May the 4th be with you!

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.