The baby peregrines at City Hall have discovered that it’s fun to sit on the lower ledge and watch the world go by, and now they’ve started flapping their wings up there, not willing to just sit and stare anymore.  Their white fluffy down is almost gone. They’re not quite ready to fly, but it is possible to get caught up and over by a burst of wind doing that–it happened a few years ago.

Somehow, though, (watching one step around his brother by holding onto the outer edge) birds just don’t seem to be very afraid of heights.

Meantime, my friend Karen of the Water Turtles shawl fame (OOP but Purlescence has copies) was told by her neighbor that a small bunny had been eating the neighbor’s flowers and then had gone into Karen’s yard to hide.

She went out to see, and there it was. Smaller than her fist. It froze when she came near, letting her get it into a box; she released it by a pond and grassy area nearby.

Knitter’s notes re the falcon-colored hats: needles size US 5, loose gauge, 68 stitches, 2×2 rib, one entire skein each very soft Di.v’e Autunno merino wool bought at Purlescence.

Funco the Jinch/hybrid stopped by again several times today. Cute little bird! Energetic and spunky and fun to watch: there is no fear in him, only the necessary prudence.

Meantime, Michelle from the other room heard a Rubbermaid box thwacking against the door of the closet as it tumbled down at me and called out, Are you okay, Mom?

I was just starting: going through boxes, taking out yarns, assessing yarns, you stay, you go, you maybe, I debated, I consulted. Old plans vs new.  Not quiiiiite the right shade… If I haven’t been inspired enough to use it or overdye it in how long and it still doesn’t call to me? Well then? (Being able to buy yarn in person at the store has its definite advantages over online sometimes.)

And yet. A cone of 35/35/30 cashmere/silk/merino from Colourmart.com got hanked and scoured in hot soapy water in happy anticipation–their yarn with all the mill oils still in is a lot of extra work but the price had been sufficient inducement to get past that. Definitely. I’ve used it before; it is luminously soft. Dry, dry! I want to play!

Some cashmere/merino that I’d plied years ago on my wheel from infinitely thin up to a workable yarn finally hit its reality check: I was still never going to use this one. Wrong color and too dark to overdye–it’s going where it needs to, out.

I was in hyper-busy mode without an actual project to make me sit down and hold still and catch my breath. Organize, choose… Hamsterball time, where you can’t make yourself stop running and bumping into things.

I needed my knit night. I took two balls of yarn and two pairs of needles and decided I’d let them duke it out once I got there–I still hadn’t granted myself time to think out what I was actually going to start making right now today.

It was so nice to just sit down at Purlescence and decompress. For once, the group was very small; it was easy to hear. Perfect.

The Dive’. Their soft merino won, because there was only enough of it to knit it simply while I listened. A hat is in progress. The fingers did the walking while the knitters did the talking.

And hey, there’s one last cone of that 35/35/30. Don’t look at the clock, I could go hank it up right now… (Stop!)

Laceweight (the darker turquoise blue) dries fast. This is a good thing.

I finished at 1:00 pm. Spun the shawl out in the washer (no spraying water) to speed it up, laid it out, about two hours later set out another white sheet and picked the shawl back up and laid it out over there now so the first, now damp sheet wouldn’t slow down the process. A hair dryer was tried and given up on.

They laughed tonight when I added, “So I didn’t turn on the air conditioning on a hot day to speed up the process.”

The lace pattern is a play on the recipient’s name, and since she enjoys the occasional bit of bird news, it looks to me like a flock of birds in flight.

When I was desperately ill two years ago, the folks at Purlescence gifted me with two skeins of Mooi buffalo blend as a mind-blowingly-nice get-well wish in that basket they delivered to our doorstep, full of other things too from various knitting friends pitching in to the cause. Being able to sit up and knit again was a dream at the time, but I have to tell you, it really did give me something to hold onto and look forward to: I couldn’t let them down. And that Mooi was such soft stuff.  What I would make with it someday, I did not know yet, but I knew I would.

One of the Purlescence women was in the hospital last week. You know I finally knew exactly who that yarn was meant to be for all this time–it had just needed the right time.

Delivered. Done. She loved it. YES!

In today’s patio news: you remember yesterday’s was curses, foiled again. And that Pam vegetable spray had apparently become tasty as well as entertaining.

