It just wasn’t it. I only got a few rows into it but frogged it.  Not soft enough. Didn’t please me.   Colors wrong.  No.

Well, huh.  I grabbed that Blue Moon Silkie Lagoon and began another one for one of the boys instead: one skein of teal-blue Manos Silk with it this time.

Brian’s family shared so many pictures of their older boys and ours camping in the Sierras near Lake Tahoe with the Scouts, and each one of these hats captures the colors in those photos.

I finished the third one, then, tonight at Purlescence, hanging out with my friends while my yarn had a ball.  Mary retrieved the Silkie for me once, but after that I declared it free range yarn and, as long as it wasn’t going to trip anyone up, let it roll with the punches.

It wandered a little down the aisle to my side. A sweet young merino hung a strand down from its perch, Rapunzel style, and they kind of got wrapped up in each other. Hat’s off to the two–I cast off and unleashed the strands.

I’d brought with me some more Silkie, this time in a colorway Blue Moon calls “Love.” (Or called; I don’t see it on their site at the moment.)  I picked out some superwash to match it tonight for Brian’s sisters, some red, some pink, all very soft.

I was almost to my car when Sandi came running after me.  Wait!  I hadn’t gotten a discount!

They insisted. They knew who it was to be knit for.  They asked me to send Brian’s family their love, too.

I walked back inside; they fiddled with the register and counted out the difference. I looked at it and grinned, “I’ve never been paid for leaving a yarn store before.”

They are such good souls there.  Sandi, Nathania, and Kaye: thank you.

I know, it sounds like having Amazon put paper and ribbon to your Christmas presents.  I can’t believe it–it took me how long to figure this out?!

Purlescence was having a don’t-make-us-count-inventory sale New Year’s Eve, and Sam and I did that errand, too, before she left.  We walked in and people jumped up and offered us seats; have I ever mentioned it’s a nice place? (Oh, never…) Thanks, but I was there with a specific purpose in mind.

I wanted fingering weight, but color and feel rated highest. Sam picked out this one.

Venezia merino and silk, in a shade of green she pointed out just about anybody with any coloring could wear, with a nice sheen to it.  Spun quite finely into many plies then cabled together–Cascade did a very nice job with the spinning. This one shouldn’t pill.  This one kept its softness despite the rate of twist. Well done!

Worsted weight. (Oh well, can’t win’em all.)  The Rooster Rock shawl proved to me I could work with that, so, okay.

I started to knit a variation on my Water Turtles shawl, and the slip knot at the beginning of my traditional long-tail cast-on stopped me right there.  In that yarn, it was just too thick.  I didn’t like it.  I started again.

No.

Huh.

Hey.  What if…

Now, I once explained to someone that there is almost never a good use in knitting for an e-wrap.  If you cast on via e-wraps, ie simply twisting the yarn into a loop like the cursive letter e and putting that loop straight onto the needle, when you go to knit the first row, there will be a length of yarn hanging down between those e-wraps that will get longer and looonger and looooonger as you go across the row, like a dog on a retractable leash running after a squirrel.

And yet.  I tried it. One e-wrap, just on that first stitch only, just there at the start, just that very first stitch.

I had to do several rows to see how it would really play out in context.  And when I did, it was, WOW.

I have knitted over a hundred of these top-down shawls by now.  Not so many on the heavier weight ones, so I guess I didn’t have quite the motivation to go looking before, but still–a hundred shawls! And I only just now get it.  This is how they all should have started. This is how all the ones I’ll do after this will.

I guess my surprise New Year’s present to myself and the whole wide world arrived e-wrapped after all.

Last night at Purlescence, I got to the end of a long row on the shawl I was working on and didn’t want to start another before quitting time; a good excuse to browse the shop a bit.

There was some Blue Moon Peru I’d seen before that I’d never really paid much attention to.  I was going to buy laceweight, and at 500 yards/8 oz, this was anything but.  Yeah, I did like that blues skein at the front, but that Rooster Rock–what was it about it?  It kept leaping into my hands–cautiously, because there were little things right there to snag that one skein in its spot if I weren’t careful.

