You know, before I launch into finally doing that edging, I ought to go doublecheck that first shawl I knitted from this pattern idea just to make sure it’s exactly what I want…

Oh.

Huh.  Well, count that one a redesign for that bottom part.  Better I decide now, at least.  I remember now, I kind of squeezed the rows on that first one, writing down as I went what I was doing, because I never did find its last ball of yarn so I only had so much yardage–not a problem on the second shawl.  I made sure of that.

I never do this, but by golly I am so tired of wanting to get to the next project that I’m going to just go launch into it before I go to bed.  I mean, this is really pretty yarn but I am just so ready to look at other colors. (My get-well afghans have tons of colors, and hey, they certainly worked.  You all don’t know how grateful I am every day for those.)

And yes, that’s my Dancing Queen bud on its second day.  When it wants to come to be, it makes it happen!

Oh–wait…  Okay.  I’ll swatch.

It *is* nice, when I think about it, to be able to re-write the endings any way we want at any time when it comes to knitting. Just like you all helped re-write mine.

A new character showed up in the neighborhood with a stylish zorro streak on its other cheek and reverse eyeshadows– half circles of white right above its eyes, fluffing out to  make it look bug-eyed head-on. The wicked witch of the nest: I’m moulting! MOULTING!

And the other thing: I had the Red virus pass through about a third of my amaryllis patch last year, probably in part due to their lack of care while I was ill. One is supposed to throw away such bulbs quickly so that bugs and the wind don’t spread the disease.  I was in no shape, having had my belly unzipped twice, to go lifting any pots, nor did I particularly want to. Besides, there were memories in those flowers and I stubbornly wanted to give them every chance at hope.

Nearly all recovered and they show no signs of the virus now. From everything I’ve read, that wasn’t supposed to happen, I was risking losing the lot of them. But yet again, my amaryllises present a metaphor for what I went through as they look peachy-fine now anyway.

This is my prized Dancing Queen (yeah, I need to go clear away the old stuff). It may be a fairly small bud for this variety, but hey! I can’t wait to show it blooming.

And life continues on in its quiet, unspoken strength.

Last year, my friend Nancy gave me an amaryllis plant that had been given to her as a bulb kit but that had never bloomed for her; she thought maybe I could get it to this year. It’s gorgeous, Nancy, thank you, and I’d give it back now if you hadn’t moved away.

The parakeet came back to feed many times today.  I wonder, if I were to put a bird cage with an open door out there, whether it would climb right in and make itself at home–but I’m perfectly happy watching it being perfectly happy.

And yet.  Not so much when it hit the window flying in a panic along with the finch flock–going not quite in the same direction as the others, being not quite one of them. It seemed okay afterwards, but it sure sharpened the caged life vs. longer life question about it for me. I tell you–personally, I’ve gone for longer and found it’s okay for it to be that way.

This picture is for Rachel: I’ve started in on the Malabrigo Silky she wound up for me.

Meantime, I got the perfect Mother’s Day present from my daughter-in-law and older son: “Outwitting Squirrels.” Okay, you already know it’s going to be good!  And then the author quotes the owners of bird stores in Cabin John and Potomac, Maryland–I bet his kids went to the same schools I did.  The guy had great fun writing this.

My favorite part? His tale of a woman in Massachusetts who found some old LPs in her attic. She strung them on a rope separated by knots with her birdfeeder below: no squirrel could climb that stair-eo.

Then she got to watch them trying to jump down onto the top LP to hang downwards towards the feeder.  Here came the first: it got spun off into the snow.  Hey…! Cool! Do it again!

She described it as a line at Disneyland, waiting their turn. No food but almost as good.

I mentioned it to Richard and his reaction was, “Like the buffalo.”

Wait, the what?

And then he reminded me.  After the musk ox got reintroduced to Alaska, the buffalo did.  “Where the deer and the antelope play” had nothing on these guys.

Okay, so if I ever seriously think about parakeet cages I’m going to have to provide it a lot of toys. They’re members of the parrot family and can talk; I wonder if I could teach it to knit.  Or at least recite my line-by-line lace instructions so I don’t lose my place.

I guessed, looking at my brown fluffball, that I had enough qiviut left for perhaps five more repeats.

I somehow got eleven out of it (with very few inches to spare).  That little ounce just went on and on and on.  Yay!

