Nordstrom’s: zero. Zip. Nadda. Ain’t got’em. Doesn’t even carry Birkis anymore. (What!?) The guy was a prince, but he got desperate and tried fancy flipflops–you know, it being a Californian wedding and all, right? Mellow? Casual? Uh, sir… Didn’t matter. Couldn’t get my feet squeezed through and Cinderella’s wicked stepsister was out of luck. There simply was not. one. pair. Not even that he could put a rush order on, not at any price.

I’m debating putting in an aside here: pointy toes? They’re bringing back pointy toes? My stars, do you know how dainty pointy toes look on a double-EE foot, how far forward you’d have to extend the toe box for visual balance? Dudes. Errol Flynn could swashbuckle his way down the castle steps with those as backup swords. For him, though, they could be well heeled to the hilt. Heh.

So I went home and googled my size. Looked for the flats. Zappo’s had one pair left in this shoe and three left in that. I actually got to choose. Done.

Nope, Kathy, didn’t get the shoes. One shoe store per day is my outer limit. No-Blog-Rachel’s heart attack at the thought of me in heels made me laugh (she’s seen me walking through yarn stores)–no chance there, honey, don’t worry. Hey. They would make my cane too short. And I don’t need to try to reenact the glamour of the day I so artfully and delicately fell off my roof years ago; let’s keep the feet down to earth.

Changing the subject, come to find out from them that the women at Handmaiden did actually specifically try to match my mother-of-the-groom dress when they dyed my Camelspin. Having their Sea Silk in my book might not have hurt my chances for them wanting to do that–whether that’s a normal thing for them, I quite hesitate to assume, and I don’t want to put them on the spot re their future customers. So. Write a book, match a dress, you put in a little effort, they put in a little effort. Go for it. I’m glad I photographed the yarn with the dress for the blog; they were delighted to see that it had worked out as well as they’d hoped.

Somehow that meant the pressure was on even more to create just the most perfect design in the most perfect shawl ever for the wedding. It would have been so much easier to just chuck that and go knit whatever–but whatever simply wouldn’t do. I spent the last week–a week!–growling and swatching and ripping and trying again and gradually getting lightbulb flashes here and there as I went along, one eye on the calendar and knowing the date was extremely close. I needed to get started, fer cryin’ out loud!

I came home from Purlescence’s knitting night Thursday night, where someone had gasped when I told her how much time I had left, and I thought, no, I really can do it. Honest. (So cooperate, brain!) Did one more swatch or two…

…And my shawl is now humming along. I did it. I got my amaryllis pattern. I did it.

(Toute being French for “all.”)

Michelle and I needed to go shoe shopping. Not my kind of thing to do: trying to buy shoes for me in most stores is like trying to buy qiviut in Walmart. They ain’t got’em. EE width in a formal shoe? Uh, no.  Try Nordstrom’s, lady. 

So Michelle shopped and didn’t quite find what she wanted right away either; I, since I look at shoe stores as something to escape from, thought that meant we were going to be out of there in no time. Right. I should have pulled my knitting out about fifteen minutes earlier than I did, but hey. A lovely African-American woman about my mom’s age was being dragged around shopping with a woman about my age, and as I knitted away, I grinned at the older one, “When the yarn’s gone, we’re done.” Totally cracked her up.

And then from a number of aisles over, Michelle’s voice, suddenly: “I heard that!” The woman about doubled over, laughing.

I had to shoot a picture of these with my phone when I saw them: did the person who designed them think of Tutenkhamen too, with those bright gold and lapis stripes?  Put these on, and you, too, can walk like an Egyptian.

Accessorizing my amaryllises.   I’ve got to show you these before they fade out.

And then, hey look, there wasn’t much overtwist after all; when I straightened out the skein, it pretty much stayed straight.

Commenter Sonya surprised me with one answer to single sock syndrome; I love it.   It came with its own single earring.  (Stitch marker, earring, hey, a necklace with dangly stitch markers would be so cool. )  Thank you!

Meantime, the rest of the Crown Mountain bag is beckoning me to come to the dark side…

It took a moment to sink in, and then she suddenly exclaimed, “Mom! You’re spinning! I haven’t seen you spinning in” (pauses to think a moment) “years!”

I think it’s been two years since I gave Robert my angora roving. The (now gone) Robin and Russ Handweavers store once listed 70/30 Chinese angora/acrylic roving for clearance at eight dollars a pound; given that most of their customers were, I’m guessing, fiber snobs like me, that acrylic was a dealkiller and the stuff had just sat there. Eight bucks!