Maybe being protective of the yarn contributed to the feeling. Dunno. Three times I picked it up, unsnagging it gently from the display case; twice I put it back.  That heavier stuff was just not what I had come for.  The blue one, I held it out in the light just once, eh, nah, even though I quite liked its denimness.  There–I put them both behind me and went and found the completely different yarn I thought I wanted, a buffalo blend in purple, around the corner. And that was that.

And yet.

I went back.

Huh.

I finally held one skein in each hand, the purple this and the Rooster Rock that. And thought, I quite like this (glancing at the left hand.)   And it’s in a color I love.  But *this* makes me feel deliciously, wonderfully happy (glancing at the Rooster Rock.)  I looked at the colors, trying to figure out how that could possibly be so.

It’s not the gauge I wanted to work with.  That bit of graygreen in one area I would never have chosen, although I like the rusts and the earthy purples.  It IS deliciously soft; but ohmygoodness, so was that buffalo, most emphatically.

All I know is, that skein has nothing to do with me. It has everything to do with…I have not a clue who yet.  But it wanted to dance for joy in my hands in sheer anticipation, enough to part me from the price of it, and I thought of Marguerite’s cashmere.  (She is doing well now, thanks.)

And now I want to run go knit it up so I will be ready–again–to find out why at the right moment.

Just let me go quick finish up this last bit of Casbah Topaz first….

Driving to Purlescence tonight, I caught something on the radio that surprised me and I thought I’d come home and blog about it: a Beethoven piece that I’d always heard as a very solemn piece, very introspective, even slightly mournful.

But here, instead of an orchestra, it was a single piano playing, and the pianist was–playing. He was having a good time. Matter of fact, that left hand started getting jumpy, progressing to a full-blown pogo-stick effect. Let’s dance!

It took me a moment to get past my “that’s not how you play that!” response and sit back and just listen to what the guy was doing.  And you know? It was really cool!  It was very creative. I found I liked that.

So that’s what I thought I’d be talking about, about being open to a new take on things.

Well.

At the shop.  Somehow the subject of blood donations came up; how, exactly, I didn’t hear. One woman said, Oh, I’ve been a platelet donor for some time. Then another chimed in, I do that too.

I had no idea you did that! I was exclaiming, Platelet donors saved my daughter’s life!

It was their turn to be surprised.  It all suddenly became very personal.

And then, to the one who didn’t know, I told her, And blood donors saved MY life last January, and I told her the story of the man in the hardware store. (Looking back over the January posts, I see that I didn’t mention at the time that I’d lost half my blood volume before the surgery, and they had to replace it then as well as what was used during the colectomy itself.)

Every now and then I get another chance to tell a donor thank you.  It was so cool.  SO cool.

So yeah, I had this blog post I was going to write. But life opened it up into a whole ‘nother direction. And it left me wanting to just dance for joy.

At Purlescence I reached back towards some of the baby alpaca on the sale table behind me and got caught wincing. I admitted I’d had a recent near fall and someone had grabbed me on my way over and had saved me. I’m glad they did, but my shoulder’s been begrudging it.

“You need to come with airbags,” one knitter opined about my balance issues.

I hesitated just long enough to almost have some sense of propriety before I opened my mouth and went straight for it and answered her, “I do, now.”

So.  ‘Hem.  Meantime.  I read somewhere that a Slinky toy on a birdfeeder pole will send the squirrels and their ex-seed-ing greed back down to earth.  Curious.  That could be entertaining, along the lines of the kid I saw trying to run up the then-World’s Longest Escalator (the downward side, of course) at the Montreal World’s Fair, Expo ‘67.  I was in third grade at the time and stunned, stuck between being awed at his having gotten halfway up–IF he’d started running at the bottom, good and honest–and the idiocy of the idea. I remember looking up at whichever parent was closest and half-asking if I could try that or was it as dumb as it looked.

They quickly affirmed it would be stupid.  And don’t.  I think they could just picture all six of their offspring suddenly taking off trying to beat each other going the wrong way through a crowd unhappy at being pushed at long narrow heights, and somehow that idea just didn’t appeal.

