That’s both an exclamation of delight and a note to self. 

Meantime, I was knitting something subdued and quiet and…suddenly I felt like, color. I need color! I put the one project aside and grabbed the Lisa Souza’s Mardi Gras merino that had come in the get-well basket from my Purlescence knit-night friends in January.  I’ve started it in the Carlsbad scarf, a simple pattern that is good for showing off an extravagant color display like this.

This is the yarn that, while I was in the hospital, I kept thinking how good it would look on that day’s nurse. Then the next one. And the next one.

There’s enough yarn for two scarves, and it’s a total toss-up where they’ll land, but at least this one will go to Stanford Hospital.

(Meantime, this Hercules amaryllis opened today, one of the bulbs Dad gave me this past Christmas.)

I’ve had the experience before of knitting something, giving it away, and then totally forgetting later that I’d made it.  I’ve found projects stashed away I’d forgotten starting, I’ve seen people wearing scarves that answered my inner question as to whether I’d knitted for them yet–oh, right, right, that yarn, I remember that.  Maybe not what I made with it or just who it went to, but the yarn, yes, I almost always remember working with whatever yarn when I see it.

But this one really threw me.  Some of the women at church were throwing a mystery-dinner party tonight, and Christina showed up wearing a gorgeous open-front circular shawl, borrowed from someone else for her costume. She didn’t know who’d knitted it and had just assumed I probably had.

I was stunned. There’s no way I could have made that in that colorway and not remember it, but that was definitely my pattern.

Turns out that someone I didn’t know was now a knitter and that I didn’t remember they’d bought my book, if I knew, had made a sweeping, gorgeous Julia shawl from it.  And I’d had no idea.

But I couldn’t be absolutely sure it wasn’t something from my own needles till I’d eyeballed its yarn up close: that sealed it. Nope, I’ve never knit with that one. That’s someone else’s knitting.

Christina was trying to wrap her mind around the fact that I had to see the yarn to know that, at the same time I was wrapping mine around the covert knitter who didn’t tell me she’d succombed to my addiction.  It was pretty funny.

Anybody know what the name of this is?  And what wildlife might particularly like it?  The bare branches in front of it are my Fuji apple tree, ready for a little springtime too.

Meantime, here’s an amaryllis’s equivalent of gray hair, the color of the flowers in the older stalk (two weeks old!) a lighter pink at the back, and in the second stalk, newly opened, bursting out in color.  Same plant.

Here, this shows the contrast a little better.

Now that you have that earworm singing away…

I had an amaryllis outside with a bud that was just starting to open when the stalk got blown over.  I expected it to recover and come back upright, but no; its reaction was, fine with it; bloom where you are face-planted.

But since the flowers were hiding on the far side of the picnic table where nobody could see it from inside the house, I cut it and brought it in where it could brighten up the room and not just keep to itself.

Meantime, today, Nancy, instigator extraordinaire who talked me into taking handspinning and dyeing classes years ago, stopped by today with flowers and chocolate.  She’s also the one who knit the circle shawl for me to give away to whomever that turned out perfect for one of my doctors, who loved it.

Anybody else do this? I find I tend to go through bursts of playing with my dye pot, where creating colors in my wool or baby alpaca is what I find myself focused on day after day. Or winding up balls of yarn for the sheer sake of winding and the sense of anticipation it brings–and that it lets me be engaged with a particular texture or shade or colorway for just a short time and then lets me go right on to the next.  Or times when, enough of all that, I need to sit down and knit and see something actually materializing and getting done!  But each phase tends to go in spurts.

It bugged me lately that I hadn’t been able to ball up yarn hanks all these months.  That I couldn’t expand my project possibilities into my whole stash; I was limited to the ready-to-knits.

Last week, I found the black cashmere (yay!) and got the first hank of it ready to go; I did it, but I had to take a good long rest afterwards.  This evening, I finished winding Amanda‘s Huarache yarn she gave me in Vermont last November, and I’m wondering which yarn to wind next after I finish typing this.  My arms and standing-up time are getting better at this.

