Making progress
Friday September 30th 2011, 11:09 pm
Filed under: Knit,Wildlife

If you can’t be a good tree squirrel, be a good ground squirrel. That seemed to be today’s thinking.

We had a weed tree spring up that had pretty branches and we let it be although it was right next to the patio. Canopy is a good thing, right? While I was in and out of the hospital two years ago, it was the last thing anyone was paying attention to.

One day in this Spring’s early growth, though, I happened to walk outside and do a doubletake: when had the edge of the patio gotten lifted up like this! What would it do to the house, and soon, if this kept up. It was a non-native species that offered no support to the wildlife anyway, the birds didn’t even deign to land in it nor did the squirrels touch more than the trunk, much less did any of them gain any sustenance from it; it had to go.

My little black squirrel showed up in the late morning today, daring to come out even earlier this time. A walnut for you, m’dear. She was a little more skittish, a good sign of increasing health. Even her tail was groomed now.

And again, as she munched the second walnut quietly on her forearms, a large gray squirrel approached to challenge her for it.

She ducked under that patio square. I did not know she could. But she’s a tiny thing and she had it all figured out and completely disappeared in a space I thought impossible.

The challenger, after she left awhile later, came over and sniffed around there but would not could not climb in there himself. Nuts. He’d missed out again.

Meantime, one shawlette in one skein of Sea Silk, half done, practically knitting itself. It’s amazing to my fingers how thick it feels after baby alpaca laceweight!

(Ed. to add: the tree is gone, thanks!)



Nut so bad myself
Thursday September 29th 2011, 10:53 pm
Filed under: Crohn's flare,Knit,Wildlife

For the first time ever, this evening I stepped outside just in time to see both my Cooper’s hawks at once: soaring in a wide circle, surveying the neighborhood from above, their wings held wide to ride on the wind, the one announcing their territory with the other one backing her up (while some crows across the street dared not challenge their airspace but moved down among the treetops, trying to stay out of their sight). Breathtaking.

And more down to earth: she came back today.

She has clearly learned how to manage with how things are now; she didn’t fight it but simply rested on her forearms to eat the nut I rolled to her, but first took it over to the yard and off the hard concrete. Oh!

She had much more energy, though still clearly injured; she had kind of a sideways twist to her leap, a squirrel equivalent of trying to walk in super-high heels with her hips swaying, but leap she could now. A bit slow still, but yesterday I think I could have walked outside and scooped her up; had the wildlife rescue center still been open that till very recently was two blocks away  (their funding got cut), I would seriously have considered trying to get her there.

A much larger gray saw her with her second nut and interrupted his siesta to swagger down from the tree and try to steal it from her. She turned away from him; he came after her again. He saw me suddenly standing up, eyeing him: you leave her alone. This one’s under my care now.

He hesitated, then walked around in a circle as if somehow I wouldn’t follow his movements–and then he leaped on her in an attack, teeth ready to tear into her. (Quite a few of the bigger ones have torn ears; ears seem to be a target in dominance fights.)

But he leaped quickly away again as I started to open the door, and when he was far enough from her that I could aim it specifically, he got squirtgunned for it while she hid in the bushes and trees, up or down I do not know.

But she was clearly so much better than yesterday.  She felt better, she was better nourished, and she had learned quickly how to get by with how things are now rather than inflame the damage by trying to stand upright.

Watching her these last few days has been like watching a part of myself.

I finally sent off a note to my Dr. R yesterday, detailing symptoms we knew too well. It had been nearly a week of it.

He emailed me right back with a clear plan of how to start tackling this, starting with the simple declaration, “I’m sorry to hear this.”

I found a surprising degree of power in that simple declaration. Someone who knew every disease detail but also the potential emotional impact, someone who had hoped with us that the potentially-untreatable might be gone forever, someone who cared deeply and who KNEW…from hospital to hope, every single little thing…

It mattered to him. I knew of course it would. But those words were the most perfectly stated and the most caring rendition of that whole unspeakable everything, and with them, he made all the difference.

And now I could handle it.

I woke up today feeling like that little skunk-striped black squirrel that soon showed up out there: still limping but coping and more food down me and so much more energy than there was before.  I think I’ll be all right.

(Oh, and by the way, when I projected that stitch count to finish that shawl? I forgot to factor in the ruffle. 12,462 stitches in two days. I was determined to bring accomplishment out of the enforced downtime and I did it.)