Mind you, premium handplucked French pure angora yarn, with each bunny individually groomed and cared for daily, tends to run at about a dollar a gram (as well it should, for that much work). A gram. Compare that to qiviut–or even vicuna. Handplucked angora, especially, fluffs out like nothing else out there, if carefully taken care of. It also felts if you breathe on it too hard.

I bought one pound from R&R, just to experiment with on my wheel, wondering why on earth someone had mixed bunny with something so lowbrow. This was probably ten years ago. The Chinese fibers were all random lengths; handplucked from molting rabbits this wasn’t. But still. I assumed it would be difficult to dye, because the acrylic would be impervious, and yet somehow, when I spun and dyed it, you couldn’t tell one fiber apart from another, and the stuff was, even if not as soft as French, definitely–I mean, this was still (mostly) bunny fur! Sheared four times a year. Wish I could grow my hair that fast.

So. I called Russ’s store back, asked how much they had left of it, and bought the whole lot, maybe fifteen pounds. I knew that that would give me the freedom to go play with this luscious stuff for anybody any time without worrying about the price of the frivolity–just go enjoy.

And I did. But boy did I sneeze while those bits of fluff flew as I spun.

I made a number of things out of it, but ultimately, my body got the better of me. I spent a long, hard time, several years, where any extra expenditure of energy left me gasping for breath or simply too wiped out for the day, and handspinning just took more out of me than I could manage. A little ironic, I thought, given what I had named my website. One of my children breaks out in hives if she touches angora, it turns out, and that was all the more reason to not spin this particular stuff.

Robert spins as well as weaves. He taught his elementary school classroom about the tradition of the medicine blanket like the one he made me, and asked them whom they would want to weave one for.

One child said his grandpa had cancer. Another child raised their hand and said *they* had had cancer–which no one in the room had known. Wow. And so they got to work, warp and weft, working together and individually, a lesson put into action on acknowledging what life is and what we can do for each other about it.

And so it was only right: I gave Robert that bag of roving. It was down to maybe eight pounds by then. I knew it would go to the best possible use at his house. He told me later his surprise that it tended to make a heavy yarn, and I nodded that yes, it does–quite pleased that he’d started to spin it. Maybe to please me, to be able to tell me he had, but hey. It will wait patiently for its time. It did for me.

Jasmin got me talked into going in on a Crown Mountain Farms order with her on some hand dyed merino roving a few months ago, and when it didn’t look like I was going to get it spun, she spun the first pound for me. Wonderful gesture, gorgeous yarn. And you know? I had another pound still. It pulled at me.

Last week I sat down and got my first bobbin spun up, picking out most of the lighter areas of the roving first. Then after a few days, I did the second, picking out most of the brighter pink areas. The resulting skein is brighter and lighter than Jasmin’s, and the darker sections left in the bag mean I can’t match my one skein. But that’s okay. It got me started spinning again, it showed me I could, and that was mission enough.  Jasmin, once again, I owe you. The yarn is, as always, a thicker one than the fingering to lace weights I generally knit these days; that may be a contributing reason why I haven’t spun much. I don’t have the feeling in my fingertips required for making a very fine yarn.

But. I am inordinately pleased with myself. It has just the very slightest degree of torque in the wet skein, a sign of my being out of practice, but not enough to impact the final fabric. It’s almost perfect.

I have some seacell/merino mill ends waiting for my drum carder and then my wheel. It’s awfully good to be back.

The one-skein Casbah Julia shawl is sized for the petite; two skeins and, say, the Constance pattern on size 11 needles would be a good choice for a larger person. I showed it off to Nathania and Sandi at Purlescence yesterday, and traded them my getting to hold Nathania’s baby for an hour for letting them put the shawl on display for now.

Stephanie tells of Stephen and WonderMike taking her to Millenium for dinner after the Maker Faire, and writes, “Go there now. After a month of hotel and airport food Stephen and Mike can both verify that I almost wept into my dinner out of sheer relief and joy.”

Amen amen and amen. (Having once lived off hotel food for a month, too.) I’m not a vegetarian, but if I could eat there every day, I very happily would be. We took our vegetarian daughter and vegan son-in-law there for dinner a year ago for his birthday, and oh goodness, I have never tasted such gloriously good food. Our daughter explained to us what “biodynamic” in the description was all about, the back-to-the-land intensity of mindful farming. We don’t drink, so I can’t say a thing about that part of their offerings, but I can tell you their biodynamic grape juice was to die for.

