Small Striped Scrap Socks and Come to Grief

The knitting is a pair of stripey socks knit from scraps and unraveled outgrown socks.  #3 small tube socks and a toddler sock that I knit for practice a long time ago helped me make a new pair of socks for my daughter.  I love that I'm reusing yarn.  She loves socks.  We're both tickled with the bright and happy colors.  I need more sock projects with pink or red stripes!  This was so fun!  

Most of the yarn is Kroy sock yarn, which is technically a sport weight.  For the cuffs, heels, and toes I  brought out some fingering weight yarn that a friend and her daughter dyed with Kool-Aid that she destashed to me a couple of years ago.  I used #0 needles and cast on 56 stitches.  My little girl wears a children's Size 13, so I knitted the feet until the knitting came up to her little toe before beginning the decreases.  They're only slightly baggy, but she's growing quickly and I wanted them to last a little while!

I have plenty of sock yarn, and I promise I will someday knit the poor child her own pair of socks with new yarn.  But I had a lot of fun pairing up the colors and she likes how busy they look.  

The novel is Come to Grief.  It takes place about a year and a half after Whip Hand, but it's the 1990s.  There's faxes and cell phones and the internet.  There's also some person going around hurting horses, mostly horses that belong to children.  And, as always, you have a heaping helping of injury and sadness for Sid. But while you kind of expect that, this one is still really dark.  There are plenty of interesting interviews with colorful characters for the reader to enjoy, and Sid befriends a little girl with cancer and helps set a delinquent teenager down a more wholesome path.  He meets someone in the civil service who will want to hire him for future jobs.  But the book begins and ends with deaths and there's a lot of sadness and resentment in between.  Sid comes to grief, by golly, and then we stay there for 300 pages or so.

As in so many Ruth Galloway mysteries or, you know, real life, the villain is a rich man who wasn't told "no" enough.  But this time it's one of Sid's old racing buddies, so he's sad.  That's not spoiling too much considering the book begins in the middle of the story and goes back a bit.  There's also a fair amount of Charles the former father-in-law and Jenny the somewhat amicable ex-wife.  Sid and Jenny can be friends a couple of years after their divorce in the late 1960s.  There is no Chico.  Sid and I were both sad about that, but he's married and has a job that won't endanger his life.  

I don't know what else to say about this one.  It was so, so sad and made for terrible bedtime reading--and that's when I do most of my reading.  The next book in the series is Under Orders, which I'm looking forward to re-reading because I really like having an idea of what I'm getting into when I read something these days.