Dunno if they make Slinkys wide enough for my awning poles, but, hey.  I thought it would be worth checking out; we were going to Target anyway.

Ever try to find a low-tech toy these days?

Online later, I did find them. And variations, including–now wait a moment.  I’m assuming someone placed a special order and that they had to make so many and now they’re just trying to sell off the rest of the stock.  (Tell me this isn’t in their normal line!)  How about: 14k gold-plated. Slinkys!

This is so begging for CEO jokes.

I’m still trying to wrap my mind around and around and around and…but I think it’s flipping out.  Can you just picture it? A golden pawshake for the high-fliers.

The good news is, the shawl came out worth every second of the ripping back and of the not knowing; I am very, very happy with it. It’s hard to believe I got that kind of length and width out of 82g worth of laceweight. (Anybody need a little extra white Fino for theirs?…)

The bad part, of course, is that I can’t show it yet.  All in good time.

And now that the lacy days of summer are over, I went looking for what to do next. After all, what’s the worsted thing that could happen, right?

I had a project in mind, and found, as I looked through my stash today, that I’ve been knitting so much lace for so long that I hadn’t noticed I was virtually out of any heavier weights.  It’s not that the wool had DK’d… It just got a little loopy.

Shepherd’s Wool puts out a new-to-me merino so soft one could go in-skein, and Purlescence tonight helped get me all wound up about it.

Nice stuff.  I am going to have a ball with it.

Two things today. The first: I realized just as I hit the freeway that I’d forgotten my camera. I nearly took the next exit home to get it, but I didn’t have time and I didn’t know if it would be allowed anyway.

Glenn Stewart of SCPBRG gave a talk in the downtown San Jose library about the rescuing and recovering of the peregrine falcon population. I knew there’d only been two nesting pairs left in California in the 70’s; I had not realized they were extinct by then on the East Coast.

DDT accumulations had decimated the populations by thinning the shells, he said; that, I already knew. I didn’t know they were shot on sight in Europe during WWII so they wouldn’t intercept the carrier pigeons delivering wartime messages.

When he and his group started their efforts to rescue the peregrines, they were told it could not be done, it was a waste of time and resources–those birds were simply gone.

But how could they not try?  I got to watch a man showing the story of his life as well as theirs, the passion that had changed everything.  He showed slides of rappelling down cliffsides to retrieve falcon eggs to replace them with dummy ones in the nest. The living eggs were taken back to UC Santa Cruz, hatched where momma wouldn’t sit on them and break the shells, fed for a short while via injured/recuperating falcons on hand that were willing to adopt them, then the rappelling was done again, the babies put back in the nest, and the dummy eggs were taken away.

There are now about 250 breeding pairs in California, and the peregrines are making a comeback elsewhere as well.

Because a few people decided that if a difference could be made, if it were at all possible, it was imperative that they try to bring those birds back into life.

And they did it.

While he spoke, he had a marvelous distraction going on to his left: on a portable perch with a drop cloth of about four feet around it stood Sophie.

When there is a peregrine too ill or injured to be released into the wild, Glenn takes care of it: Sophie was certainly well enough to travel now. She would allow Glenn to hold her and take care of her, I was told, but no one else.

Well, yes.  I would definitely expect that.

But Sophie didn’t mind having about 15 strangers nearby as she preened, stretched, scratched herself with that enormous yellow foot, napped, stood on the other foot to show how relaxed she was, and generally kept us entertained very thoroughly.  Glenn reached into her space at the end, picked a downy underfeather off the drop cloth, and handed it to a thoroughly pleased listener.

What I hadn’t expected was what followed: he pulled out the most curious contraption and I was trying to figure out what it was. First he put it on his ear, and I thought, okay, to protect his ear, as he put on his leather gauntlet–but it was on the wrong side.  He got her set up on the gauntlet, then he reached for that–thing.  And then he put it over her head.

