Let it snow?

The kids we put on the plane yesterday were heading home to a foot of newfallen snow to have to haul their luggage through.

Later in the day I got a note from my friend Gigi, one of my testknitters for “Wrapped in Comfort,” who grew up in Iran: she was off on vacation and enjoying new snow, too, and mentioned quite gleefully what the word for snow is in her native Farsi language:

Barf.

She was cc’ing her note to a bunch of us back in California, saying she wished we could all come play in the barf with her.

Ahem. Moving right along. I got totally blown away by a surprise package in the mail yesterday, handspun handdyed yarn, Cherry Tree’s Orenberg in Raspberry Sorbet. Wow, thank you, Margo Lynn! You have to love a yarn that gives employment to handspinners in Russia trying to keep a tradition alive that goes back to Catherine the Great; google Orenberg shawls if you’ve never heard of them, they’re gorgeous. They have geometrics that remind me of Persian rugs. Although, traditionally–this is an aside to the laceknitters reading this–their patterns have one quirk: the decreases are all of the knit two or three together variety. There are no ssk’s to lean the other direction to keep the fabric from biasing. The Orenbergers blocked the heck out of their shawls, with the fact that they’re made of cashmere plied with silk–not wool, so there’s much more limpness and much less memory–making up for that inherent biasing.

The hank was small enough around that I’m guessing it was wound from someone’s hand to the crook of their elbow, what I think of as a vacuum-cleaner hank, because it fits best on the handle of one when you want to wind it up. But this one I was able to do most of the winding simply by putting it on the floor with a flashlight in the center to make sure it didn’t tangle inwards on itself, so that I could sit and read emails as I wound. It worked.

I pulled out the bag of yarns I have from Stitches East, marvelling at how Margo Lynn’s color choice matched so well with some of mine. Her yarn is cobweb fine, and I’m going to knit it with a strand of merino laceweight from Shelridge Farm that slightly contrasts so that the two colors add depth to each other.

Right now, I’m thinking I should knit a scarf in a snowflake lace pattern, wad it up into a soft big ball, and throw it at Gigi.