Nuts to the squirrel
Wednesday September 28th 2011, 11:23 pm
Filed under: Wildlife

I happened to pick up two bags of nuts at the bird center last week. Might as well divert them with a little food too occasionally rather than keep fighting them off all the time, and maybe they’ll stop stealing my neighbor’s tomatoes that way. They don’t usually even like tomatoes.

She looked like she was overdue for an appointment with the hairdresser, a skunk stripe beginning to emerge down the center of the black fur in a stark line down her back. Mange.  The tip of her tail has been broken off too for awhile of late and I’ve seen it red, I’ve seen it healing, I’ve seen it infected after that and the tail hairs are very thinned and end in a sharp V that makes it easy to spot her, but now it seemed scabbed over, at least.

She was eating quietly away at ground level, for once not trying to leap to the feeder for a shakedown attempt.

Yet I went to chase her away anyway.

Have you ever been reproached by a squirrel? This one with the white whiskers had been particularly obstreperous in the past, but she just stopped and looked at me, head low.

And then limped slowly away.

Oh.

I felt awful. And particularly so because I know what it’s like to have your balance get wrecked; squirrels do such cirque-de-soleil acts because they can balance so well by the flips of their long tails, and clearly, with hers damaged, things had suddenly not gone well.

I did not see her the rest of yesterday.

Nor today–till finally, in the afternoon, there she was, back on the patio alone in the heat of the Indian summer day, gleaning away at the time the others typically rest up and in the shade of the trees. She would have the ground to herself. Giving me, it felt like, a second chance.

I cracked open the door and she didn’t have the strength to run for it. I rolled a nut gently to her. She watched me. She ate it. I rolled her another, and it went past her; too far, too hard, not even for an almond, no. I tried again. Aimed better that time.

And so we communed a bit together, taking in each other’s measure, me offering her more each time she finished the previous. Nature says it’s Fall and solstice and one must eat much, and she was trying her best. Nature also says look out for hawks, and she glanced skyward a few times and seemed to shrug, eh, whatever.

She kept turning, trying to get a comfortable position. Facing me finally, I saw what I was expecting by then: her hip bone was splayed way out on one side, out of socket or broken I do not know, but I saw her try to straighten up to a squirrel pose but fall down in slow motion onto her forearms, again and again and again, giving up and just eating resting with the nut and her nose against the ground, but deciding to be determined and picking herself up and trying yet again. She hurt, she would do what she had to, but she was not going to let it get her.

There–put the left hind foot way forward to brace, okay, that worked.  She finished that hazelnut upright; I rolled another; she had to figure out all over again how to get the tail and the hip to work out right, and clearly it was hard and discouraging.

And one must put away for the winter too. I rolled one last big nut, thinking she couldn’t possibly eat one more bite, and I was right; she wanted badly to hide it, bury it, do the little squirrelly thing of faking out the bluejays and making and patting over ten holes to hide just the one nut.

But she just couldn’t. She turned back the other way: okay, tree time then.

She tried to go up and started to fall. I held my breath. She was going to DO this. She tried again and made it to the nearest limb. She caught her breath or resolve or something for a minute or two, and then climbed carefully higher where there was a wider limb she could better rest on.

That one hind leg kept giving out on her, but the better perch helped a lot. She couldn’t sit up but a moment–down again, down on her forearms, and that walnut became just the thing to make it all better; she held it and nibbled at it, unmolested by jays or hawks, full and having just a bit of dessert, watching me.

And I felt like I’d redeemed myself. A little.



Soccer fields forever
Tuesday September 27th 2011, 10:37 pm
Filed under: Family,Politics

In our built-up city… A week or so ago our school district backed off and said they weren’t going to interfere with the developer’s plans for putting ten (at least it wasn’t 23 anymore) houses on the daycare site next to our street.  A subject on which I have gone on and on.

Tonight, they announced at the school board meeting that not only were they interested in buying it, they had entered into a formal agreement towards doing exactly that. From the developer–a little late, but hey.

Let the soccer games on the suddenly-available field begin. Our grandchildren will have room to run after all.

(There’s a meeting set for public debate before the offer is to be formally signed.)

People spoke up, people showed up, and people kept speaking and kept coming, and the city finally heard.



Growing bigger
Monday September 26th 2011, 11:30 pm
Filed under: Crohn's flare,Family,Knit

I had an errand to run. It didn’t even walk, much less run (sorry, Cheryl, hopefully tomorrow). I was glad instead for large swaths that can no longer be inflamed.  It was a good day for putting up my feet and knitting, 5985 stitches’ worth.

