It’s a new blog feature! As a designer, most days I’m lucky enough to spend a big chunk of time knitting, and I’m usually consuming other media as I do so—I listen to tons of music, podcasts, and audiobooks, and (depending on time of day) I watch TV and the occasional movie as I work on my latest project. Since these pieces of audio and visual culture are such a big part of my knitting, I think it makes sense to share some of them here.

This month I’ve been listening to the audio version of The Violinists Thumb and Other Lost Tales of Love, War, and Genius, as Written by our Genetic Code, a new book by Sam Kean. I love history and pop science, and this book is a winning combination of them both. I imagine it’s difficult to write about the mechanics of DNA for a broad audience without either leaving most people behind with science-y talk or dumbing it down too much. At least for me, someone who never took a science course past high school (unless you count The Physiology of Music, which I don’t, because it sounded like fun but mostly went way over my head), Kean does it perfectly.

As for listening to this book instead of reading it, it’s been highly entertaining, but I occasionally feel like I’m missing something from not getting to see all those rows of Gs and Ts and As (not to mention Cs) written out in front of me. And I’m a little bit distracted by my knitting the entire time, of course, so that contributes to my missing a sentence or two sometimes. I’d actually be willing to listening to the entire thing over again at some point, and I’m sure I’d pick up on quite a bit that I missed the first time. But the book is highly entertaining with dramatic anecdotes from history even if you’re not entirely following what exactly that crazy DNA is doing.

Now the question goes to you, fellow knitters and makers: what are you knitting (or sewing, or tinkering) to this month?