I discovered that my parchment (porch-meant?) baking paper, which is silicon-coated, is quite wide, enough so that a single long sheet could wrap all the way around that pole up and down. Tape of course wouldn’t stick directly to it, but I could wrap it tight around corset-style, half a dozen places. Worked just fine. You could see the squirrels checking it out, grumbling under their breath.

In other news.

A line for Don’s list: I wondered if morning was ever going to come, and then it dawned on me.

I was trying to figure out the math on a pattern today after being awake from 4-6 am. Note to self: don’t spend an hour whining that you don’t want to get up–when the bag breaks, the cradletime will fall, get to it before it does skin damage. But you don’t think clearly at that hour.

Richard drove my tired self to Purlescence tonight. He’s a peach. (And while there I finally got something useful and working right out of my day with that pattern working out the way I’d envisioned; it felt good.)

Penny was there, hoping I would show up. When I did, late, she stood up, wrapped her new shawl around her shoulders wanting me to see how absolutely perfect it was, and then wrapped her arms around me in the most heartfelt embrace. She told me that when her Richard had brought it home last week, “I was just…stunned!” And she hugged me again. And again, a few more times. She looked radiant.

I know I shouldn’t need that kind of gift in return for knitting something nice for someone. But I have to tell you–it sure helps me cope with the dumb stuff better. And it sure motivates me to go knit for another someone else.

I do have a fair amount of yarn squirreled away to work with.

A new picture of my grandson Parker–he smiles now! And here’s what he looked like about the time we saw him two months ago.

So here’s the shawl story.

A few months ago I was at Knit Night when Sandi, one of the owners of Purlescence, handed me a bag of yarn and said quietly, “You’ll know what to do with this.”

Four skeins of sparkly Kidsilk Night and some Fino baby alpaca/silk laceweight to match.

I near-instantly did–all I had to do was glance around the room and see Penny in her soft shade of purple, her favorite color: Penny is one of the nicest people you could ever hope to meet. It would be so cool to get to surprise her with something and blame it all on our mutual good friend.

I got Sandi to the far side of the room a little later, knowing that my idea of what other people can hear or not is always a little shaky but I gave it a try; I wanted to make sure she thought it was the right choice for what was, really, her yarn.

She was thrilled. Perfect!

Between chemo caps and all kinds of other things with more of a deadline, it waited. That and, I kept swatching cool new lace ideas using other yarns, wanting to make the most bestest perfectest wow-iest shawl ever, not wanting to waste the Kidsilk but not knowing how it would look in it either, then. You can’t frog Kidsilk–whatever you do, that’s what it is.

So in the end I decided enough with this indecision and went with lace patterns I already knew well, and it was the right choice.  It’s perfect.

Sandi was again thrilled tonight as I handed the finished shawl around the room. Penny wasn’t there, though; she had a cold and she was being careful not to share it. But her husband, who spins and weaves, did come, and after his turn holding it up and admiring it he stood up and came over, holding it out.

“What are you giving that back to me for?”

I looked at him steadily as I said that.  He did a doubletake. I got the delight of watching it dawn in his face and then to see the joy in his eyes as he suddenly looked forward to sharing it with his beloved wife when he got home. I got a glimpse of the deep love that defines who that good man is.

I could not have asked for better than that. I felt almost an intruder in the moment, and blessed for it. I owe him my thanks.

Later in the evening, another couple came in, new parents who’d gone through the process of becoming certified to be foster parents, who were surprised instead with a call by their social worker offering them a newborn for adoption. Which is what they’d most wanted but never dared dream for.

I got to meet their new daughter tonight. Six pounds something is just so tiny. And so perfect. And they are so in love with her!

As were we all all around the room.

Y’know, she might need a tiny hat or something… (Superwash, superwash. Well, I know I’ve got some in blue…!)

I’m on a tight knitting deadline and had done thousands of stitches on one of my shawl patterns today when I stopped to give my hands a break and just gaze out the window a little while.

My jaw was suddenly…  My stars.  (!) We are not in Cooper’s town anymore.

Cooper’s? 31″ wingspan. And no sign of them all day.

