Enculturation

Being a college student, I have to read a lot. Being an avid reader, I read a lot anyways. Add to this the fact that I love working with yarn, and you end up with me spending a lot of time being very quiet. Today I decided to couple these activities, reading and knitting, in an attempt to multitask two things that take up huge amounts of time.

Knitting with my Sony Reader is quite possibly one of the best experiences out there. I prop the Reader up on my laptop, using the grooves between keys to hold it open and the screen to prop it up (best thing this Mac has ever done). I just press a button to turn the pages, and there is pretty minimal fuss.

But knitting while reading a real book is an entirely different matter. And is also a problem I need to solve soon, because all of my school books are real books. I have to use weights of some sort to hold the book open, and even then the new books constantly resist the weights. Then I either have to hunch over and strain my back to read, or prop the book against something. Propping the book causes all of the weights to fall off, so it's not a feasible idea.

I have designed a little metal device that will likely hold my books open without too much problem, but I need some thick wire to do it. I think an old coat hanger would work best, but I'll settle for anything so long as it can resist being bent by the book. Even a really really long paperclip or the spiral from a spiral notebook would be good enough. And once I have this made, I have some cardboard I can cut up to fashion a little thing to prop up my books. Turning pages will still be an issue, but I'll be willing to overlook it so long as I can actually read the book in the first place.

I'm motherfucking MacGyver over here! All in the name of reading while knitting.