Meantime, the darkest red amaryllis, my favorite, opened its first blossom today. I’ll never see its second beyond the bud stage:  I took a deep breath, cut the stalk, and walked it at dusk down the street to a neighbor whose 90-year-old husband is ailing and who needed that.  I didn’t want to inflict the plant on her–not one more thing needing taking care of. Just a flower, smaller and daintier than amaryllises normally are due to last year’s necessary neglect. A survivor.

Which meant that a normal bud vase would do the job–it wouldn’t tower and topple over. It’s all good.

It was gorgeous and she could watch the process of the living blossom for herself as the second opens.

Meantime, after taking this photo, I rinsed the qiviut scarf and laid it out to dry.  No blocking wires for it. I didn’t even manipulate a yarnover up between stitches when I found I’d missed one–I frogged it gently back down to that point and did it over, wanting no tension against those fibers.  Go gentle gentle gentle on this stuff.

Which brings me to my question tonight: my daughter does not care for the undyed musk ox color.  I have read that dyeing qiviut damages the fibers, and after all that hand combing of the animal in a specially designed, enclosed holding pen, the hand de-hairing, then all that hand-spinning, all that hand-knitting, all that was done on the part of three different women along its way to get this thing to come to be in its exquisitely glorious softness like nothing I have ever knitted before or probably ever will again, the last thing I want to do is take away from that softness.

I also happen to want the recipient to like it.  Color is so much of the experience of wearing something.  I’ve never met her. I can only guess what she’ll think of it.

I could, theoretically, simply dunk it in water with dye stirred in and it would take up the dye. However, without any simmering heat, it wouldn’t be dyefast–can you imagine her wearing, say, a white cashmere sweater and getting caught in the rain or even, for goodness sake, sneezing! and having dye run permanently down that sweater from her scarf?  Or on her winter coat?  So you see that if I dye it, I have to go through the whole process no matter what it might do to that qiviut.

Grayish brown it is, then.

A new amaryllis opened today, a double white, one of my dad’s bulbs from a year and a half ago. Gorgeous. Thank you, Dad!

I decided the best way to thank Rachel for the gift of her time and her wrists Saturday was to pay it forward: by knitting up and giving away the qiviut fiber she’d spun up and then had insisted on giving back to me. That had been on my good-intentions list for awhile.

Procrastination, however, had not cured me of being a little afraid of touching it. One must experiment, one must frog a little, when playing with a new yarn of a very definite length and no more.  One must see what kind of width vs length vs pattern I could get out of it.

Well, now I really owed her, so today I’m here to say that Rachel’s superfine handspinning of dryer-lint-fine qiviut is something that will stand up to being (oh so very gently) ripped out. It did fuzz a bit when I did. Just those first few rows–umm, wrong needle size. Didn’t like.  Try again. Um, wrong stitch count, won’t have enough.

I thought.

I expected to just whiz through that small ball in no time.  It has been thwarting my expectations in wonderful ways.  Out of 24 g, I really have 16 still left?  Really?  Unblocked, I’ve got 20.5″ already–I was expecting to get a cowl’s worth but instead it’s going to come out an actual scarf. (I didn’t knit it in the round out of sheer optimism.  Definitely paid off.)

Details: the lace pattern of the main body of the Michelle shawl from “Wrapped in Comfort,” plus an extra stitch each edge for a solid selvedge. I cast on 27 stitches on size 4.5mm.

I bought the fiber hand-dehaired from the owner of the animal.  This yarn is so exquisitely soft, the best qiviut can be, and oh, it is so warm. Can you just picture having your own Alaskan Musk Ox to comb the undercoat from?  Or even making socks out of this stuff to keep your feet really really warm on the ice? (But the idea of wearing holes in it! No thank you–I’ll knit my own holes in and call it lace.)

Because–Frankly, my dear, I don’t qiviut a darn.

You know the cliche of that galloping horse image? How, if you couldn’t see your knitting mistake from one, don’t sweat it?

My horse could have won the Kentucky Derby and that yoke would still have had to go.  Sometimes, the visual difference in a knitting pattern between slip two stitches as if to knit, knit the next stitch after that, pass the two slipped stitches over the knitted one, ie, sl2-k1-p2sso, vs. the faster slipping just one stitch, knitting two together, then passing the first one over, ie, sl1-k2tog-psso, is striking.  The first gives you the middle stitch pretty much going straight up with the other two leaning in towards it from the sides, the second gives you two stitches leaning sideways against the third.