It looked like she was wearing a WWII ace fighter pilot leather helmet, except that it covered her eyes (which I’m sure was the point.) But: it had black rubber deely-boppers, two each to each side, going out far from her head.

I tried to wrap my brain around that one. I guess it’s for a visual announcement of her personal space so people won’t try to pet her as he walks by?

It was 1:00 pm, and with San Jose State University in the same city block and school in session, the library was jammed with people.  Walking behind Glenn and one  of the moderators of the peregrine group as they left, I got to watch heads turn and feet stop, over and over and over.

There was an inner set of doors, an atrium, and then the outer doors; in the atrium stood three young men suddenly stunned at a falcon with deelyboppers going right past them. They started asking each other, and of course none of them knew a thing, so I stopped and told them that Glenn Stewart of the peregrine rescue and recovery group had just given a lecture.

“Will he give another one!?”

Google his name and UCSC. Okay; they asked about the lecture, and when I talked about those slides of rappelling down the cliffs to save the species, their eyes got big and clearly, this was something that appealed to 20-something young men.

Maybe Glenn will find his next set of helpers soon.

Now, thing the second today.

I was at Purlescence Knit Night tonight when their phone rang (and if the woman wants to add anything here, I would love it, but till then I’m keeping her name private.)  A few minutes later Nathania came over to me and quietly told me who had called: one of my readers had gone over to deliver a shawl to a friend who had Stage 3 breast cancer. It was what she could do about it.

Nathania knew and I knew as she relayed this message that when a person has been made suddenly acutely aware of how finite the minutes of one’s life are, having someone bring them hours and hours of their time, a gift of life as well as any stitches or fiber involved…there are no words.  But the caller wanted us to know the depth of the joy she had found in that giving.

She had welcomed her friend back into life in that moment.  How could she not try.  For every minute there might be of it, for however long, she was wrapping her friend in love.

Glenn would understand, too.

It was going to be a long wait. Michelle was very apologetic about having scheduled an appointment over here during my appointment with the dentist over there;  I thought, are you kidding?  How long have you been the daughter of a knitter?  No, I don’t mind, not one bit–guilt-free knitting time? Peachy-fine.

So I grabbed the shawl project du jour and threw it in my knitting bag.

But.

No. I’m not going to!

But there was that bluegreen Purl Up and Dye project from Purlescence…

Now, Kaye gave me that skein she and Nathania had dyed out of the generosity of her heart only a week or so before I had this knitting epiphany hit me of wait, I knit socks?! And that yarn, ahead of its time, emphatically wanted to be socks.

No. That’s just not what my needles do, do you hear me, yarn? I cast on this scarf instead.

Every single time I picked it up to work on it, the silly thing whined at me, But I want to be *socks*! You NEED me as socks! Rip it, c’mon, you can do it, one good frog session and you’ll have just the right colors and just enough synthetic with your merino not to wear holes in the heels and you know you’ll feel like royalty and you’ll finally have some that would go with your teal skirts and it’ll be such a big deal and and and.

For the last time, I. Do. Not. Knit. Socks! This is going to be for somebody else anyway, and you know I’m too greedy (or afraid they won’t fit) to give away socks.  I knit to give, not to keep.  Be still.

So you know how that came out; after that surprise Sock Summit package arrived, I started knitting socks after all, and that bluegreen was sitting there torn between feeling jilted and exulting in, I told you so!  So now are you going to frog me, are you are you huh huh?

Hush child.

Now, I tend to do one project till it’s done these days, a discipline I learned in knitting for my shawls book, but this scarf timed out into being the homework project with a deadline a long way off that you don’t want to work on and you have plenty of time to work on and no you’re not going to pull a 2 am-er on it at the last second, the semester doesn’t end for months and the teacher will never know you crammed, she’ll think it’s your best work and not only that she’ll tell the whole class she wishes everybody else prepared like that in advance!

Wait–that was Richard’s high school oral book report on a book he didn’t know he was supposed to have read, never mind.

I explained to the dentist’s hygienist that I was simply going to have to wait awhile after my appointment to be picked up; sure, no problem.  She sent me out into the waiting room with toothbrush and fresh floss, armed to the teeth.

