Q1 Recap 2026 (Jan-Mar)

What a first quarter to 2026! I would say I don’t know where it went, but I do. I spent almost a month travelling (2.5 weeks for fun and 1 week for work), volunteered at the New England Farm and Fiber Festival, and took on a massive new knitting project as part of the Loose Ends Project.

We started the year off with a trip to South America and Antarctica! There’s a great recap in my February losing.my.knit YouTube video if you’re interested in seeing photos and hearing about the trip. We spent time in Buenos Aires, Ushuaia, Puerto Madryn, Argentina; Montevideo, Uruguay; and 3-4 days cruising around the Schollaert Channel, Paradise Bay, and Elephant Island, Antarctica. We didn’t get to touch Antarctica, but we did Drake’s Passage, we sailed over the Antarctic plate and saw SO MUCH WILDLIFE!

I’ve included some photos at the end of this post if you’re interested. We were also supposed to stop at Stanley, Falkland Islands, but unfortunately the port was closed due to high winds that day. Thankfully, we knew it was a 50/50 chance of getting into that particular port.

A lot of the trip I was focused on visiting yarn stores, but we did stop by one of the most iconic bookstores in the world, El Ateneo in Buenos Aires:

This was one of the coolest bookstores I’ve ever been to. It was a little overwhelming how big and busy it was, but it was such a wonderful experience. The building is an old opera house that was refurbished as a movie theatre and then when that folded, the city asked the community, and they wanted a bookstore. There’s a massive downstairs as well as the three balconies of books. I picked up a tote bag and (yet another) copy of Cumbres Borrascosas, or Wuthering Heights in Spanish.

Bookish Things
I thought the year was off to a slow start—and it is—but it’s not as slow as I thought. I’m not on track for 52 books this year, but I am for 26 and that’s not including 2-3 decent length vacations later this year where I read multiple books. Mostly I’m impressed I’ve kept up with actually writing my responses in a timely manner. There was a bit of a backup with 1,100-1,102 but I was able to catch up on my work trip in March.

Below is what I’ve read since my last recap, * denotes an ARC.

Sedaris’s Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, and Woodson’s Red at the Bone are all from an online book group I’m in with some fellow knitting podcasters and knitters. They were all fascinating reads and I can’t wait to dive into our April book Zeyn Joukhadar’s The Thirty Names of Night. I’ve also been trying to clear off my physical TBR pile/shelf with an RNG and that pulled Clock Without Hands and The Little Paris Bookshop off my shelves and got me making progress there too!

Crafting Corner
As I said above, you can hear about my trip to Antarctica in the February episode of my video podcast and my most recent one is below with the rest in text links after that. My crafting will slow down a little bit in the spring as it usually does, but I’ll be talking about that in the episode that comes out in April. I’ve knit a few sweaters, quite a few hats, and a shawl since I last wrote.

What’s Next?
We have a somewhat quiet few months with some small trips out to Austin for a cousin’s graduation from UT Austin and I have another work trip out to Denver in mid-June. I’m hoping to keep reading books from my TBR shelves and keep up with book club with the upcoming travel, the itch to play Minecraft some more and my crafting.