I have leapfrogged over that little problem: that yoke is ripped, reknit, and on beyond.  I find it always feels better to get past where I’d been the first time, if possible, before I put a frogged project back down again.

And now it’s blooming again on my needles and I totally love it. It was well worth the rip.

Three weeks!  I started this three weeks ago.  That’s way slow for me.  I told one friend yesterday I just needed two more hours to finish it, and today I took that time.  Taxes were over.  I could finally do what I wanted to do. What a relief!

One skein of Plymouth Dye4Me merino/silk/cashmere, down to the last 4g.  This was one of these times when I was glad I had a second skein in reserve, just in case, and when I was glad I had a  scale that measures in grams so I could safely judge whether I had enough yarn left to do one more pattern repeat or not.  Made it by the skein of my teeth.

It is sprawled out in the other room, off the needles, taken a break from being all wound up.

Last winter, while my husband, my mother, my friends and readers, my doctors, nurses, respiratory therapists, a housekeeper at Stanford–everybody played a part and everybody played it well in taking good care of me, strengthening me, being there for me, and I am so grateful–I, of course, could take no care whatsoever of my collection of prized amaryllises. They were the least of our worries.  They were outside under an awning, up high on an old picnic table so as to be out of reach of the snails that would devour them.

But that also meant the winter rains couldn’t reach them. And when I came home, I could not lift the weight of a water jug as my long incision healed ever so slowly.  The others remembered to once or twice each over the months.

When at last I could do my part, the pots just sat there with the bulbs desiccated. I was sure most of them were dead.

A few were.  But the others, I could feel that the bulbs still had some heft left between my fingers, enough for hope’s sake.  So I kept on watering those pots long past the point that leaves should have started to show already.  They did not. I watered anyway.  Throw in a little Monty Python: “I’m not dead yet!”  I hadn’t been, so they weren’t allowed to be either–have faith in that heft and keep trying.

This went on for months.

I finally got a few leaves here and there.  I figured that was the most one could ask for, really; if they could produce four, the chances were high they’d bloom next year, and that would be wonderful, but if it had to be the year after that, then so be it.

This bulb produced only two.  And yet–I glanced outside two weeks ago and was very surprised to see a bud.  I brought it inside. Eventually, I found six pots with buds so far, and not wanting the wildlife to develop a taste for the flowers, brought them inside and out of their squirrelly little reach.

I really had wondered if they were dead after all.  It had just been so long with no response I could see.

The first one opened today, is opening today, the flower smiling wider and wider in slow motion as I type this.

It is standing there reminding me what I so easily forget, how much Life is a gift, beautiful and powerful beyond all understanding.  It is not limited, no matter what our expectations may be at any one time.  The life force is strongest when we hear its call to cheer someone else’s day–as so many brightened mine when I was in dire need.

Pouring water into flowerpots.  Typing an email to someone lying in a hospital bed, sending up a prayer, Thinking Good Thoughts.  A small moment to each patient bulb, and then another, and then another, adding up.

To pure joy.

Thank you, everybody.

And remembering, as I write this, the One who endured all, rose above all, and loves all, Happy Easter!

I’m not sure why I find myself wanting to catch up on old yarns as Stitches approaches.  But I do.

Long, long ago, in a galaxy far, far away, I bought a wholesaler’s closeout of natural-brown 90% cashmere 10% nylon cones at–are you knitters ready for this?–$15/lb, and I bought ten pounds of it, all they had.  And then they found a few more in their warehouse and I bought those too.  They were giving it to me at their cost to get rid of it.  It needed a strong washing, and not just for the mill oils.  It was single-ply and cobweb fine, impossibly fragile; I plied it on my wheel into all kinds of useful, stronger thicknesses, scouring after spinning, and I made so many things out of it for several years.  Afghans, yarn that my mom knitted up into the most glorious Aran sweater, you name it.

Till I was down to the very last few pounds.  The idea of actually running out of this resource after all those projects… The rest of it kind of got tucked away, waiting till I could bear to let it go.

At some point, though, I wound some off, 64 g here, 66 g there, and threw them in the dyepot, one into a little red, the second a bit of purple.