The wait began. I reached for my baby alpaca–and you know what came out of that bag instead.  Hmmph.  I was knit amused.

And then it became a race: can I get this finished before Michelle shows up? So I don’t ever have to listen to its socky attitude again?

And the answer, now, is, unblocked, 44″. Stretched out, mmm, ’bout 57. So close.

Nathania took a picture of it in progress the other day so she and Kaye could recreate that colorway.  And if that doesn’t placate it, one more half hour and it’ll be cast off and that’s the ends of that.

If only I knew who this was going to be for!  After all, the best way to get kids to stop whining about something they want is to get them looking forward to something else.

Someone is going to absolutely love this colorway and the generosity by which this yarn came to me.  I know I do.

About an hour ago, I only saw a blur with my glasses off, reading; Michelle saw the falcon swooping by in front of the window in its peregrinations.  She stood there, going, Wow!

I was wishing, More? Please?!

Note that the squirrels have again gone into deep hiding.

Meantime, last night at Purlescence, I said to Jasmin that some of you out there allowed as how you actually *liked* to kitchener.  (She was totally being set up and she knew it.) She said with immediate perkiness and the biggest grin, “*I* like to kitchener!”

And thus my socks took the easy way out, with both of us promising that, next time, I was to do it myself.  But she worked that grafting as easily as casting on a new project. ‘T’ain’t hard.

There will be next times: I started another pair today I’d been planning in Casbah, and DebbieR surprised me by having told the LYSOs from afar to gift me with their Jitterbug (it was a b.o.g.o. on their sale table) to keep me going with this whole sock thing.  Yeah, I know the racket: someone expresses interest knitting-wise, you bombard them with really good yarn, and you know they’re hooked on the spot. It’s insidious, I tell you.

The mail: Michelle’s first reaction to LauraN’s package was, a spider? No–an octopus, ready to get to work on socks: Mrs. Weasley’s airneedles have competition now.

I had an appointment today with my cardiologist to ask questions about my blood pressure med; everything’s fine, and no, this wasn’t the Thursday post-op. Routine stuff.

I got there a little early for a doctor who is  always late because he takes the time to listen to his patients, which I like, and pulled out needles and the purple baby alpaca I’d grabbed on my way out the door.  I’d had a project already started to try to get done by Thursday, but somehow it just..wasn’t..it. But purple was. So.

Doodling around, let’s see, cast on 33, take it from there, I was several inches into it, wearing the shawl on the cover of my book, wearing the socks that Michelle knit me, when another woman not much older than me checked in. (Wait, I’m 50, I might look that old too… I tend to forget that…) Now, when you’re sitting in cardiology, it’s fairly striking when someone younger than the average clientele comes in–but it was my knitting she was drawn to as she sat down by me.

On a whim I’d brought mine in a Purlescence bag rather than one of my knitting bags.  She told me she was a knitter too. She hadn’t heard of that store and wanted to know what the place was like.

My mind glanced briefly back towards the owner of another shop who’d once asked me, “How are you?” rather warily as I’d walked in her door.  Someone who has seemed to me fearful of what life might be capable of: who, a few months before that moment, had suddenly come upon me waiting at the elevator at Stitches in a wheelchair and with no preliminary conversation, had simply exclaimed, “It’s not fair!” like a small child and had rushed away while I was going, huh?

“Do you want to know?” I shot back.

“No.”

Well, that’s honest, I thought, and answered, truthfully on the non-health side of things, “I’m fine.”

Purlescence, though…  (Here’s a half skein of the Sea Silk in Glacier I bought there last week. The dark line lower right is just shadowing from the chair behind the scarf.)

Coming back to the moment, I told my fellow patient, “They have a great selection. And also this: I had a shawl on display there, and came in asking to have it back after my daughter-in-law’s uncle had a brain tumor and went into a coma; I wanted to get one to his wife quickly.

