Expanding my skills

Last March when the Spring 2011 issue of Interweave Crochet came out I could not wait to make the Bluebell Cardigan by Edie Eckman. I began (cast on?) the same day the magazine arrived.  I quickly worked through the flowered border, then...

I have no idea.  Something sent it to the basket and it stayed there for over a year.  Recently, I've been in a "get sh*t done" mood so I've been pulling out old projects left and right and finishing them up.

I picked it back up and I've been seriously trucking through it.

In two days I've finished about 10 inches of the body.  Thats insane!  I could never bust through a knitting pattern that fast.

The cardi is made in one piece up to the armpits then split and knit separately to the shoulders.  Most of the cardigan is this all-over mesh pattern.

The flower details at the bottom look a little crummy right now, but it looks like they will block out pretty nicely.

I love reading blogs where people talk about what they're reading along with what they're knitting, so I figured I'd start sharing as well.  Recently, I've been reading an excellent book--The Poisoner's Handbook: Murderer and the Birth of Forensic Medecine in Jazz Age New York (why oh why do academics feel the need for long subtitles?) by Deborah Blum.

It's so good! Prior to the late 1800s it was basically impossible to prove if someone had been poisoned--needless to say, it became a pretty popular way to get rid of people.  As scientists started to come up with ways of detecting poisons, poisoners switched to poisons that were harder to detect.  When the industiral era was in full swing in the '20s industrialists were constantly inventing new chemicals to facilitate their industries but there was little investigation into what the side effects of the chemical exposure might be.

The book chronicles the cat-and-mouse between murderers and scientists and the development of the science of detecting poison. The book reads like a story and even though it talks about scientific development it doesn't get overly technical.  Fair warning though, it does describe the effects of various poisons on the body, sometimes in detail.  I found the descriptions of radium poisoning especially disturbing.  Seriously though, I'm loving this book.  Read it!