And then those hanks, too, simply sat there.  I certainly didn’t do any spinning last year with all the stitching they did on me.

I got some Handmaiden laceweight silk awhile ago. Hey. While I was working on the shawl in Cashmere Superior and Dianne’s laceweight, the fuzzy and the colorful, I wondered if this new silk would look good with those two, and it would definitely add strength…

So today I tried it.  Plied the cashmeres first, then the silk around the other two. The yarn is balanced; no twisting in the finished skein, it hangs straight. So my being so out of practice didn’t hurt it.

The silk glistens, the cashmere fuzzes around it.  160 yards, drying now, waiting.  There’s a whole lot more, potentially, where that came from.

Hey, Dad, look what’s blooming now–thank you!

Twins by a different color… I was already into the green hat today before I realized that oh, right, I was going to use superwash for all these. Misti baby alpaca isn’t, but oh, does it feel wonderful; I decided, well, hey.  One doesn’t always have to be entirely practical.  Meantime, I definitely have enough of the Blue Moon skein left to make a third, although I’m going to do another girl hat while I decide what to put with it.

Thought I’d show the finished fuschia-orange one, ends woven in, so Ellen can let out a sigh of relief. There you go.  Done.

I remembered today what I already knew, that when it comes to knitting ribbing, two by twos knit up so much faster, so much easier on the hands, and in a fair bit less time than one by ones.  Y’know, there’s a parable waiting to leap out of that.

On to the next, after I decide what it’s going to be.  The whether-or-not  report is predicting bright and sunny, with chance of scattered colors.

The first amaryllis to rebloom despite last year’s definite and atypical lack of plant care, and a very bright spot in our weather.

I’d been needing to go to the post office all week, but the incessant storms were making it a nice time to sit down with a good knitting project in hand and my feet up–never mind the hearing aids, where getting wet or not is the $6400 question.

But the skies finally held their breath for a moment, Friday presented the gift of an arbitrary deadline, and at about 4:25, I finally kicked myself out the door.

Driving there, I was surprised at how high the water was in the Baylands.  It would be so easy right now to repeat the February day when my oldest was 16 and, as a certified Red Cross volunteer, had helped run the emergency shelter with my husband: a friend of mine was in there, having gone to bed the night before on one side of the room and having woken up to find her waterbed on the other side now, it having become, yay verily, a water bed.  Hovering near the ceiling.

I’d called my friend Lisa to let her know that folks had been evacuated from her old apartment building by boat.

There was also our friend Brad who’d wondered if the water might be coming up in the street and decided he’d better go open his front door to check–only to see his koi from his back yard right there, swimming past his feet.  So long, and thanks for all the fish.

It raiiiiiiiiiined as I drove.

I got in the post office with my hood over my head, got my four packages safely on their way, I got back to the car and on down the road.  There was traffic, a light, the freeway nearby that everybody seemed to be heading to or from–

–and then there was me.  On a quiet, narrow road.  Going past the side of the San Francisco Bay marshes, the sky thunderously dark in puffy soft clouds that made it hard to take the threat seriously, and right in front of them, suddenly, the sun! Bright, vividly shining as only the rain behind it in the late day can make it, with a strong rainbow arching across the water to land somewhere over…there, where, as I approached, a white egret, standing in the enlarged lake, had its head tucked down.

Hoping perhaps for an incoming koi for dessert.

Can Nut Lady come out and play? Pretty please?

It’s just the one, the red-bellied medium-black squirrel of the three siblings, that has decided my purpose in life is to open the door and toss it a walnut.  It has now learned that if the walnut goes past it, it’s still there, and will now turn and go find it.

It has surprised me the last few days (I apparently learn slower than it does) by perching there in the morning, watching me at the computer, waiting patiently for me to get with the program.

I am utterly charmed.  It’s training me well.

Okay, question for everybody: I succumbed to Margo Lynn’s mention of the Cherry Tree January sale and ordered some suri lace.  They threw in a grab bag with random additional skeins, a pair of SWTC needles (size 8, 32″–perfect!) and these two… black plastic hearts?

Anybody?

Is there some cosmic knitting significance to these that I’m just not grasping?  I am at a loss. Huh.

Meantime, Phyl, the purple flowers you gave me for my birthday are still blooming the winter away, as are the first of the amaryllises, a gift from Richard.

Happy January!