Whereupon Kaye, one of the owners, not only gave it to me, she took an expensive, beautiful, handmade shawl pin, put it in my hands, wrapped my fingers around it, and asked me to give it to Barbara too. Someone she had never even heard of before.”

The woman went, wow.

And then I told her, “And last January I was in the hospital. The owners of Purlescence gifted me with two skeins of a buffalo-blend yarn, which cost something like $50 apiece, as a get-well card.”

Her eyes got even bigger.

“They are NICE people,” I told her.  “Just the best.”

That being true, I thought I would repeat here what I told my fellow knitter in that waiting room today. I wish that all yarn stores could be like the one that I get to go to.  I know how lucky I am.

I could have gone on and on about how they attract good people like themselves, (that’s just for a start), but my name was called.

I so hope that woman shows up at Purlescence sometime when I’m there!  She would fit right in.

To Nathania, Sandi, and Kaye: you create much good in this world. I am blessed to know you and have you nearby.  I just wanted to say publicly, thank you.

Twenty-five rows today–sing it with me: 9685 loops of pink on the wall, 9685 loops of pink, take one down, wind it around, 9684 loops of pink on the…

Yeah. I know.

One lesson learned, given that I’m someone who winds my hanks into old-fashioned balls and these hanks were made into cakes on the ballwinder at Purlescence: given the slightly wiry character of baby alpaca when it is spun into a yarn as fine as this laceweight, one should knit the cakes working from the outside. Not centerpulled.  I did the first centerpulled and it wanted to kink on itself constantly and it would not run smoothly through my hands; I was constantly stopping and rolling the ball on its side to try to work some of the excess twist out.

The second one, working from the outside in–rarely a kink. Piece of cake.

This is probably not news to those who use ballwinders and laceweight all the time.  But I have to quickly add how grateful I am to the folks at the LYS for winding them up for me: as I explained to Kathy when I bought these Saturday, knitting-wise, I’m at the equivalent of standing in the frozen foods section looking for the prefab meals.  I’m not lifting dyepots. I’m not winding cones’ worth by hand, nor even hanks.

Today is two weeks post-op. I might be able to stand and wind a hank now. Just let me finish up this big bubbly lump of pink first.

Tomorrow.

First it was an email. Then a phone call. Then: the prisoner escaped!

Kathy showed up from San Jose, the sweetie–I’m hardly on her way–and took me to Purlescence for some rather desperately-needed hanging-out time.  Not only that, she gifted me with hand-dyed yarn she’d bought as a souvenir for me from Sock Summit: a gradient set of five skeins of seacell/merino from Three Irish Girls, whose work I highly admire. (I voted for their Georgia Peach colorway that not only won in its Dye for Glory category, I ordered some.) And, two skeins of Double Bambu, on mini-cones.

Sandi and Kaye wound up a skein of their Purl Up and Dye merino, Purlescence’s own hand-dyed, and refused to ring it up for me.

Lisa came in, and Sock Summit stories started zipping around the room, to my great delight.

After two hours, Kathy looked at me and asked, Are you ready to go?

Not that I wanted to admit.  But she picked up on the fact that I was fading, for which I’m grateful–I wouldn’t have had the sense to kick myself out, I was having just too good a time being with friends.

I went home, crashed, and woke up with a new design idea bouncing around my brain that I can’t wait to try out. Creativity: it’s contagious. Thank you, Kathy, Sandi, and Kaye, and everybody, for that matter!

“Begin: the rest is easy.”

Right. So I began a new project today, got interrupted, snagged the mostly-silk yarn getting off the couch, came back later, looked at the mess and frogged it on the spot.

I avoided it the rest of the day.  Don’wanna.  Silk is so lovely but it’s a bit of a pain to work with–you have to watch those needle tips every second so it doesn’t treat them like being on a slide at a water park.  Whoosh and away and hey, now let’s go running!

My favorite cure for not feeling like knitting is Knit Night, Thursdays at Purlescence: the colors and the wool fumes will do it every time, and, best of all, there are the good friends to be found there. Who knit.

I began.  Again.

A few weeks ago, a customer at Purlescence asked me how I liked the afghan.

