Finishing Things

I have been quite busy working on things. I finished several things, including one of the books that I was reading. I finished reading Against Calvinism by Roger E. Olson. I thought that it was a good argument against Calvinism, hence the title, but I'm not sure that it totally convinced me, but it didn't really provide very good explanations of alternatives to Calvinism, but just presented problem with the Calvinist theology. I recommend reading it if you are interested in Calvinism, and haven't made up your mind about it, but don't really know anything about it. (This is where I was coming from). It's very informative and good at explaining things, and at a few points almost feels repetitive, which really helps to drive the point home for me personally.

Now I'm reading For Calvinism by Michael S. Horton. Which is the other side of the coin as far as the Calvinist debate goes, just presenting the Calvinism theology with a more positive light, whereas Against Calvinism was an argument against it at every turn, and it was hard to picture why anyone would believe it in the first place. For Calvinism I hope is going to answer the question of why people believe and embrace Calvinism, not that I have decided which side I fall down on, but it's still important and interesting to learn about.

I'm also reading A Year of Biblical Womanhood by Rachel Held Evans. It's a book about how she spent a year following all the biblical laws literally and how she discovered things about herself through following the laws. I think that it's interesting, and I'm learning a lot about different Biblical women that I had never heard of, and I am interested in the Bible, and finding someone that scoured the Bible and found all references to women in order to figure out what it means to "live biblically" is really interesting to me. She writes in a very approachable style, and has her own blog, where you can read about different things. She links different pages of her blog in the book, so I think the two are coordinated, but since the book was written several years ago she's probably not writing about being "domestic" anymore.

In other news I finished a scarf that was two strands held together, I'm calling it "Dirty Snow". It was a strand of white boucle with bits of color and then a strand of lace weight that striped between light blue to white to dark blue to tan to brown and then all the way back again. I like how it turned out. It's just a strip of garter stitch, but I thought that any patterning would be lost in the boucle, so I thought it best to just keep it simple, and not have a lot of complicated things going on.

And then here's a close up of the scarf, where I hope you can see the strand of the lace weight. It had a pretty good halo and was also metallic. 

I also finished a hat, knit with mill ends of sock yarn, and it was striped, and I knit it on my size US 2 Karbonz 16" needles. I did about 2.5" of ribbing, 2x2 ribbing. Then I did a simple mesh stitch that I made up. It was a row of eyelets, and then three rows of plain knit. It was knit in the round, and then I did my normal round decrease at the top to close up the hat.

And then finally I made a baby quilt for Project Linus. It was a along time in the coming, and in the last two nights I finished piecing, put on a border, and then quilted it and put on the binding. And I learned that while I am not terrible at long-arm quilting (my mom has a long arm quilting machine), I am absolutely terrible at sewing straight enough to put on binding. It's quite challenging for me and I'm not really sure why. It's a bargello pattern, made by Jodie and some of her other patterns are available at the Project Linus Kansas City Chapter website. 

And then here is a close-up of the back just so you can see some of the quilting a little better. There are little flowers traveling all the way around the border, but because the border is so busy you can't tell that it's quilted at all unless you are feeling it.

So there you go, everything that I've finished in the past few days. I also cooked up a storm yesterday, and now have enough food for several days. Today I'm going up to Angelika's Yarn Store, and I'll be seeing some new friends, and then I'll be going to Matthew's Ministry, which is a ministry for adults and children with special needs. I'm really looking forward to it, I enjoy it a lot.