But the groove in the record that my diamond needle keeps jumping back to?  (That’s an anachronism, kids, go ask your folks. Heh.)  Taking pictures of everything blooming, celebrating spring giving birth to life.

I went for my liver scan early this morning and got sent home.  At three and a half weeks, my surgery was too recent for the metal stapling inside not to be at risk from the MRI machine. They told me it needed more time for scar tissue to grow to hold it in place. There’s a chance of needing a second surgery to get rid of more tissue in a few months; let’s not up the odds of it.

When I came home, Richard astonished me by being up, getting dressed, and announcing he was off to work now.  Wow.  He *does* feel better–yay!  He just arrived home again, needing those pain pills now, but at least he was able to get some in-person time in and he can telecommute from here.  Having seen him the last three days, I am gobsmacked at how well he’s doing.  Wow, and my thank you for the prayers said and the Thinking Good Thoughts in our direction.  (I very much believe God counts those too.)

Last night, while we were eating dinner, the doorbell rang: it was Kaye from Purlescence. I hadn’t gone to Knit Night last Thursday because people there had colds, (they emailed me to warn me) and Jasmin had brought more of her handknit socks for me while I wasn’t there. So Kaye was bringing them to me.  Wow. I definitely do not live on her way home; how many LYSOs…  And how many people give away handknit socks like that!  Thank you, both of you!

I laid out the bounty and Sam admired.  I told her it wasn’t fair for me to have all these Jasmin socks and her none, particularly since she lives where warm wool socks are such an essential in the snow anyway. In the end, of the four pairs and the Jasmin socks I already owned, I was able to talk Sam into claiming three, though she could have taken more, and she very proudly showed off her happy feet this morning.

My feet were already beJasmined too.

I need to work on those leg muscles a little more. I got down to snap these photos and couldn’t get back up off the floor by myself, which surprised me.  I keep thinking I’m more recovered than that.  I finally scooted over to a chair and table in the kitchen and pulled myself up–while reminding myself I couldn’t have done that at all before.  One week ago was the day I came home, and I had to have help even getting up out of a chair most of the time, much less climbing up into one.  Where my rear landed on the bed was where it was going to be for the night, with me having to lift my legs over and up with my arms.  I don’t have to do that now.  Every day there’s a little more progress made, and the “hey I can DO that now!” realizations that keep coming are very cheering.

I needed to take these photos. The soft appleblossom is a gift from Rena, my knitswap pal; the deep red, a gift from my father.  Thank you, Dad! Thank you, Rena!

My dad sent me a box of amaryllis bulbs (thank you, Dad!) and told me to open it at my birthday and not wait for Christmas; you never know what might already be sprouting in there in the nice warm house.

When an amaryllis thinks it’s time to bloom, it does what it can to make the world beautiful whether it’s been planted in soil and given the water it needs or not.  Go!  Tall stalks are nice to have, but the flowers are what its life is all about.

I opened the box and this Antarctic one had buds almost ready to burst out of a stalk whose shape was curved by the restricting protective netting around it.

Flowers in the color of the snow we miss and that blossomed the day before Christmas Eve. Glorious.

Meantime, having shown you my “Part ridge in a pear tree” awhile back, I thought I’d show you what it looks like now.  The tree continues to recover well.  In this climate, it lets its leaves go after New Year’s–not till it’s finished doing its Rudolph impersonation.

Merry Christmas to all, a happy Festival of Lights, and the peace and joy of the season to you and yours.

Did it again. (As always, don’t miss the captions.)

I think this is like how, when I was a kid, I picked up the habit from my friends for a time of dotting my i’s with smiley faces, practicing a great deal on the sides of my notebooks so they wouldn’t look like grimaces. Sometimes I added curlicues sprouting off all kinds of random places on my letters as if to pull attention to the words themselves, wanting to shout visually, I wrote this! I put language into effect, I made this marvelous tool of writing carve beautifully ornate statuary out of my thoughts, come see!

