36 Stitch Mittens and A Dying Fall

The knitting: 36-Stitches  

The novel: A Dying Fall by Elly Griffiths

So. 36 stitch mittens by Elizabeth Zimmerman.  I love Elizabeth Zimmermann and I love this mitten pattern.  You take small needles (I used Size 2) and Aran weight yarn, and make some very sturdy mittens.  I've made them plenty of times, and I still love the process and the product.

This pair is for me.  I wanted some plain brown mittens and had nearly a full skein left over from a plain brown sweater project I finished last spring.  It's Shepherd's Own by FibraNatura, and I found it at a Tuesday Morning.  It's discontinued now, which is a bummer. But I've enjoyed the projects I used it for, and I think these mittens will wear well.  I only made two modifications--I decreased the ends as if for a hat, and I made the thumbs a little longer than the pattern called for.  But that's it!  It's a pretty perfect and precise pattern.  I thought about dressing these up with a little embroidery, but then didn't.  Maybe next year.  

My favorite thing about the pattern is the use of decreases and increases at the wrist to eliminate the need for a thumb gusset.  I don't like thumb gussets and I feel like this method has fewer gaps at the thumb to stitch up later.  Just delightful.

Thumbs up!

The novel is A Dying Fall by Elly Griffiths.  Another Ruth Galloway mystery!  Following a book in which Ruth isn't hit over the head, kidnapped, or otherwise endangered, it's time to get back in the swing of things!  Forensic archeologist and person in charge of raising a baby Ruth Galloway gets threatening text messages about examining some bones an old university friend discovered before he was murdered.  The texts warn her away.  She not only goes, but she makes it a seaside holiday for her and her daughter and doesn't tell anyone about the texts until halfway through the book.  Classic Ruth!  

For real, this character worries more about her weight than whether or not someone is trying to kill her.  But given the number of times she's been hit on the head hard enough to lose consciousness in these books, maybe that makes sense.

Anyway, her old friend Dan gets burnt up in his own house (locked from the outside!) and then Ruth receives a letter he must have mailed to her right before his death.  He's uncovered something big!  But what is it?  I'll just go ahead and tell you: maybe King Arthur.  Who is maybe black.  This has something to do with North African people joining Roman legionaries and getting stationed in England.  Which sounds fun enough to me.  Like, who cares?  White supremacists, that's who.  They're in the book and they're bad.    

Meanwhile, Ruth is taking the aforementioned holiday up by Blackpool.  Everyone's favorite druid buddy Cathbad comes along to help out and have fun, and to take his mind off the fact that Judy has had her baby (that is probably his baby also).  He visits a druid friend!  Who also turns up dead.  Cathbad inherits his dog.

There are rich men and jealous women I have trouble keeping up with.  This is unfortunate because they're the villains.  They also think they're recreating King Arthur's court?  It's unclear how much they actually believe this, but it was such a stupid plot point that I just got tired of them.  The bones are tampered with and test results go missing.  A crazy woman is a possible threat.  Cathbad's dead friend turns out to be involved.  Nelson and his wife, Michelle, are also in Blackpool visiting family.  Nelson has to reach out to his old partner, and winds up offering a job to a young officer named Tim.  Ruth and Cathbad take Kate on a lot of trips to the beach and water parks.   Kate goes missing at an amusement park and a bad guy says she'll be dropped off a roller coaster.  She isn't.  Everyone is fine and the bad guy is captured.  But Cathbad is injured in the process, fulfilling the book's concussion quota, and Judy can feel it all the way back home because they're psychically linked.  Sure, fine.  

Cathbad decides to stay up north for a while.  Ruth decides to break up with Max, even though he's a perfectly nice archeologist with a tragic backstory.  Nelson's mom and Cathbad become great friends.  Kate is fine.  Ruth is definitely going to write a book about the Raven King/King Arthur/how neat it is to discover that a Roman outpost was somewhere later than previously thought.  That's good, I guess.  A lot of the book--all of these books, kind of--feature Ruth dwelling on what happened between youthful idealism and professional pragmatism.  The bones discovery will help her be more established in her field and give her something new to dig into.  No pun intended, but I'm leaving it there.