Afghan?

Apparently, uh, oops.

And then a few people on KnitTalk started mentioning it: Elizabeth had been gathering knitted squares from folks who wanted to wish me well and a speedy recovery, starting back in January when things were so very bad.  Elizabeth told me last week the result was now finally on its way.

I promised not to peek at her blog.

(Did you peek?)  That was really hard! (I didn’t, though.)

Today, the mailman went past. No box. Just like yesterday.  Just like the day before.  The UPS guy let me be disappointed just long enough, and then, tadaaah!

Wow.

And just, wow.

Sitting on top inside was a large ball of silk yarn from purlsyarnemporium.com, a lavendar pillow, and, wrapped in gray silk, a stack of cards and notes offering hopes for my return to good health and expressing a great deal of love, over and over, as I opened the envelopes.

There are ninety squares in this afghan.  Some knitters wrote; some let their stitches state plainly and clearly what they were feeling.   Some squares came with stories, some of them were the stories.

All the yarns are soft.  They match up beautifully together, and if you’ve ever tried to knit squares of different yarns to the same size, even just one knitter working alone, you know how hard it is to get the sizes to match. And yet, in Elizabeth’s hands and everybody else’s, these all came together just so.

Elizabeth’s mother did a square that I’m sorry to say the post office has yet to find.  The afghan came up one short. Elizabeth’s husband knitted his first item to make the last square. I don’t need to tell her this, but he’s a keeper.

This last photo is a shout-out to Robinfre, who’s been signing her emails with these words for all the years I’ve known her: she gave me my best laugh of the day!

And now I’m off to Purlescense for Knit Night–and where 37 of the 90 squares were knitted and contributed when I wasn’t looking.

(p.s. Ed. to add: Jasmin and Gigi with their Knitmore Girls podcast got the word out for the squares being collected at Purlescence.  Thank you!)

Yarn: Lisa Souza’s Mardi Gras in merino, a gift from my Purlescence friends’ gift basket when I was so ill in January. Now I finally get to play with it.  My Carlsbad Scarf is a good pattern for showing off a busy colorway.

Thursday evening I ran off by myself to the once-a-month South Bay Knitters’ meeting at Green Planet Yarn down in Campbell.

Where half the room burst into clapping when I walked in, and the other half had no idea why I hadn’t been there since October.  I explained.  I got quite a few hugs, and Beth, the store owner, couldn’t get over how good I looked–the best she’d ever seen me, she said.

But I didn’t buy her rosewood needles over there that were calling to me.  I was trying to be frugal. (We won’t mention that silk cashmere  that did come home.)

Now, the last time that Stephanie Pearl-McPhee was in northern California, Jasmin and (formerly) no-blog Rachel (go see her new dress!) and I road-tripped together to see her. I took my knitting project and a backup, just in case; it was going to be a long day.

The bag with that backup had in it my pair of Holz and Stein rosewood size 5.5 mm (US 9) I’d used for all the size 9 projects in my book.  It was a particularly beautiful pair of needles, made from the leftover wood from making musical instruments,  a needle not sold in the US anymore, and that particular pair had been much loved for many years.

And I never saw it again.

It still hurts.

There was a pair of Destiny rosewood size 8s from Vietnam at Green Planet.  They had a beautiful grain, but the tips and joins weren’t quite what I’m used to.  And they just weren’t Holz and Stein.  As if I could ever replace that one pair anyway.  I passed on the idea.

Coming home, it having been a long and very busy day, I found myself suddenly almost doubling over in pain and nausea–only for about ten seconds, but it was a complete throwback that told me to definitely take it easy.

So of course today, feeling well and having an hour to myself, because I could and in reaction to that episode, WHILE I could, (after all, you never know), I ran back to that shop to buy those needles.  I did like the grain.  I’m going to at least give them a try.

Where Beth again couldn’t get over just how very well I looked.  And you know?  I realized on my way home, it’s a comfort to be told that.  Her delight may have been the biggest reason of all why I decided to try out her needles and made the trip back down there.  Because now I will always associate them with her caring.