This immense black hawk swooped low across the yard, rising up at the last and landing on the translucent awning over the patio. I watched its shadow from below as it walked noisily across up there, going left, then right. It leaned over the awning to give me a good look at its face–it was looking at the birdfeeder and within a dozen feet of where I was sitting just inside the window. Definitely a hawk, but black? And since when do hawks come that huge?

It was checking out the menu, I guess; squirrels would make a tasty appetizer. (And guess which one was the only thing that stayed put?)

And then, as I followed every move, just waiting to see it clearly again for more details, it took off and swooped back the way it had come, those immense black wings spread wide. WOW.

A Zone-tailed Hawk (the one on the right, definitely). By the book, it’s 51″ tip to tip–it could reach every note on my piano and then some.

They are rare enough and very rare here but there it was, tail and coloring confirming. Sibley’s western guide, again, says that in flight they apparently can be mistaken by other birds for turkey vultures–no worries, just the local garbage collector on cleanup duty, when suddenly *stoop*! It’s a hawk! And as a woman who raised four teenagers and one of them grew to 6′9″, I can only imagine what it takes to feed that thing.  Well, (being helpful) I do have a plethora of squirrels, and a particular one seems happy to step up to the plate or anything else you want to eat him on. Just stay put there a moment, he’ll come challenge anything with wings.

My friend Sandi once told me that one of the cool things about running a yarn store is that every single day, someone new comes in that she’s never seen before: she gets to meet new friends and knitters every day as well as enjoying the regulars, it’s always interesting.

(Okay, sudden visual image of stick out your talons for me a moment so I can wind this yarn on them, will ya? Don’t let the silk snag. Thanks.)

I so want to see this one again!

Random curious photo: our local mini-tsunami got its picture taken here, the water playing jump rope across the San Francisco Bay.

You asked for Parker pictures; here’s another from our visit to San Diego. Parker’s already beginning to look older than that.

Meantime, Nathania made my day last night when she looked at the cotton chemo cap I’d made and exclaimed over the depth of the cable: “Cotton usually goes flat!”

Well, I used really small needles to get that effect, but I could only do a few rows of that a day in that yarn so it went really slowly.

She looked at me, knowing cotton knitting, going, Yeahhh. But meantime, I am so glad at how it came out and it was with such a sense of joy that I sent it out and on its way to tell the recipient I love her and hope all the best for her. It was exactly the right project for her. I’m so glad I made it. I so hope it eases at least that part of what she’s going through.

Specs: cast on 16, another riff on the Knitty Coronet pattern, only with a different cable and no fold to the brim, just straight up from there. The two four-stitch cables were crossed every other right side row so that I could adjust the length easily, keeping it in the pattern while matching how long I needed it to be to fit her. (Which is 2″ more than it would be for me; I’m glad they measured.) I did a three-needle bindoff on the right side of the brim part so the seam wouldn’t chafe, and at the top, I crocheted the end to a few inches long and left it for decoration without running it inside, French beret style, again for the sake of comfortableness.

(And yes, that is a Vincent Van Gogh in the shower curtain behind me. I am, after all, an art dealer’s daughter. Art museums are a great way Toulouse-Lautrec of time.)

The first thing.  Benjamin Levisay and Molly Vagle of XRX came into Purlescence this afternoon; good conversation was shared with a little chocolate torte on the side and a good time was had by all. (Thank you Laura for sitting next to me, laughing off my deafness when I needed that and repeating a few misses for me.)

The second thing. National Public Radio in Massachusetts did a segment today on knitting.

India called in. India and Ellen have been the main reasons the Warm Hats Not Hot Heads campaign actually got off the ground, and it was good to hear her voice as she did a great job of saying what it’s all about and why and encouraging others to join us.

As I type, we’re at 130 hats. That’s a whole lot of people who put down whatever project they were working on to go knit towards a cause that they too felt was important. I think one more and we’ll be at 25% of Congress.  Go knitters go!

The third thing (and why I’m glad I’ve already finished my representatives’ hats). My cousin Jim’s 14-year-old daughter Abby fell while skiing yesterday. Hit a tree. I’ve never heard the highly-unwelcome term “burst fracture” before, but it was two of her vertebrae. (To Amy: T12  L1.) The doctors were, to quote her father, very pessimistic last night.

This morning she felt tingling in her toes and said she needed to go.

