Did it again. (As always, don’t miss the captions.)

I think this is like how, when I was a kid, I picked up the habit from my friends for a time of dotting my i’s with smiley faces, practicing a great deal on the sides of my notebooks so they wouldn’t look like grimaces. Sometimes I added curlicues sprouting off all kinds of random places on my letters as if to pull attention to the words themselves, wanting to shout visually, I wrote this! I put language into effect, I made this marvelous tool of writing carve beautifully ornate statuary out of my thoughts, come see!

Oh. Wait. That’s what a blog is, too. Never mind. Well anyway.

I often, when I get to the end of a shawl, leave the cast-off, just the cast-off, to do the next day. I have no real reason for that. It’s as if it were to flourish and curlicue and smiley-face it into an exclamation point: I did it! Look at this, totally effortless!

As if the one final row were what creating the whole of it had been about or the whole of the effort involved. C’mon. I can’t fool me, not that easily.

Or maybe it is that I don’t want the shawl to have any whiff of a slogging, endless grind attached to it. Rather, to have it be like a young girl holding it over her head, running into the wind with it Superman cape-ing behind, or her twirling around and around with it till she gets dizzy and falls down laughing, the silk turning into a landing parachute settling down around her.

I think I’ll run the last end in tomorrow.

My Picotee amaryllis is still blooming! It’s too bright out there for a good photo, but I wanted to grab it before it faded.

The Zappos came: the more formal, more wedding-y looking shoes sliced deeply. I walked halfway across the carpet and couldn’t take them off fast enough. People actually wear these?! Zapp’em back.

The other pair, though. Wow. These were created expressly for my feet. And if you look at the style: picture the increases in a top-down circular shawl translated into a shoe. It’s as if I’d been in collaboration with the leatherworking designer in Italy. Success. Why, yes, actually, I did immediately order a second pair in pearl. I buy one pair of shoes, on average, every other year. Break the bank.

(Added later): I’ve been thinking for the last several hours how ditzy a post this is. Shoes? After writing about E? But… Other than Birkenstocks, there have been so very few times in my life when I’ve found any that fit well, feel good, look good, and that I really like. Although, I’ve got to say, overall, I’m glad of that. My weird feet have totally saved me from ever being a shoe fanatic, since there’s no chance. Leaves the money for important things, like yarn–which I can use to center myself around others rather than myself. Thank goodness for 9″ long EEs.

Sometimes.

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.

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…

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.

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.

No, I’m not showing pictures of the project yet. Today’s Picotee amaryllis, not quite all the way open yet, will have to stand in for it. Gotta have some surprises. (Right, and I’m as good at holding off on anticipation as a five-year-old on Christmas Eve, we’ll see how long I last.) I came down with a cold the day after I got the yarn, had to put it away for two weeks, and finally now I can safely knit it up for them. At last.

I got a note from Andy a little while ago that totally made my day, telling about his having taken a walk outside of the hospital, at last, on a beautiful day, wearing his “magical scarf.” There’s nothing like a knitting recipient who loves what you (and Tina!) created to make you want to create more. I offered to knit his wife a shawl or scarf, whatever she’d like, asking for shaping and color suggestions. I wanted to get it right. I wanted them both to feel supported and thought of. The family of the patient has it, in some ways, harder than the patient. They need not to be forgotten.

I was going to dye something from my stash, but when I heard back, I knew none of the base yarns I had would quite get to the colors she liked. I went to four yarn stores, searching.

The last one I went to, walking through it, wishing for lace or fingering weight in a nice soft yarn in just the color, why doesn’t anybody carry colors that–

–there was one. One only. It leaped out at me. It screamed, I am THE shade! Right, yarn, tell me, how do you know? But I just knew. And it was so soft. So perfect.

