(Sorry for the wrinkled-towel background; it was the color I needed, and for today it has to do.)

I have a nearly-finished silk scarf for my daughter I need to get done and mail, but it’s staying safely inside its ziploc bag and away from me, germ free. I have a shawl I want to photograph before I mail it off, and, ditto. Even if other people don’t get Crohn’s flares when they catch a bad cold, it’s still a bad cold.

Today is the first day I feel like I could actually hold up the needles for awhile, meantime, and the knitting bug is getting to me. I wanted to show something: in person, the Kid Seta (the bigger ball) and the Orenberg handspun “kidd/silk” from Russia are a little bit off from each other, the one more to the brown side, the other more to the vivid pinkish-purple. But knitted together, they’re absolutely stunning. They were so made for each other.

I bought the Kid Seta from Warren at Marin Fiber Arts http://www.marinfiberarts.com/ last summer while I was doing my second booksigning. I adore Warren. Every yarn store owner should be like Warren, not only as kind a soul as you could ask for, but his yarns! Chosen by how good they feel, as far as I could tell: wonderful. At the time, I just bought two balls, thinking I’d do a scarf or two, nothing major, a souvenir of my coming to his shop. But every time I went to go work with it, it just felt like, nah… It hadn’t found what it wanted to be yet.

My friend Margo Lynn totally surprised me with the gift of the Orenberg about two weeks ago, just to make my day, which she very much did. I pulled out Warren’s yarn, curious, and instantly knew. Yes! This is what it had been waiting for!

Neither yarn alone had enough yardage to do a shawl, but together they could. I thought, let’s see, I got two shawls out of 1000 yards of Lisa Souza’s fluffy Kid Mohair (the turquoise Julia shawl in the book), and the second one was pretty long, at least for me. Two balls of 230 yards of the Kid Seta, and the label says 50 g and approximately 600 yards on the Orenberg–yeah, that’ll do. I’ll just have some Orenberg left, that’s all.

It’s not working out that way. Handspun is of course variable, but the Orenberg appears, calculating by the weight of what’s left of the Kid Seta, to have been about 350 yards long. But oh, such gorgeous yards. And yet–I think this thing will still be long enough to keep me happy. And I’m thinking that silk has a tendency to stretch over time, which couldn’t hurt. I’m just glad I’ve got a scale in grams so I can see if I can get one more row, and another, out of it, and one more after that. I’m so close to being done.

Design-wise: I chose the smaller-stitch-count Julia to try to stretch the yardage as far as possible using 7mm needles, but past the yoke, I ditched the Julia stitch pattern for a different 6+1, doing the pattern from the main body of the Michelle shawl from there instead. I’ll show you when it’s blocked.

I can’t wait to see!

Okay, I think I’m ready for a nap. Knitting later.