Words and Wool

My Ballyshannon Cardigan is coming along very well! I'm very pleased with how the design is working out and am pretty sure the size is going to work!! There is still a LOT of knitting to go so I'm telling myself to sit back and enjoy it.

As for reading, what time of the year is better suited for this past-time than winter!!

I just posted my Favorite Books of 2014 here.

I have a number of books to post about but I'm making myself wait until I've finished them! Here are some recent reads:

Your Future 'Other Half': It matters whom you marry by Rebecca VanDoodewaard is an absolute must-read for any girl of dating age. This is a short, well-worded, full-of-wisdom paperback that is aimed at college girls but I think is appropriate for high school because that is when girls are really forming their first serious ideas about dating and marriage (read it yourself first to be sure). Rebecca explores how your future mate could effect you emotionally, mentally, spiritually, physically, etc. and implores you to take great care in your choice. And she doesn't leave girls off the hook -- she ends with some soul-searching questions about how you can have a positive or negative affect on your mate.

Letters on an Elk Hunt by a Woman Homesteader by Elinore Pruitt Stewart is the sequel to the Letters of a Woman Homesteader that I recently read. As always, Stewart is witty, informative, and very entertaining. She takes the reader with her on a several-month journey to hunt for elk meat in the wilderness. I only wish she had written ten books!

  The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing by Marie Kondo is, apparently, a very popular book right now. Kondo has some good advice on purging your possessions and tidying up your life. I felt that what she had to say could have been said in a few short chapters but the book is easy to skim. Her methods boil down to keeping only those things that "bring you great joy" and making sure you have a place for everything to be kept. Kondo brings her religious beliefs into the book but these can be sifted out, or, for me, when she urged thanking objects for their usefulness in one's life, I figured it would be easy to switch the focus and give thanks to God for allowing me to have these objects and for how they have benefitted my life today. I wouldn't say this is an all-time favorite cleaning up book for me but I certainly took a few good and useful things away with me!

A Call to Spiritual Reformation: Priorities from Paul and His Prayers by D. A. Carson is the book our Bible study group went through this fall. Carson's thesis is that our greatest need as Christians is to know God and know His love for us and prayer is one of the ways this is accomplished. Carson walked us through numerous prayers from the Pauline epistles and the lessons he brought out were very helpful and definitely motivating toward prayer. The style of the book isn't the easiest reading but we all agreed that having it as a discussion book enabled us all to get more out of it.

The Sweep's Boy (My Story) by Jim Eldridge was read in school last week. We are studying Victorian England and this was perfect since it is set in 1870 in London. It is a page-turner telling of the life of an orphan who becomes a chimney sweep and is then forced into burglary. We all loved it and couldn't wait to read the next chapter.

That's all for now! You can find more ideas on knitting/crochet and reading at Ginny's Yarn-Along.

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