I’ve been a little discouraged at how tired it makes me to do things I think should be simple, and last night I was too wiped to post.

Mostly because I’d finally hauled the water out, gallon by gallon, to break dormancy at last on my waiting amaryllises yesterday.

A little time, a little perspective, a little browsing through old photos (this being one of the most fun) of my favorite flowers.

Now time for a little yarn.

It’s a surprise. I don’t know a thing about it. I’ll distract you with an amaryllis photo (Lene, that’s yours in the white container, far left).  The thing is all wrapped up in bird-themed wrapping paper over there, right next to the 25 lb bag of birdseed. I wonder what it could be.

Michelle was wondering out loud yesterday what the family should get me for Mother’s Day.  My friend Robin then sent me a link to one of her favorite stores when I mentioned to her that a birdfeeder would be really cool. Our next-door neighbors have one, with the result that I’ve seen a red-tailed hawk right outside our window here, and there was the never-to-be-forgotten moment when I pulled into my driveway, got out of my car, and there, perched at the edge of the neighbor’s roof at the closest point of it to where I was, quite close, stood a golden eagle. It looked at me. I looked at it. It looked at me.  Hmm. A little big for prey.  Came in a crunchy container, and it might get back in and you know how hard it is to undo that overpackaging with one’s talons.

So I wanted something that would help pull the outdoors up closer to my window, a little friendly competition with the feeder next door.

Robin’s link was to the local Wild Bird Center.  Michelle and I hopped in the car today and headed down to Los Gatos.  We were helped by an enthusiastic ornithologist who wanted to know what kinds of birds we wanted to attract?

“Pretty ones.”

She laughed.  Ooookay…  Obviously a fussy customer here.

I asked about the feeder I’d seen online that flips the squirrels off. No, literally. She told me the price of those (yowsers!) and that they have a $30 part that has to be replaced about once a year, and added, the squirrels learn quick to avoid them so then where’s the entertainment?  She doesn’t sell them.

Ah. Well, it was just a curiosity.  Besides, then I’d have to keep the feeder close to the ground and I’d be watching the little beasties anxiously like a mom whose 16-year-old just took off on their first solo trip behind the wheel.

She sold Michelle one that closes up the restaurant at the weight of a squirrel and is perfect for songbirds.

And I don’t know a thing about it till Sunday.  (Michelle wanted me to come with her to make sure the one she got would be one I’d be pleased with.)

I’m all a-twitter.  Heh.

I spent today watching this little Picotee slowly open up.

Quite a few of my older amaryllis bulbs have been blooming with unusually short stems this year, including these two and the budding one lurking behind them.

They’re typically marketed as Christmas presents and bloom around the winter holidays on towering two- to three-foot stalks, their leaves lasting eight months or so.  Then you quit watering them, let them rest for one and a half to three months, start up again and wait for them to rebloom.  Rinse, rest, repeat.

I like to have some in full flower as far into the year as I can, so I stretch out the drying-out periods to stagger the timing; last year I had flowers all the way to the end of May.  Cool!

So. Around the middle of this past December, I did a mass watering of my several dozen older bulbs to get them started, knowing some would respond quickly, some slower.

But I was already three weeks into my Crohn’s flare, and as many know, it got bad fast after that. Carrying heavy pitchers of water around was something that got given up real fast. I worried about killing my bulbs off–one watering in the middle of five months?  But there was not a thing I could do about it.  And they just were not the first thing on anyone else’s mind during those days, as one might well imagine.

Mom eventually planted the ones Dad gave me for my birthday and took on the watering.

My older bulbs could have put all their energy into sheer survival mode, green only.  Some did. But some, with the beginnings of buds already formed inside the bulbs, were determined to bloom the moment it became possible, however  it could be done.

And those are the ones with the short stems now, giving it all they’ve got. A green hummingbird enjoyed them a few days ago.  And suddenly our roses are blooming en masse to celebrate spring too; I almost caught a honeybee in this picture.

Lene? The bulb you gave me a year ago started to send up its first two leaves right away, then they died off in the drought. I started watering it anyway when I could again.  It took it weeks to respond, long enough that I wasn’t sure why I was still trying, but now it’s got two unusually wide, healthy young leaves making up for lost time.

Amaryllises need four leaves producing food for the bulb for them to bloom the next year.

I can wait.

I’ve got all the time in the world now.