Yarnalong - Juice Box Socks and Essie Summers

That there is the first of my Sunday Swing Socks - featuring a newly-turned heel - lying on top of the Christmas gift that made me tear up.

More on the socks: they're in the Juice Box colorway of Knit Picks Stroll Hand-Painted yarn, and the colors are so bright and pretty that I feel like I'm holding a little jewel box in my fingers as I work on them. They also represent the first time I've ever worked from a chart for knitted lace (the lace would be the twisty part just under the ribbed cuffs - it's simple, but it has holes on purpose, so it counts as lace).

More on the book: it's a gift from my parents and I did cry a little when I got it, because it's such a lovely gift. Essie Summers is one of my heroines and her autobiography is out-of-print and hard to come by. She was the wife of a minister who lived in New Zealand and she wrote book after glorious book set in her beautiful homeland, full of happy family life, heroines and heroes who are both kind and good, and, of course, the gorgeous Kiwi scenery and fascinating Kiwi history. I love her books. And I love that she wrote them in the midst of her life as a homemaker and a minister's wife - I've heard that she used to plot for several weeks of the time while doing mundane things like washing dishes, and then she'd just sit down a write for days at a time, getting out into type all of the story she'd been holding in her head.

And I'm finding her autobiography charming. It's chatty and flows from one subject to another. It's not meticulously plotted like her fiction, but more like a conversation with a fascinating person - one who grew up in another world, but who is such a kindred spirit that you feel that she saw and knew and cared about all the things you hope that you would have seen and known and cared about if you'd grown up in her place and she in yours.

More Yarn-along goodness can be found here, at Small Things!

Peace of Christ to you,
Jessica Snell