But I committed a faux pas there. Okay, let me back up. My son-in-law had created me a pair of knitting needles that were really nifty and a bit large, and I had given them a test drive in the passenger seat on the way up the freeway to Millenium, casting on just after we got in the car. Forty-five minutes north and time spent look for parking. I had Knitpicks Suri Dream going in a lace stitch, so that half of what I was knitting was air spaces. Very soft, very fluffy, very fast, very natural-fibers, very gratifying. I cast off as we searched for where to put the car, got the ending yarn worked in across the cast off stitches, and stuffed it in my purse quickly.

That dinner was like nothing I have ever tasted. I have been fervently wishing for quite some time that I could remember the name of that place, and when I clicked on Stephanie’s link just now and saw the picture, it was an instant rush of, that’s IT!!! YAY!!! THANK YOU!!!

The waitress we had was young, loved what she did, loved the food, loved her customers on the spot, and was just the best. Hey. I had a scarf. So when we were done eating, I called her over and said I had one more thing to ask her.

Yes? Was the food okay?

The very best! But here: (unzipping the purse): was this a color she liked?

Run grab a spatula out of the kitchen, she’s lost her jaw there, folks.

She was gobsmacked. “For ME!?… You knitted this? You knitted this ON THE WAY HERE?!?” It was so soft. It was a bright color, a red on the orange side, and it suited her perfectly. She loved it.

A moment later, as we waited for our check, I asked her back over. It had hit me: I was in a vegan restaurant, and I had just given an alpaca fur scarf to their employee. What if… Sheared from the happily living animal, but some vegans don’t go even for that. I asked her, “Did I just commit a faux pas? Will your boss have a fit if you wear that?”

She told me she had to tuck it away for now, but it was okay. She glanced nervously in the direction of the kitchen and added in a whisper that I didn’t hear but my family filled me in on after we were safely outside, “I’m wearing leather boots. Don’t tell my boss.”

I just spent five minutes outside at 10:30 am, talking to the guy working on my roof, and my left eye sight was starting to get wonky. It’s a very good thing we didn’t try that walk to the Faire, however badly I wanted to.

This faster-version Julia shawl took about eight hours to do, and it’s a good pattern for when I only had a single skein of Casbah merino/cashmere/nylon 80/10/10, because it repeats every right-side row: so you can stop at whatever row you need to and still have it look right. Since it’s a superwash-treated yarn, I’m thinking of it as the Eight Hour Mom Surprise (I’m suddenly picturing Elizabeth Zimmerman fans pelting me with small leftover balls of yarn.) Celebrate the mom as well as the baby, with something that won’t get outgrown. I do feel every new human that enters the world ought to have something created just for them, but I also know how much it can lift a mom’s spirits to have something pretty but that doesn’t require babying–she’s got enough on her hands. Although I would put it in a pillowcase before throwing it in the wash, definitely, and no dryer.

Meantime, yonder elder son is flying home shortly, but the letter just beat him to it. I was shaking my head, going, how can they summon a kid at university in the middle of their studies, when they’re a thousand miles away? How can they require the kid fork over for the plane ticket? He told me the real reason he was flying home now was, he was coming home to play with his mom for the little time we could have together and to “drive you to your little yarn stores and take you to see your little knitting friends.” Kid. 6′9″ you may be, but, I used to be bigger than you…

The letter came. He had me open it and read it over the phone as he waited. Dear… You are hereby excused from jury duty.

I guess they agreed that sequestering him during his honeymoon was going to be a bad idea.

Thank you, everybody, for your kind words and thoughts. I could picture my doctors breathing a sigh of relief that I didn’t get out into that crowd after all. And yes, I could really relate to Lene’s comment: there are occasional days where I just want to demand, can’t I just chuck this lupus/Crohn’s thing? Just for one day?! I used to walk miles every day at a brisk clip for the sheer enjoyment of taking in the world on a fine day out there. I might have risked that walk from the parking anyway, if it hadn’t been for the worry and pain it would have caused my Richard. But I just couldn’t do that to him.

But hey. All the more reason to look forward to Stephanie’s next book. She sent me encouragement when I was going nuts during the final proofs stage of my own book; she’s such a good soul.

I woke up this morning and looked up at my sweetie, already out of bed, and announced, “I’m going to pout.”

“Because you didn’t get to see Stephanie?”