And I, both powerless and…not quite entirely, while marveling at the almost too good to hope for that that is so far, knowing that so many others have wished for such moments and never had them and knowing there’s a long way to go, wonder what her favorite colors are. (Just got the answer: purple!)

That, and continuing prayer, I can do.

Kind of a reverse gift of the magi moment:

I offered Richard some chocolate torte. After all, it’s Valentine’s Day (besides, he had just given me red roses).

He passed, not because he didn’t want some but to save me the effort of making a second batch, to make sure I had enough to bring to Purlescence tomorrow.  Maybe there will be leftovers? There are definitely leftover ingredients to work with.

XRX meets Purlescence. 12:30 Tuesday. There will be chocolate. (And, looking in the cabinets, a desperate last-minute run here for paper plates and forks.)

Meantime, Warm Heads Not Hot Heads hat count for Congress: 119. Go knitters go!

(Picture this line as the ticker tape streaming above the blog: the Warm Hats Not Hot Heads campaign has more knitters. Yay, and thank you!

And second, copies of Wrapped in Comfort are available at Purlescence at the cover price+shipping. Hey, I’m not good at this marketing thing but I have to try a little occasionally. )

Back to the blog.

To quote my sister quoting my mom on the phone today on the subject of reading: “I can abstain but I cannot be moderate.” We had a good laugh over that one because it’s so true; a good book is for getting totally immersed in. Good yarn, too, definitely.

Speaking of which–it was knit night tonight. Last week, Kaye exclaimed emphatically, “Oh *cool*!” at the pink sparkly hat that was going to someone else, turning it over and around in her hands to see how I’d made it.

Well hey, I know how to respond to that.  So I went home and knitted a second and you know whose head it stayed on the rest of this evening. That was way too fun, and there’s one more hat’s worth of that Classic Elite Intrigue;  I offered to give it back, since it was their yarn to begin with, and they just waved me away.

And even more: they handed me another bag with another murmur of You’ll know what to do with this, another explanation that this too just hadn’t worked for them personally.

And I instantly did know. I asked permission and got an Oh, perfect! in response.

Just let me catch up a little here first.  I am definitely not abstaining. But my limited number of arms and the brain cells it would take to keep track of all the multiple sets of projects they’d be holding forces me to moderate the pace at least somewhat.

Here you go, and I’ll try to get a better photo of it in the sunlight. This is what I finished for my local House representative, a woman, in our knitters’ campaign to ask Congress to speak to and of each other with civility and a sense of decorum: for we knit softly and carry a big bag of sticks.

At the brim: a line of cables leaning to the right, a line of cables leaning to the left, a purl stitch dividing them, but when they’re relaxed, the purl disappears into the fabric and they come together in an interlacing effect as one.

I figure that’s pretty representative of what I’m trying to convey to them.

Congressperson hat pattern, version 1.

(Note: version two would be to use a heavier yarn in, say, a dark color for a male recipient and only pick up 2/3 of the stitches as noted below for a beanie effect above the brim. It would be fewer rows upwards, too, thus faster to make; I wanted this one to have extra height and width above the brim to go with that knit/purl pattern for a slouch effect, and to protect my congresswoman’s hair from being matted down by allover tightness.)

Yarn: worsted weight. I used Misti Baby Alpaca Royal (apparently now discontinued), 86 g out of two 50g skeins, a very soft, very drapey yarn, but very fine and thin to my hands for worsted weight.

No gauge swatch necessary, although a measuring tape pretty much is.

Needles: I used US size 6, 4mm.

Cast on 17 stitches. You can use a temporary cast-on, or later just pick up the stitches of the side of the strip; I found it easier to do the temporary cast on.

Row 1 and all wrong side rows: Purl 2, k2, p4, k1, p4, k2, p2.

Row 2: K2, p2, k4, p1, k4, p2, k2.

Row 4: k2, p2, slip two stitches onto a dpn and hold in back of work, k2, knit the two stitches on the dpn, p1, slip two stitches onto a dpn and hold in front of work, k2, k2 from dpn, p2, k2.

Repeat these four rows till the strip is the length you want to go around the head. Hat size chart, again, is here.  Remember to take into account that the strip will have a bit of give to it; on the other hand, it will, if you make the hat long enough, be folded up over another layer, taking up just a little of the give. On this particular hat, the cable part can be folded up as high as a person wants to go as there is no right or wrong side above the cabled strip.