I still, no, no way. I can’t…

I stood there in Creative Hands in Belmont, then, flashing back to the Crohn’s of five years ago: lying on my side in a hospital bed, too weak to hold up the edge of the page I was trying to read, too far gone to register a lot of what it said anyway: every lab mouse that sneezed was written up in those pages. But my husband and I needed to understand what we were deciding on. The doctor had his (positive, it turned out) feelings on the subject, but he wanted our input before telling us his gut feeling. The side effects of the experimental med being proposed included MS and lupus. (Hah. Beatcha.) Absolutely not to be given to patients with those or any neurological diseases, since it damages nerves. It depresses the blood pressure. (Great. I’d already done 63/21 once, memorably.) And on and on. My lupus had killed off the previously-working main nerve to the right side of my heart; there, as far as anybody could guess, would go the rest.

And I utterly knew in my bones that that med was the door to life for me, and not to risk it would be to die. I was so close. Whatever the outcome, let it happen, I wanted to live. I fully expected never to be able to digest food normally again and to be on TPN (tube feeding) for life, but if that’s what it was going to cost, I’d take it. I remembered my friend Neil’s dad with much gratitude, telling me that getting a pacemaker was no big deal. You just do what you’ve gotta do.

I stood in that store, knowing that one does not choose something like a bone marrow transplant except under circumstances where it comes down to the simple choice: I want to live. Remembering not knowing how I was going to find the strength to take the next breath. Nor the next. And my doctor coming in just then, needing me to live, imbuing me with that strength I needed so much simply by his caring presence, in a way I cannot begin to describe.

It was one of the defining moments of my life: our presence and our caring matters. It matters.

And the med worked. Pass the Green and Black’s mint dark chocolate. That small frivolity became a great joy.

I stood in that store, flashing back to Andy’s words: his trying not to complain, his briefly mentioning the fatigue beyond fatigue, his thanking me for recommending the book “100 days” by a doctor who had had a bone marrow transplant too, someone else out there who knew what it was like. Fatigue beyond describing to the living–Andy only barely touched on it in his note, but it was okay to tell me. I knew it well.

I pictured how that exquisitely soft yarn would beckon Andy to lift his tired arm to put it up around his wife’s shoulders as he continued to heal, finding both strength and softness in her presence.

I mentally apologized, and am still doing so, to every person I’ve ever knit for who didn’t and won’t also get a project made out of Jade Sapphire–but hey, please know, you’re in good company. I’ve never sprung for it for me, either.

Although, you know? Truth be told–I guess I just did.

My friend Nancy was helping me out with some stuff about a month ago, and I gave her her choice of amaryllises in bud to take home. Last night, after our knitting group meeting, she gave me the bulb back and then emailed me a picture of her Dancing Queen while it had been in bloom at her house so I could put it on my blog. Cool. Thank you!

I have to tell you about her turtle, since I have a thing about turtles anyway. She opened her door one day years ago to find a small box turtle on her doorstep, unable to reach the doorbell but trying to knock to come on in. Well, hello, who are you?

See that area behind the amaryllis? The rock, the cactus? Her house has an enclosed atrium: you walk in the front door to a glass-covered outdoorsyish spot, complete with bubbling fountain and plants growing in the ground, a greenhouse, basically. Continue down the flagstone pathway, enter the sliding glass doors looking onto the atrium, and you’re the rest of the way inside.

I grew up next to a ten-mile long watershed preserve in Maryland, where people didn’t fence off their yards and the wildlife was pretty prevalent in the heavy woods surrounding the houses. We had box turtles in the backyard munching on the jack-in-the-pulpits and mayapples in the understory. But here in California, the housing is far more dense and the creeks were turned into cemented-in troughs decades ago to keep them in their places. (After 21 years here, I still wince. It’s just so wrong.)

Somehow Nancy’s turtle had survived all that development. She and her husband took care of it for decades, and when it finally passed on, the vet had guessed its age to be 130. It had seen Mark Twain’s day.

And it had beaten every odd thrown against it, and at about 100, had found the place where it was welcome and warm and comfortable and fed and had lived surprisingly long and quite happily ever after.