“Yes!”

He hunched down so we were eye to eye: “Here, I’ll pout with you.” And he put on this little-boy face–you know, eyes narrowed down to here, lower lip stuck out to there, that made me burst out laughing. I’ve got me a good one.

I try to take good care of him, too.

(Added later: if you’re curious to see some of what was going on at the Maker Faire, these photos were taken by the family of commenter RobinM.  I want to see that helicopter fly–with me in it.)

(Jasmin gifted me with yet another pair of socks as a total surprise Thursday. I didn’t get to hold Stephanie’s sock today, so Jasmin’s pair is filling in as a Pseudo Psock Picture. Note the artistic photographic rendering of an actually perfectly lovely pair of Blue Moon Socks That Rock socks. It amuses me.)

When your plans are castoff (why, yes, that is the Casbah Nathania waved at me Thursday night that I cast on late Friday afternoon in the faster-version Julia shawl pattern and am half done casting off Saturday evening–it should block out to about 20″ and tie in front quite nicely)

and are left adrift

what can you do but knit

to give someone else (not to mention me) a lift.

(I was SO going to finish that shawl during Stephanie’s talk and hand it to some random person at the Maker’s Faire and give them an impromptu lesson on shawl blocking in the spirit of the Faire. Whatever random passerby was wearing the right shade of teal, especially if they said something complimentary about knitting. If only the guard had been willing to move the gate to let me be dropped off near the entrance–although, with a thousand people or so stuck trying to go what was, for us, 1.1 miles in over two hours, I see his point at not letting just one person in. But no. I’ll just have to find some other victim.

I’m sure it’ll be tough.)

Come ON dear, we have to GO, I tried to hurry him.

But in the end, we ended up leaving not that much later than I had been planning on anyway, and in the end, it would have made not one iota of difference either way.

Googlemaps notes a distance of 223 feet to merge onto Cancar Drive.  That was the fast part of the trip: 20 minutes.  I think half the population of the Bay Area was trying to go where we were trying to go.  I was marvelling at all the cars, thinking, I haven’t seen traffic like this since the Loma Prieta earthquake at 5:04 pm, where everybody was trying to go home at once and none of the streetlights worked.  Wow.

We creeped up to the faire’s parking lot and got waved on past.  At four minutes to noon, I figured Stephanie was probably done–I dialed Jasmin from the passenger seat.

It rang, she picked it up, and I heard about five words. Stephanie over a mike.  Then clapping, as Jasmin tried to make herself heard over it.  She had an extra copy.  She’d also talked to Stephanie beforehand, and Stephanie had told her how much she was looking forward to seeing me.  Thank you, Jasmin, thank you, Stephanie, that helps very much!  It really does.  I needed that.

Judging by where people were walking from, I was going to have to walk a mile in the noontime sun to get back to where Stephanie was going to be signing after the now-finished talk, assuming we were able to get parked and walk back there before she was completely gone.  Gotta watch that wonder publicist of hers.

Richard told me, “I’m not going to tell you what to do.  I CAN’T tell you what to do.”  (Heh.  He’s onto me.)

And with that we bailed.  The northbound freeway traffic facing us was well snarled up to that exit.  We walked in the door at home, I glanced at the computer, and just at that moment it pinged.  Email from Lene.  Hoping I was having a good time there.

And that’s when I finally cried.

Remember the twins? They were triplets!  The last blossom opened yesterday.

I hadn’t bought Stephanie Pearl-McPhee’s latest book yet because I wanted to get over to Kepler’s to support my local bookstore. Then she announced she was going to be in San Mateo at the Maker Faire tomorrow, and I pictured a mad scramble of knitters across the Bay Area looking for copies for her to sign.

Jasmin scored me one at Borders and brought it to Purlescence last night, after checking and finding out our Purl Girls were out. Thank you, Jasmin!  Nathania did her part: she waved some new Casbah at me in the most exquisite shade of deep teal, just to make sure I’d have a good portable project for knitting while waiting for Stephanie.

So. I went home, I sat down with Stephanie’s book, and I didn’t go to bed till I’d finished it. I went to bed laughing and knowing exactly what I was going to be blogging about today.

If you go to page 33 of my own book, “Wrapped in Comfort,” I describe running back to the (late, lamented) Rug and Yarn Hut after finding I was short for the project pictured here. Immediately after they opened for the day, there I was, throwing the door open and yelling across the long expanse to Kat, the only person in there just then, “Nobody touch that alpaca! It’s MINE!!!”