I did 25 repeats of my cable pattern to get what looked like 18.5″ sitting there but easily stretched to 21″. If it’s a little loose on the person, they can always just fold the cabled part up higher.  End with a cabling row.

From here, I undid the temporary cast-on, putting those stitches on one needle and the live stitches at the other end of the strip on the other needle and did a three-needle bindoff to work the short edges of the strip together; then, I picked up the stitches around the top of the now-circle.

For a standard hat, you pick up 2/3 of the stitches. For this one, wanting a slouchy hat that wouldn’t compress a coiffe, and given that I had a good drapey yarn that matched that concept, I picked up all of the stitches: 100 stitches. (Remember, 25 repeats times four rows.)

I knit five rows.

Then I purled five rows.

I repeated those ten rows till I had, facing me, four sets of purl rows alternating with five sets of knit rows.

Ending:

Row 1: P2, p2tog, p1, repeat across row.

Row 2: Purl.

Row 3: P1, p2tog, p1, repeat across row.

Row 4: Purl.

Row 5: P2tog, p1, repeat across row.

Row 6: Knit.

Rows 7 and 9: K2tog across row.

Rows 8 and 10: Knit.

Row 11: P2tog.

Row 12: Purl.

Row 13: P2tog.

And then I think I did one more p2tog row–I ended up with five stitches and cast those off. I wove the end in a little and added a “Created with Pride by” and then my name on the tag on the inside of the hat and wove the strand in just a little more.

Note: When I knitted the light pink hat with the braided cable out of the King George yarn from DBNY, I picked up all the stitches as well: cables tend to shrink the size of the fabric by a third, roughly, so picking up all rather than 2/3 of the stitches worked–but the cables are slightly stretched  when the hat is worn, at least in that pattern on my needles.

And when I knitted this bright pink one, the hat that started this whole thing, I picked up 2/3 of the stitches and made it shorter than the red one is because it had no extra width for a slouch effect; on the head, it simply comes out as knit/purl stripes.

Here’s another shot.

The yarn was a gift from Sandi at Purlescence: awhile ago, to my great surprise, she handed me a bag of this cashmere-with-sparkles in a heavy worsted and told me that I would know the right thing to do with it.

I don’t know if any of my three Congresswomen want bright pink sparklies. What I do know, is, playing with that yarn got me familiar enough with this pattern that I could go play with it comfortably and offer up my own version in the pattern above in hopes that others run with it, or with whatever pattern they like, and help to create a little peaceableness in the halls of our Congress.

And one other thought: I want our representatives to know that people care about them personally as they go about their work serving us all.

First: there’s a local couple, Tuck and Patti–our family sat under the trees listening to them giving a free concert in front of City Hall once back when our kids were younger, their way, they said, of giving thanks to the community that had believed in them before they were successful.

There is nobody who plays guitar like Tuck. And Patti’s voice!

Being a dedicated Birkenstock wearer, I always got a kick out of her High Heeled Shoes blues song. And this, courtesy of my husband, is what made me think of it. Comfy looking, huh? Something to heel all that ails a body.

The other thing today:

I went to Purlescence to knit among friends, having missed them last night and being in terrible withdrawal. Not to mention, I couldn’t wait to make a delivery. Richard had helped put me up to it. (”I think they’re down that aisle, dear.” –Thanks!)

I walked in the door and handed a certain someone a wrapped present (oh good, she IS here).

She did this furtive quick glance to the sides, because clearly I was just handing one present only and only to her. She whispered, “Should I open it?”

“Yes, sure, go ahead.” (Thinking, don’t you dare not, I’ve been in too giddy an anticipation for you not to.)

The tag read: Because sometimes, that’s just the way the cooking crumbles.

Huh?  She held it down out of sight of the others, carefully working at the paper,  trying to peer through the growing crack at the seam as she gently tugged, the wrapping finally coming off for her to see–and she screamed! Threw her chair back, leaping up, just screaming with laughter, holding it up and showing it to the others and exclaiming, “This is the. BEST. EVER!!!”

