There was a grandchild on the way at the time and I went to Cottage Yarns to get some Malabrigo Rios for a baby blanket.

What leaped out at me was a bag of the thicker Mecha in their Anniversario colorway. It demanded to be bought, it demanded to be knit, and I wasn’t quite sure what to do with it because it wasn’t what I was planning on at all. Meantime, the Rios got bought and the baby blanket happened–but this did, too.

It was really too heavy for a future toddler to drag around as their blankie, and the thick loosely spun yarn wasn’t really made for what a baby would do to it anyway.

So it went into a ziplock bag and waited its turn. Every now and then I pulled it out and tried to get it to tell me who it was for. I wondered/expected that the day would probably come suddenly all at once.

That it did.

As I wrote to my sister’s son and daughter-in-law: Malabrigo began when Antonio, whom I’ve met a number of times at Stitches, had a flock of very fine-haired sheep but felt, Can’t anyone make something pretty out of my wool?

So he started dyeing it himself. He grew a business that was just starting to really take off–and then his mill burned down.

I told them, my local LYS was upset with them because suddenly their orders were unfilled and there was no response to their emails. They had no idea.

Antonio and his sister and brother-in-law, good, good people, not only rebuilt the mill, they went solar, and they’ve done so well that they’ve revived the sheepherding industry in their part of the world. For awhile there it cost more to pay the shearer than what the farmers could get for their wool; Malabrigo’s promise was, sell us the good stuff and you’ll get a good price for it. Not by the pound (coarser hairs weigh more) but by the micron count.

SO soft.

At their tenth anniversary they celebrated by throwing all the colors at once into a new colorway: Anniversario.

I told them, my son-in-law drove us up a mountain above Anchorage a few years ago in hopes of showing us the northern lights. We didn’t get to see them–but I knitted this to make my own version.

And at last I know why it needed to come to be.

This is the niece and nephew whose house in Pacific Palisades burned to the ground, her childhood home and entire neighborhood gone, my nephew and sister and her husband visiting to fix up the place barely escaping with their lives.

I grieved their loss. I wanted them to have a hug from me always.

Wool has a natural tendency to extinguish flames.