Yarn Along 2016.8: More Cadence

Happy snowy Wednesday!  We are in the midst of our big snow storm for this week.  Started with bare ground this morning, began to snow around 8:30 a.m., and now at about 1:30 p.m. we have a good two inches or so of snow on the ground and another half foot or more predicted to fall before tomorrow morning.

I am joining with Ginny this afternoon for the Yarn Along.

I've done quite a bit of knitting since last Wednesday.  I have worked a lot on sock #2 of my Cadence socks.  The leg is done, the heel is turned, and I'm about halfway through the gusset decreases.  All this in spite of taking a short break to make my dish cloth for February (one of my goals this year is to knit a dish cloth/wash cloth each month).

For this month, I chose to make the Chain Link that is a free pattern from Knit Picks. No special reason I picked this pattern; it just happened to be one I'd printed out last fall but hadn't made yet, and I am still without a printer.  So, it was just convenience that won me over, LOL.

It was a quick and easy knit, I'd say it took about three hours total (I worked on it while watching a video with DH, then finished it the next night.)

Once I'd satisfied my dish cloth making desire, it was back to working on the Cadence sock.  And also reading about cadenced riding (in other words, dressage).  I'm currently reading two books I got from the library, and will probably end up hunting down a copy of at least one of them to purchase for my own collection.

The first, underneath my yarn bowl, is The Athletic Development of the Dressage Horse by Charles de Kunffy.  It was published in 1992, right about the time my riding time (and funds) became greatly diminished by motherhood (as in, finding out DS2 was in the oven as it were), and I had not read it when it was new.  Doesn't really matter, as the principles in it are quite old and classical, which is right up my alley (being a classical dressage rider and all), so they are still quite relevant now that my kids are grown and I have my riding time back.

The second, with the photographs, is 101 Dressage Excercises for Horse & Rider by Jec Aristotle Ballou. Not nearly as old as the de Kunffy book, published in 2005, many of the exercises in it are ones I remember riding in 1991 and 1992 back when I was a working student at a place that started every horse with dressage, no matter if that horse were destined to be a western pleasure horse, a jumper, or actually continue a career in the dressage ring.  It's nice to have those descriptions of how to execute each exercise, and the goal/benefit of each exercise, in my hands since it has been so many years (ahem a couple of decades) since my working student days.  The trainer I rode under most recently--and still nearly ten years ago--did not use very many of them. This is the book that I believe I will be purchasing in the near future.