I am knitting my first cowl ever. While I’m sure this will strike many people as strange – since cowls are very easy – keep in mind that I just knitted my very first scarf a couple of months ago. The woman who taught me to knit back in college felt strongly that neophyte knitters shouldn’t start with scarves and other easy projects. She thought that new knitters should be taught to read patterns right away; otherwise, they would always find patterns intimidating. For the most part, I agree, and for a long time, I knit the same 8-10 sweater patterns over and over, usually in children’s sizes.

I don’t come from cowl-wearing people. No one in my family wears cowls, and while I have known for a long time what a cowl-neck sweater is, it was only when I started reading Ginny’s blog, Small Things (where Yarn Along is hosted each Wednesday), 3-4 years ago that I learned that people knit cowls as projects in and of themselves. At first, I wasn’t interested, but the idea has slowly grown on me. This cowl uses what I’m calling the Forgiving Scarf pattern. If all goes well, it should be done by the end of this week. There is something appealing sometimes about projects that are QUICK.

I am not doing a very good job of honoring my resolution to read only 1-2 books at once. In fact, at the moment I am reading 1-2 books at a time PER ROOM in the house, with another 1-2 in my purse and another 1-2 on my Kindle. This has got to stop! I don’t get the plots mixed up, but when I’m reading that many books, I start to get angry at myself for “never finishing anything.” Sigh. Maybe next week.

I photographed my cowl with Norman Mailer’s mystery novel Tough Guys Don’t Dance, which I started last night. The prose is wonderful – like a cross between Dashiell Hammett and F. Scott Fitzgerald – and how is it possible not to love a novel called Tough Guys Don’t Dance? The main reason I chose this novel for the photo, though, is that it occurred to me that this may be the first time that a Norman Mailer book has been photographed with a knitting project in the entire history of taking pictures of books side-by-side with knitting projects and posting them on the internet. Which is not a very long history, I suppose – but still.

Happy Wednesday!