I love that Ginny combines knitting and reading together in her weekly round ups. Not only do I love those things independent of each other, but I often liken knitting patterns to books. Some knitting patterns are exciting and I can’t wait to see how the next row is going to look, just like a good page turner of a book is. Others are slow going, sometimes comforting, sometimes dreadfully boring. My two knitting projects are like two different books. My lace shawl is a quick, exciting page turner. I can’t wait to finish up another row to see what the next row is going to look like. My barn sweater is beautiful and interesting, but is more slow going. So I am currently juggling between the two.

My reading choices have been similar. I’ve been reading is the course material for the Elite Blogging Academy. This is exciting and page turning reading. You might have noticed around these parts that my blog is evolving. I love blogging, it’s been a pretty steady habit for the past 6 years, but things were starting to feel old fashioned and stale. Plus I was starting to feel that it was fair for me to receive more compensation for the hours I invest in this space. With a few more hours on my hands each week, I’m really drawn to spend more time here. What I needed was a swift kick as well as a gentle guiding hand to get me out of my rut and into the current blogging world. Ruth’s course has really helped with that. It is a tremendous, tremendous amount of both work and information. Luckily this is a self paced course, because going back through six years of posts and reorganizing, re-categorizing and getting them SEO and pinterest friendly is taking for ever. It feels good though. It feels good in the same way that giving your entire house a good cleaning and de-cluttering does. She is encouraging us to take it slow and get it right, it’s not a race. Thankfully, ever since I’ve been taking her advice and making changes, the graph of my page views is not languishing at a flat line but instead it is making a steady, satisfying rise everyday.

So if you are interested in giving yourself and your blog a swift kick in the rear, like me, you might want to check out her course. Ruth’s voice feels authentic to me. I have a real sensitive internal Slime Ball alarm bell for this whole internet marketing stuff, there is so much cheesy, slimy blog advice out there. But this feels good to me. If you don’t have a blog and want to start, this would be good too, it would get you off on the right foot for certain. The supportive peer group that goes along with the course is another vast sea of resources too. She opens is up periodically for new students and it seems starting Friday, November 28th to December 5th is one of those periods. After that she’s waiting until spring to open it up and it will be $100 more expensive. You can sign up to get an email notification when she opens it up. (please note that these are affiliate links that direct you to her site. In other words, if you buy her course through my link, I’ll receive a little kick-back from her. thank you!)

The other thing I’ve been reading has been slower yet enjoyable. I asked for book recommendations a couple weeks ago and my great aunt offered up a suggestion of looking into Elizabeth Strout. A few days later our local bookstore held a special Sunday morning gathering. They’ve been inviting a local baker to sell her amazing, out of this world baked goods on Sunday mornings and 10% of all her profits and of book sales go to a different non-profit each week. That week the profits went to our little school. I took that as an excuse to indulge both in croissants and books. One of my books was The Burgess Boys and like my barn sweater it is a very good ready, beautiful and interesting.

I bought a bottom whorl drop spindle at the Wool Symposium, as you can see. There was a woman there sitting so peacefully, listening to the lectures and spinning. I wanted to be just like that. So I bought one. What that woman was not able to convey to me, is that the first few times you sit down with the drop spindle, you end up cursing like a sailor. I’m past the cursing-like-a-sailor stage, but not quite at the peacefully spinning stage either. I’ll get there, practice makes perfect and it certainly is rather addictive.

In non reading, knitting news, we are readying the house for Thanksgiving. My favorite holiday. Just food and family. No stressful gifts buying, card sending, perfect-festive-decorating extra added busy-ness, just thankful delicious, gathering. Happy Thanksgiving!