I’ve been staring at this blank page.  Where to start.

(Maybe if the yarn weren’t all in hanks. But it is. And I am too tired to wind it up into balls.)

But still.  All these glorious, glorious yarns and colors.  And a thank you to Dianne’s husband for running out to their truck for my Waterfalls Elegant hank from their stock.  Where to start.

I tell you, it’s going to be a very fun year.

I got to see Lisa and Rod, so dear to me for so many years, and Sheila.  Dianne.  The folks at Blue Moon.  Karen at Royale Hare, Melinda and Tess at Tess.  I got to meet the folks at Malabrigo: to my surprise, I found myself in a conversation in French at one point, but we all spoke yarn. And I got to see so many, many friends who were simply walking around trying to take it all in, too.

To Jasmin‘s brother Sam, who pushed me today, sparing my hands and arms for knitting, Michelle and I plan to get that manufacturing cream on Monday–you earned that chocolate torte! (Recipe in comments, actual cake forthcoming.) Thank you!

And I have now held an actual vicuna-blend hank of hand-dyed gorgeousness, 15% vicuna and still in the qiviut-ic stratosphere.  Which is a good thing. Pay those South American ranchers well.  Shear a wild vicuna, save a vicuna by making it worthless to poachers, save a species–well done, Peru!

And someday I will afford some and knit some.  (No, new skeins, that wasn’t a sheep shot.)

(Knitting needles as models have limitations. They’re always trying to make a point.)

“You know nobody’s going to see my shawl. They’re just going to look at that hat,” I told Michelle.

Truer words… I was planning on taking it off after I no longer needed it for warmth nor to keep my slightly damp hair away from my hearing aids. But on it stayed, because all day long I had people stopping me and wanting to comment about what was on my head and I do have this ego thing going on. Had I designed it? Where could they get the pattern? It was a doodle?!  One told me, “I’m a piano teacher!”  I laughed over the ignored Tara pattern and got told by one knitter, “There are a lot of shawls. There is only ONE piano hat!”

Well, no, actually, there are two. But I rather doubt the surgeon who got the other one minds.

Yarn: merino laceweight single ply in a base like Malabrigo’s, from Tess Designer Yarns; blackbewwie sock!merino, very soft and just the thing for shawls, sapphire baby alpaca laceweight, and Lake Superior silk from Lisa Souza. And no, that’s not all; Dianne at Creatively Dyed and I had a delightful time together.  Uh, yeah. She would confirm that.  Definitely.

Having rather un-chair-itable thoughts at certain battery packs that cost $150 a whack and then don’t recharge, because it’s a use-it-or-lose-it and I didn’t try to since…um, Stitches… (Wait, that would be TWO years ago, Sam was pushing me last year ten days out of Stanford. Right. Okay, then.  Never mind.)

Back to the manual one. At least I’ve finally got a much-needed new cover for thisssss old thing.

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.

Another round shawl was laid out, blocking… And Michelle came home and walked into the room. She stopped. She considered it a moment.

“The peacock called. He wants his tail back.”