Last week, she’d told us all of going out to dinner with her husband and being given a dish with so much more food than she could eat and that was just totally inundated with bacon. Ooh, bacon! And there was so much!  She took the leftovers home.

She woke up in the morning looking forward to that bacon (you know? I never did hear what the rest of the dish was. I don’t think it mattered.) She got up in just so much anticipation of walking into that kitchen downstairs for the rest of it, but her husband, who had had to leave for work earlier than her, had eaten it.

All of it.  Gone.

She told us this last week with an I-know-this-is-silly look and tone of, this was almost grounds… (for pouting, yeah, that’s it. Pouting!)

The wrapping paper fell away.  And she saw: a giant Costco package of cooked crumbled bacon.

I told her as I was walking out the shop door later and she reached to give me another hug before I left, “Best. Response. EVER!!”

Nina and I braved the southbound traffic tonight and went to Green Planet in Campbell.

Going around the circle at their Knit Night, when it was my turn to show off my knitting, I had nothing except the project in my hands. The post office had beaten them all to it.

But boy, have I got a long way to go yet!

Thank you, everybody. I was doing better today but was afraid to push it, so I waited: I had Knit Night coming up and I really wanted to be able to knit there but I also knew there would be a lot of knit/stop/laugh/knit/stop/swap stories going on at Purlescence to keep me from overdoing it–and it was so. It was the best way to ease into it. (Pass the icepacks.)

It was so good to be among knitters. Including one I haven’t seen in far too long–I didn’t even recognize Ava at first, visiting from out of state.  She, bless her, recognized me.

I am so glad I didn’t let a little lupus get in the way of my going!

According to the post office, it was supposed to get there today. I have the tracking receipt around somewhere.

And here’s the other part of the story.  Last Christmas, I dragged my daughter into Purlescence and asked her advice on helping me pick out a yarn for an old friend whose wife I have yet to meet. Sam picked out a particular one that met the specs and that she thought would look good on anybody.

I knitted it up: after some thought, I used the Water Turtles pattern that I’d designed for my lifelong friend Karen. It just felt like the right one, even though it might have been cool to do one of the new ones? But, somehow, nah…

I finished it. It was time to tell the couple I’d made it for. And yet… Something felt not quite…  I didn’t know what.

And so it sat there. This quite honestly frustrated me at times because I really did want to get going on what I thought I’d started, giving-wise. But it was stubborn and it just wouldn’t go. Huh.

Okay, then, whatever. And I started keeping my eyes open for just the right shade of green to somehow fix that one, since it had been green and so green it was going to be if that green somehow wasn’t it. Must be the green’s fault.

I did not find anything that felt like *it*.  Stumped. Totally. For months now.

I finally pulled that Water Turtles shawl out recently to look it over, wondering why I’d made it, then, and it hit me like a boat straying under the falls at Niagara: duh! Karen’s widowed sister-in-law! Karen’s pattern! It’s soft, it’s half silk, the color matches the Alaskan pines, and if ever someone needed a warm hug and best wishes–what took me so long! I checked with Karen first to make sure Sally would like that shade; she gave me an enthusiastic go-ahead.

Today it should have arrived.

And today, despite the fact that we don’t do Black Friday crowds in our family–well, but Purlescence is okay, right? The owners had been there since 6 am in their jammies.  I got there in the late afternoon.  Old friends were there in abundance, I got to play with someone’s baby–

–And I found the exact, the most perfect, the most wonderful shade of green that somehow felt like the one I’d been waiting for all this time. I’d never seen it before.  Bingo. There you go.

I ignored it. I avoided it. I went all over the store, Kaye helping, looking for that color in something else, knowing if it wasn’t soft enough I wouldn’t buy it, but looking.

There was no other.  It had me and it knew it. I bought one ball, 230 yards, one lacy scarf in Cashmere Superior (brushed cashmere blended with silk) coming up.

It’s the right project. It’s the right yarn.  I got the shawl to whom it was absolutely meant for all along–and I hadn’t even ever heard Sally’s name yet while I was buying her her yarn.

To everything turn, turn, turn.  Now the sense that I’d been waiting for all this time is finally here: I have the exact right yarn for the person I started it all out for and it will be in their hands on its own right day, whyever that may be that I cannot know.  Their turn is coming up.

They don’t even know they’ve been waiting. Yet.