I have a shawl that I made a few years ago that was different from anything else I’d done, in a way that I wasn’t sure at first I liked; it simply was different, that’s all. I threw it in a ziploc, I threw it in a corner, I didn’t remember what I hadn’t written down and my notes were a total mishmash that I guess made sense at the time. Sort of. I guess it was one of those I’ll get back to it that, till now, I didn’t.

I started it again last Wednesday night. I got the first 20″ worth figured out, written down, tested, knit, and the last of that part done today. It all came out exactly right and written down exactly so now. I am very pleased.

But what was in my notes after that point had no connection to reality–clearly, I’d tried it, chucked it, and riffed. I puzzled over the original while thinking, this shouldn’t be so hard; can we defuzz the brain a bit here? At least I hadn’t let myself give the thing away, knowing somewhere down deep that it was the only representative I had of what, now, I think is a really cool idea.

I took a break, I answered some email, and that’s when it hit me–I knew suddenly how I’d done what I’d done. I grabbed the older shawl again, grateful for its wooly presence, and after swatching, checking, writing, knitting, checking, correcting, knitting knitting knitting–

–I’ve got it. I wanted to enough finally that finally I’ve got it. I am terribly pleased with myself and with it. I can’t wait till the day I get to show Lisa Souza what her sapphire baby alpaca laceweight is now.

Another 5985 stitches and I’ll be casting off.



Consider the lilies
Sunday September 25th 2011, 11:30 pm
Filed under: Amaryllis

I finally got to listen to what Lynn was referring to re Brother Uchtdorf’s address.

He said we are all known and remembered to God, and offered the metaphor of the forget-me-not flower, his favorite: it is not tall, it is not as showy and splashy as some, it is a quiet little flower, down to earth, blooming quietly away at the job it does best. Five petals, plainspoken but with a beautiful color.

Cool.

(Favorite old pictures of my own favorite flowers, showy and grandstanding and all.)



An apple for the Teacher
Saturday September 24th 2011, 10:49 pm
Filed under: Friends,Life

“Go in a half hour?”

“At shove o’clock on a Saturday?” Eh. Sure.

Rather to my surprise I actually quite enjoyed today’s Costco trip: we ran into our friend Lisa, and then a mutual friend spotted us, one of Michelle’s friends growing up, and he asked after Michelle and Lisa and I asked after him and it was a grand old reunion over by the apples and pears.

And you know? I was feeling a sense of gratitude towards every single person who was trying to be careful not to block much less cream anybody nor put their cart where someone might back into it. People were looking out for people whom they didn’t know, constantly, even if on some level it was hidden. The intent to do good was there, visible all around for the seeing.

It was such a balm. I got one woman to look up and laugh by catching her eye as I oh oops! and moved my cart out of her way. She’d looked harried and distracted before that moment; I saw her smiling at the next person as she went on by.

I think that’s the thing I keep learning over and over: it’s the bad events that remind me how important the little good things are. As if I’d somehow forgotten. Or maybe, didn’t remember enough. Today, at least, I did.



About that blog
Saturday September 24th 2011, 12:39 am
Filed under: Friends

Wonderful time old friends new friends old memories laughed over went way too late see you tomorrow!



But the hats definitely have to get there
Thursday September 22nd 2011, 11:02 pm
Filed under: Friends,Life,LYS,Wildlife

With a random August picture of Parker thrown in.

There were maybe three times today all day when a small random flock–finches, towhees, titmice, juncos–flew in and grabbed a snack, quick, and scrambled out of sight.

It was very odd to have it so still out there. Even the squirrels barely showed, and when they did their behavior was very subdued: Don’t squirt me bro!

I didn’t see the hawks, but I have no doubt they were seeing me.

I had things to get done. Two packages to get off, one with the four hats going off to Vermont for flood relief, a card tucked inside each with a quick note of what yarns it was made of, who dyed the one from Vermont, and that Judy Sumner had given me it; I wanted to convey a sense of we’re all in this thing together. (I tucked in a few soft sweaters, too.) And this time I insured it.  Because…

I went home after talking to the postal clerk and found an actual place on the USPS website where I could send a message saying, this is the tracking number, this is the date sent, and a Kid Seta and cashmere Rabbit Tracks scarf in red disappeared after Aug 30 on its way to Germany to a recently-retired Army vet who served in Afghanistan. (I wanted them to feel a sense of responsibility to honor one who has given and served much; I certainly do.)