Go Nancy.

(Update a little later: Nancy just called. We talked about her turtle, and she said its carapace now belongs to a turtle group that takes it to schools to teach with. So its shell lives on doing good.)

Where’s a flowery phrase when you need one.

If I knew the chemistry of the various possible mordants and their effects, I might well have been able to alter how the color came out.  Still.  I like what I got.  Eight hundred seventy-five yards of April-blooming amaryllis-colored alpaca/silk.  One of a kind.

I was clipping off the spent amaryllis flowers to try to get a good photo of the ones on the stalk still going, and, as I often do, got red dripping onto my hands.

Staining my hands. It took some scrubbing to wash it off.

Hey.

Wait a minute.

Them’s protein fibers there, hon. Okay, I know you’re supposed to have so many pounds of natural dyestuffs per pound of fiber, but this is what I’ve got and I’m curious to see.

Which is how I found myself stirring at the stove, searching my stash, wishing I had just the right hank, and then checking my calendar: the 18th. Third Friday of the month. YES!!! Richard and I very quickly found ourselves (he’s a good sport) driving together over to Purlescence, where they were having their monthly late-night movie night: come bring your knitting and watch the show. I was telling him, “We’re having a yarn date!”

“If this is a yarn date, I get to have radio dates.” Okay, I’ve gone to a few of his ham radio meetings already, and I threatened to (again) bring my knitting to those if he said that. We called it a truce, and pulled up to the store.

I snuck in on tiptoes (while various friends waved silently hi) and whispered to Nathania, “I have a yarn emergency!” Okay, me whispering is a bit funny, because I can whisper but I can’t hear whispering back and I can only guess how I sound because I just plain am totally deaf to it. But I didn’t used to be, so I think I can guess reasonably okay. She was patient with me. They all were. I didn’t need words in answer anyway, just a nod that yes, it was okay to buy yarn on movie night. She laughed. Bottom cubby at the end, I knew, I went right to it.

I knew how much yardage I wanted, I knew what I wanted to make, and I knew I could never make it with anything thicker than laceweight–there just weren’t enough blossoms, and I sure as heck wasn’t going to break off any still in full splendor.

Not that I didn’t think about it. The Lady Jane looked right back at me and declared frantically, You don’t wear orange and you know it! …Okay, you’re fine.

And thus I had spent the afternoon boiling old flowers, checking Google–let’s see: the bulbs are poisonous. For cats. In large quantities. I decided I was leaving it in my dedicated dyepot to be safe, which ruled out various other methods of dyeing. I debated with Richard as we drove home from Purlescence with my prize, some baby alpaca/silk white Fino (they had one skein left! YES!!!) Do I soak the hank first, or let it dye “blotchily pretty?”

“Pretty and blotchy don’t normally go together.”

“Oh, but in a handpaint they can. But if I do that, people will think the blotches are from the amaryllis. But if I don’t–will more of the dye take up if I put it in dry? But whatever hits the water first will soak up most of it, thus the blotches.” He put up with my working it out out loud.

I decided I was going to have to wash the hank first anyway, just to make sure there was no leftover mill oil that might keep the dye off. So that means it would be wet and would take up color evenly. Fine.

We got home, and I fished all the flower parts out of the now-cool water and turned the heat back on under it. I put the Fino in and the yarn kind of put its hand on its hip and went oh, yeah? So what? Oh. Right. I fished it back out with my dye spoon, glugged some vinegar in while holding it aloft, swished it around a good one with my free hand tipping the pot back and forth, and put the hank back in.

Alright! That’s more like it!

It is bubbling away, and so am I. I’m having way too much fun.

Last night, just before Sean posted his Change of Shift edition–you have to love how his Coliseum picture looks like the open mouth of a roaring lion, including the teeth! Hey lion, you’ve got a few cavities there–I found myself suddenly grabbing that amaryllis pot and plunking it in front of the azaleas, hoping there was still enough daylight left for some good shots. There was. That post came tumbling out of its own volition.

