Elizabeth

Remember last week when I lost my mind over the adorable charity knitting project of knitting nests for baby birds at wildlife rehab centers? I lost my mind again this weekend, but in a bad way. I tried knitting my first orphan bird nest, but no matter how hard I tried, I could not get the bottom to lay flat and stop cupping.

When you knit a circle, whether from the outside in or the inside out, it can be very tricky to avoid cupping. Cupping happens when you don't increase fast enough; because each row is a little bit too short, it pulls the whole thing up into a dish shape.

Elizabeth Hand (an author I respect immensely, and who is also married to my all-time favorite author, Richard Grant) has a great article in the Boston Review about "femininjas," fictional female characters who fight back. But in amongst them she lists Amy, from Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl. Hand describes Amy as the "antiheroine" of the novel, and asks "how many women laughed out loud once Actual Amy took over the page, and how many boyfriends and husbands cringed."