I went to Purlescence tonight, got to see Jasmin and Gigi and a whole bunch of people and talk and listen and soak in the yarny essence of everything and just in case, looked and found a pretty close match on the Kid Seta. I’ve got more of the laceweight cashmere. But the hesitance was in the thought, if I don’t buy it the original will show up, right? Just a little more hope a little longer.

At one point, Kay walked around the room handing out copies of Piecework Magazine’s new Knitting Traditions issue. We were all thumbing through it, reading it, admiring things in it, when Kay, who had by then sat down and was doing likewise, exclaimed suddenly, “Ohmygosh! That’s Ruth!” (She may have said “Ruth’s” with me missing the s.)

Wait, what? I didn’t see any pictures of…

Sandi (sitting on floor, left and front) came over and apologized for having forgotten to tell her it was in there:  Ava Coleman had an article in there on christening gowns, and as an example showed the beautiful lace gown she had knit for her granddaughter.

Ava happens to be Sandi’s mom (correction and thank you Kathy: her former mother-in-law–I knew that… It’s just that she’s the only mom to Sandi I’ve ever known, and they’re such a natural fit of caring, talented, knitterly people.)

Now I got it: that wasn’t someone’s following the same pattern as… That WAS Ruth’s!



Add hawk committee
Wednesday September 21st 2011, 11:25 pm
Filed under: Family,Knit,Wildlife

You only get to turn 80 once and yesterday was a milestone day for my mother-in-law.  So I’m going to say it out loud here, too: Happy Birthday, MomH!

The Cooper’s hawk caught my attention this morning with a successful hunt. This time he (she?) took its kill up to a tree and disappeared just below the center of that first picture there (no, that’s a leaf, he’s behind there), the occasional small bit of fluff floating down in the breeze.

He swooped through again about three hours later, highly unusual in the middle of the day and it was a hot one at that. He perched in the olive tree (second picture), fanning out his feathers and turning to catch a breeze between them just so. That’s his tail below the limb. I did not see a second hawk at the time, although it sure looks like it from the camera–if it is, it’s standing behind the chopped end of that big limb and leaning left and up towards its mate.

And a few hours after that, one zoomed in a half circle around the first birdfeeder, straightened, immediately did a right-angle turn and swooped its 31″ wingspan within the 10′ foot-wide foot-of-the-L part of the covered patio and around Kim’s feeder just perfectly so and back out to a tree. And then, before even two minutes were up, he did it again! With a pause somehow at the end of that last circle, as if he were trying to scare a squirrel out from hiding. (And there is one that darts under the barbecue smoker over there. Clearly, it’s not fooling anybody.) But wow, what an air show!

My first thought was, now come on, you know no prey flew in there in between; are you really that impatient and hungry?

But the next time Coopernicus dropped all pretense of stealth: he flew to the most exposed branch jutting out into the yard from up high, the sun radiating off his chestnut front, as if to proclaim to all the world–

–and that’s when I finally got it.

Glenn Stewart of UC Santa Cruz Predatory Bird Research Group has mentioned that at fall equinox, birds display some of the same behaviors they do at spring equinox, and that the peregrine falcons, specifically, make a particular show of guarding and announcing their established territory.

My yard was being announced as off limits to all comers.

And they’d been challenged on it yesterday. Yesterday, I had a small crowd of crows fly overhead for the first time in a long time and the Cooper’s pounced on prey in front of me not long after. Those crows will attack hawk young in the nest in the spring–so today I guess they’re not taking any chances: not of the crows and definitely not of any other hawks. From that king-of-the-mountain limb, something overhead bothered him and he flew off after it and over my head, not at hunting speed; that flight definitely felt different. Just don’t get in his way.

Dinnertime, a little later–and there, a Cooper’s, yet again, and away to the left. And again and to the right! Swoop! Swoop!

I had a shawl I’d knitted out of random baby alpaca laceweight a few years ago that I’d lost some of my notes for and some of what I did find was fairly scrambled, definitely not the copy meant for keeps. I’d been wanting to reknit it, definitely writing the pattern down and writing it right this time. It was going to be a lot of work. I’ve avoided it all this time.

Today I sat down with my birdwatching and my Lisa Souza baby alpaca laceweight in Sapphire, gorgeous gorgeous gorgeous, in the color of the deepening sky well before the dark, and worked that pattern out.  I have written it. I am knitting it to test it. I’ve got it.



Good pluck with that
Tuesday September 20th 2011, 10:44 pm
Filed under: Wildlife

I was finishing up the laundry in the early evening, thinking it was about time to start on dinner, and came around the corner just in time to see the last of the speeding tilted sweep around the feeder and the landing in the yard.