And I wondered afterwards who it was really for. I referenced my nephews because they’re family and they’re the identical twins nearest and dearest to me. But I kept thinking, the timing of that sudden impulse. Curious. There would be people in the medical profession who might happen to see it if they read more than just the post Sean linked to–ya gotta love Amy’s story–and I wondered if Anne’s teasing her boys or especially the amaryllis analogy might be used to help some other twins out there whom I know nothing about. I quite hope so.

As for the how many of those things do you have question, that got me to go count their pots. (No, I don’t plant them in the ground outside: if they freeze, they die, and the rampant non-native snails in California adore them, I’ve learned.) Now, I’ve got some flowering right now because I’ve gradually staggered the timing of bringing them out of their annual dormancy period, trying to stretch out the blooming time well past December. Note that the stalk on this one is very short: that’s because the bulb was kept dry so long that it needed that extra energy to stay alive–but I’m getting my favorite flowers in April for it. Next year it will be toweringly tall the way it was meant to be and will have made the full transition from the Southern Hemisphere to the Northern.

I always tell my family that an amaryllis bulb or two is all I want for my birthday. Though I give quite a few away–nowhere as generously, truth be told, as I do my knitting–I do get many of the ones I keep to bloom from year to year. (Hint: start with the bigger bulbs, not the tiny drugstore cheap ones.) The current count: a nice even 50.  My age plus one.

I’m writing this post as a message hopefully long into the future for two of my sister’s sons. This blog is, in many ways, my version of Randy Pausch’s book, having had an it-could-kill-me-tomorrow-and-nearly-did-yesterday disease for 18 years now. A friend of mine once remarked to me that the best gift a person could be given is a life-threatening disease and then to keep on living, and I would add, and to do so quite happily at that.

Speaking of Randy, I was watching his video about a month ago and my Richard came home from work, looked over my shoulder, and marvelled, “I know that guy! I sponsored some research at Carnegie Mellon, back at DEC…” Small world. Randy, if you see this, our prayers go out for you, your family, and your doctors, and I’m grateful for how you live your life.

Okay, back to the nephews. My sister and her family were visiting here from Atlanta back when those boys were four and a half, ten years ago. They are identical twins. I, being the doting aunt type, took lots of pictures of all her kids and gave Anne copies.

Anne looked them over–Chinatown, the redwoods at Muir, Stinson Beach, you know, got to get all the good touristy spots done–and she got this big wicked grin on her face, went over to the twins, and asked them, “Which one of you is in this picture?”

“Spencer,” said Spencer, in a tone of, like you even have to ask, Mom?

“TREVOR,” said Trevor, in a brotherly tone of, boy am I going to set YOU straight, dude.

“See! *YOU* can’t tell you apart! Now you can’t get mad at anybody else!”

And now, since I tend to see the world in wool or amaryllis, I want to show you guys: someday, one of you is going to get sick. It happens. It’s an ordinary part of the process called living. And the other one of you will wonder when that same Mack truck is going to smack you broadside too.

See these flowers in these two pictures? Born on the same stem, on the same plant. Identical twins. Do they have the same number of petals? Do they curl the same way? Are they even the same color? Do their stems bend the same degree? (Notice that I had to get under the first one to shoot it, while I could stay above the other.)

Trevor. Spencer. You have identical genes. Not outcomes.

(p.s. See those azaleas in the background? The nursery promised me they were all the same purple variety, cloned from the same original stock. I think rather those were fraternal twins at best, what would you say?)

They’re new at church. I had given it to her two weeks ago: “Honey, this lady knitted me a scarf!”

He responded with the confidence of an authority figure on the subject, “Oh, nobody knits anymore.”

His wife and I looked at him–um, what did your wife just tell you?… I wanted to tell her, while she stood there agape, it’s okay. Let him be bloggable like that. Heh.

Rachel’s washable wool baby blanket.

And a few celebrants cheering it on.