Kat will be telling that one on me for years.

So here I was, blissfully minding my own business, reading Stephanie’s book, and suddenly burst out laughing. On page 153, she warns her readers not to dither about that 50% off alpaca or Alison would “swoop it up with the precision of a strike missile.” Note that most of the projects in my book are in baby alpaca. Yes, I’m not the only Alison she knows, but I am totally claiming that page for my own with great glee. Why yes, I do have an ego.

Stephanie, you’re wonderful. Now, how long since you wrote that sentence have you been waiting for me to read it!

(I told you I had an ego!)

First, the technical stuff. After I dyed that Fino in amaryllises the other day, I threw in a 25 g ball of Elann’s Baby Silk, the last one from making the original Peace shawl. There was still some color left in the pot, and when I had a few more wilting red blossoms a few days later, I threw them in to boil too. I don’t know if it was the aging of part of the batch, but the pink was gone and what was left was a deep rust color. Not much of it, but enough to do something with. This time, using merino sock yarn, it took up very nearly every bit of color. Does this mean wool takes up amaryllis better than alpaca or silk do? Seems that way. Silk always takes up dye a bit slower anyway, which is one reason I love dyeing a silk/animal fiber blend: you often get a heathery effect with zero effort.

Meantime, I got permission to share this from Tunie, one of my readers, as my son’s wedding nears. This is the best piece of advice to a bridal couple I think I’ve ever heard; I really like it. She specified after sending this that no words need be spoken, the gesture is understood as is:

“We are celebrating our 40th anniversary in June and I think being good friends (we’ve been best friends since age 16) is one of the keys to a happy marriage.

Something a friend told me when we were engaged helped a lot when we were first married. If during an argument you want to say you are sorry, but are too stubborn, angry or are afraid it will continue the argument, give the other person a glass of water (we used a special silver goblet). It means I want this unhappiness to be over and we can resume discussion when we are calm at a later time. But let’s not continue holding the anger. If the other person drinks it, the anger is suspended. Believe it or not, it worked for us. It didn’t matter who was at “fault”, just that the feeling was not what we wanted to continue.”

Then she mentioned that they used the silver goblet just to make sure a crystal one wouldn’t get broken. We’re all human.

“I found my thrill on Blueberry Hill…” I love the colors of blueberries.

Evelyn at Knitty-noddy.com was already putting in an order to Handmaiden the evening I happened to be exchanging emails with her, and the result was two things: I got to see the color page for Handmaiden’s latest and greatest about to be released, and she got to see the picture of my mother-of-the-groom silk dress–which she forwarded to Handmaiden! And then told me she’d done so. Another email or two, throw in a little Paypal, and then…

My new Camelspin arrived yesterday, along with matching blue needles from Grafton Fibers in Vermont, which I just happened to, um, really need to go with that yarn. Right. The yarn had been dyed to match my dress, and it just happens that that was to be one of their new colorways anyway. The name of it?… For those who know me?…

Ultraviolet. I love it. Get out there and enjoy. Even my amaryllis is laughing.

And I can dive right into getting started. The Bigfoot shawl for Andy’s wife that I started last Friday? Done. Just needs blocking and drying. I can’t WAIT for them to get it!

Planetary excursion: the hubby and I went to Green Planet in Campbell on Saturday to check out the newest yarn store around; I wish Beth, the new owner, great good fortune, and she’s off to a wonderful start. She has big enough chairs for my sweetie to sit in comfortably–this is rare, for my 6′8″er–with WiFi, to keep the non-knitting Significant Others happy. He approved. Houston, we have a positive on that trajectory.

Go to http://littledee.net/ , scroll down a bit, and see the author of my favorite comic strip and what he’s got in his hands. So tell us, Chris, is it merino? Is it superwash to survive what your characters will put it through? Vachel wings and Dee knee-highs next?

When we bought our house in ‘87, it had this red climbing rose that resembled the ones lining the fence at the edge of Stanford campus. I had always thought of roses as the most fragile of flowers, and yet theirs grew in the middle of a dried-out area and climbed and bloomed happily and freely. My red one, on the other hand, was in terrible shape with black spots and I didn’t expect it to last a year.

Which shows you what I knew about them. It’s grown into a magnificent plant.

Meantime, the Picotee has opened up, and I moved it to where I could see it better looking out my window here.

Every good family photo album has to have a set of bunny ears in it. This amaryllis is coming up next.