Uh oh, she’s back–Coopernicus looked up at me.

Then his right wing fluttered and he struggled, a second flutter like he was catching his balance–and then a firm stillness. (Cooper’s hawks kill their prey with their feet.)

He watched me.

I watched him.

He let me flash a camera at him and then go over to the couch and peer over the edge for a better look.

The squirrels had disappeared, cowering; one has lost the end of its tail of late. They’ve learned a little respect.  I wondered if the one on the patio had ducked under the lawnmower blade again–I don’t know how he managed that squeeze, but there was one time I bumped the handle and had an explosion of black fur dashing out at my feet.

The hawk and I took each other’s measure for a long, long moment. But one black squirrel, unable to stand it any longer, moved in the trees, and at last he lifted off to get his dinner ready elsewhere.

He’ll take his with some Fall seasoning: a finch assault and pepper.



Weasel wool
Monday September 19th 2011, 9:16 pm
Filed under: Knit

Or clearly, buyer beware.

Meantime, the fourth hat for Vermont flood relief, with apologies for the flashbleaching. In real life it’s a triple-braid allover cable.

I bought some $8.99+ship mink/cashmere laceweight via Ebay awhile ago to see if it really was what it said it was–having once ordered $.99 silk/cashmere from someone else in That Big Country that a bleach test declared to be mostly-bamboo at best. You don’t get what you don’t pay for.

The American proprietor of Great Northern Yarns, looking to establish a world market in mink yarn awhile back, flew to China to verify the source of the fiber and the humane care they take of their animals to his satisfaction, and I’ve tried his. It has a distinct hand and is very soft, so I already knew I quite liked the stuff. His, too, has some cashmere blended in.

The new stuff seems to my hands to be a good enough match. I should note that if you want dk weight, though, ya gotta buy it from GNY.

So as I was finishing up the last of that fourth Vermont hat, with worsted and dk running together on size 5 US needles and cabled, tight tight tight and warm warm warm but hard hard hard on the hands, I escaped for a few minutes by admiring that mink stuff online again. I’d been wishing they had more pale-person-friendly colors; couldn’t hurt to go see.

And there it was. A picture of a display of every color the stuff seems to come in, from a new vendor, buy any lot size and name your colorway. A caution: one of their listings says “This is not mink this is not cashmere” but the rest of their English is so fractured that who knows what they meant to say.

100 skeins 5000 g mink yarn iceberg ferrets

Condition: new

Well, we certainly wouldn’t want old ferrets. Okay, it took me awhile but I found a listing with the 90% wool of ferrets 10% cashmere part. Got it. Weasel? Ferret? Mink?

But iceberg? Anybody?

(Ed. to add.  I looked again. I’ll take them at their “This is not” word and stick with what I’ve got from whom I know, product-wise. The “partner” yarns sound to me as I think about it like they’re being marketed as strands to run with the ones that actually are the blend I’m looking for. I wonder what they’re made of!

Oh. There’s a sheepish picture on the ball band. Never mind.)



Who knows who or when
Sunday September 18th 2011, 10:03 pm
Filed under: Life

It took me longer than it should have: for the little girl, I was saying a prayer pretty quickly. But her mother too needed serious help and they clearly needed intervention.

It took awhile last night for me to acknowledge the sense of being tapped on the shoulder: Ahem.

Yes. Yes, I do hear You, I’m sorry, I’m on it. And I added a prayer for the woman who pushed me yesterday, and then the older woman with them and then all three of them together, but to be honest, it was with a sense of reluctance and of giving up on the one.

I wrote that post, I said that prayer, I knitted, I did my treadmill time, and as I racewalked, I kept being drawn back to the mystery of them: how had they come to this point? Was there anything anyone could do to make a difference? Thank heavens it (presumably) wouldn’t have to be me again–but the one thing I could do is say another prayer and mean it a little more from the heart this time.  And so I did.

It became easier to.

The thought settled in, as I hoped that maybe that was her lowest point at a bad time in her life and that perhaps it might shock her into seeing what she had become: she had assaulted the one person around whom she couldn’t just brush it off later as Oh, I bumped into someone. Rather, she pushed hard the one person around whose sense of balance was via tactile feedback, so that there was a very large and very public display of danger to that person in direct consequence to her actions and that she had to have had to dodge, although at that point I was suddenly not paying any attention to her to be sure of that. (As Richard on the other side turned to see and grabbed to steady the suddenly projectile cart.)

