun this fiber into yarn.  I filled two bobbins with this single spun yarn:

Next, I spun these two 'singles' together.  This is called 'plying' and requires a larger bobbin onto which to spin the plied yarn:

Finally, I used a 'niddy noddy' to wind the yarn off the bobbin and make a skein:

I don't know yet what I'll make out of this yarn, but I suspect it will be a shawl or something lacy.

As for what I've been reading during all of this, it's been grown up books so far.  Mr. Richards and I listened to Infected by Scott Sigler together and then I went ahead and listened to the sequel, Contagious.  You can listen to these stories for free as podcasts, read by the author himself.  The stories are pretty compelling sci-fi/horror, though I'm not a huge fan of Mr. Sigler's writing style.  I am, however, fascinated by his business model.  When he got tired of getting rejection notices from publishers, he decided to put his stuff out on the web.  He began publishing his stories on his blog for all to see and he read his stories and put them out as podcasts for all to hear.  All for free.  He gradually began building a fan base by giving away his work and eventually, the publishers came to him.  Mr. Richards discovered him and has become a huge fan.  He listened to the free podcasts and liked his work so much that he went out and bought all of Scott Sigler's books in hardcover.  If you like science fiction in which the author does the research to get the science right, you might want to check out his website.  

I've also started reading A Storm of Swords, by George R. R. Martin, the third book in the A Song of Ice and Fire series which has been made into the HBO series Game of Thrones.  I've enjoyed the show so much and the books take you much deeper.  I'll be ready when season 3 starts!