Lots of people saw. She could walk away but she would not be able to get away from herself on this one. Nobody yelled at her, nobody stopped her, nothing else she could project the blame onto.  Just her. She has to live with it.

I see two potential paths from there: either she refuses to acknowledge to herself any fault for anything anytime.

Or if only. She wishes she’d done better and tries to make up for it by treating others better from here on out. Maybe not now, maybe later; I think of a story Rachel Remen tells of one of her older patients glad for her cancer, wishing for retribution for the many evils she wished now at last she hadn’t done in her life, finally acknowledging them out loud. Dr. Remen heard story after terrible story of this woman who’d been a child in a war zone trying to survive alone, carrying that anger into adulthood, and realized, “I am her first witness.”

What a horribly long wait to begin to heal emotionally.

One of the things I’ve learned is that when you pray for someone, the answers don’t always come fast, they don’t always come in the ways you expect or even understand at first, and they very often come through other people.

May that woman encounter the other people she needs in the way she needs at the times that she needs. Starting right now seems to me would be good.

As I continued to say those prayers last night and today, I found myself increasingly able to give the whole scene up to God and, as far as anything concerning myself, to let it go.



I don’t get it
Saturday September 17th 2011, 6:10 pm
Filed under: Life

Not your usual Costco shopping trip. We had checked out and were heading towards the door and it was actually less crowded than many a Saturday, when a woman we’d seen earlier, her small daughter in her cart and her mother (I assume) with her, was haranguing them (still) in their language; our guess was it sounded like Chinese.

We had not at any time made eye contact nor interacted in any way except that I had, on the far side of the store a little earlier, smiled briefly at the little girl as we passed by.  She was being well behaved.  Her mother reeked of anger.

I guess I was not walking as fast as the woman wanted me to. I barely saw her coming up from behind just a moment before it happened. There was plenty of space to go around. She instead actively pushed me hard (and my cane, since she was on that side) out of her way. There is no question it was a deliberate act.

Richard was on the other side of the cart and didn’t see till I went flying, totally akimbo, balance blown, grabbing the cart with my other hand to keep from breaking a hip: *I* know what my bone scan looked like after that mega steroid treatment in the hospital, (200 mg/day) even though she could not have.

Everybody behind stopped in horror while those women marched determinedly on, ignoring the fuss.

It was an interesting discussion on the way home: Richard was telling me that co-workers of his had described to him how, in the open-air markets back home, the old women were the worst–they would simply snatch what they wanted out of your hands and didn’t care whose toes they stepped on.

I love that we live in a diverse, culturally rich area. But those people today live here now and you do not assault disabled strangers.

We were too stunned to react (and I was too busy trying not to fall), but for any next time should there be one, my husband and I now have an agreement: next time he will plant his 6’8″ not-small body in front of the woman, who made a point of acting as if she had nothing to do with that and no knowledge of it, and tell her that she is going to wait with us while he calls 911. Because next time I will probably break that hip. I was very fortunate.

Now pardon me, I have a back to go put an icepack on. Good knitting time, at least.

————-

(Added a few hours later, after I’ve had time to process the above and settle down.)

The report I got is that Judy Sumner‘s daughter put on her favorite music this morning, and at the third song, Judy quietly slipped away to be with her waiting husband Len. She would laugh out loud if she heard me say WIP in peace, dear Judy. Thank you for everything.



Hats for Vermont
Friday September 16th 2011, 10:59 pm
Filed under: Knitting a Gift

And then there were three. Judy’s yarn knit with navy, with a turquoise-green Manos Silk Blend, and doubled on itself. I find myself hoping they go together to a family.

I had a concert to go to early–it was festival seating–and no time to run to the LYS to get another skein of just the right weight and color to match up with it next. Stash don’t fail me now. Nope, nope, too thin and three strands is not a carry-around project, nope not that one either. Who around here keeps buying all this lace and fingering weight?

There was one: but it wouldn’t cost me the $12.50 price of the ball, it would break up a shawl’s worth of seven of them to replace.  I probably don’t need that seventh, but I am adamant about having too much rather than possibly not enough before I start. Still. I almost…and almost again, but no, keep looking.

There! Inside that bag, out of sight, forgotten about–the discontinued (darn) Misti Royal Baby Alpaca! Oh, that is going to be SO soft and SO warm and it’s the lighter color I wanted this time. Got it!

I got the cast on and one and a half rows done before the show started.