Oh. Wait. That’s what a blog is, too. Never mind. Well anyway.

I often, when I get to the end of a shawl, leave the cast-off, just the cast-off, to do the next day. I have no real reason for that. It’s as if it were to flourish and curlicue and smiley-face it into an exclamation point: I did it! Look at this, totally effortless!

As if the one final row were what creating the whole of it had been about or the whole of the effort involved. C’mon. I can’t fool me, not that easily.

Or maybe it is that I don’t want the shawl to have any whiff of a slogging, endless grind attached to it. Rather, to have it be like a young girl holding it over her head, running into the wind with it Superman cape-ing behind, or her twirling around and around with it till she gets dizzy and falls down laughing, the silk turning into a landing parachute settling down around her.

I think I’ll run the last end in tomorrow.

My Picotee amaryllis is still blooming! It’s too bright out there for a good photo, but I wanted to grab it before it faded.

The Zappos came: the more formal, more wedding-y looking shoes sliced deeply. I walked halfway across the carpet and couldn’t take them off fast enough. People actually wear these?! Zapp’em back.

The other pair, though. Wow. These were created expressly for my feet. And if you look at the style: picture the increases in a top-down circular shawl translated into a shoe. It’s as if I’d been in collaboration with the leatherworking designer in Italy. Success. Why, yes, actually, I did immediately order a second pair in pearl. I buy one pair of shoes, on average, every other year. Break the bank.

(Added later): I’ve been thinking for the last several hours how ditzy a post this is. Shoes? After writing about E? But… Other than Birkenstocks, there have been so very few times in my life when I’ve found any that fit well, feel good, look good, and that I really like. Although, I’ve got to say, overall, I’m glad of that. My weird feet have totally saved me from ever being a shoe fanatic, since there’s no chance. Leaves the money for important things, like yarn–which I can use to center myself around others rather than myself. Thank goodness for 9″ long EEs.

Sometimes.

Nope, Kathy, didn’t get the shoes. One shoe store per day is my outer limit. No-Blog-Rachel’s heart attack at the thought of me in heels made me laugh (she’s seen me walking through yarn stores)–no chance there, honey, don’t worry. Hey. They would make my cane too short. And I don’t need to try to reenact the glamour of the day I so artfully and delicately fell off my roof years ago; let’s keep the feet down to earth.

Changing the subject, come to find out from them that the women at Handmaiden did actually specifically try to match my mother-of-the-groom dress when they dyed my Camelspin. Having their Sea Silk in my book might not have hurt my chances for them wanting to do that–whether that’s a normal thing for them, I quite hesitate to assume, and I don’t want to put them on the spot re their future customers. So. Write a book, match a dress, you put in a little effort, they put in a little effort. Go for it. I’m glad I photographed the yarn with the dress for the blog; they were delighted to see that it had worked out as well as they’d hoped.

Somehow that meant the pressure was on even more to create just the most perfect design in the most perfect shawl ever for the wedding. It would have been so much easier to just chuck that and go knit whatever–but whatever simply wouldn’t do. I spent the last week–a week!–growling and swatching and ripping and trying again and gradually getting lightbulb flashes here and there as I went along, one eye on the calendar and knowing the date was extremely close. I needed to get started, fer cryin’ out loud!

I came home from Purlescence’s knitting night Thursday night, where someone had gasped when I told her how much time I had left, and I thought, no, I really can do it. Honest. (So cooperate, brain!) Did one more swatch or two…

…And my shawl is now humming along. I did it. I got my amaryllis pattern. I did it.

Accessorizing my amaryllises.   I’ve got to show you these before they fade out.

And then, hey look, there wasn’t much overtwist after all; when I straightened out the skein, it pretty much stayed straight.

Commenter Sonya surprised me with one answer to single sock syndrome; I love it.   It came with its own single earring.  (Stitch marker, earring, hey, a necklace with dangly stitch markers would be so cool. )  Thank you!

Meantime, the rest of the Crown Mountain bag is beckoning me to come to the dark side…

Remember the twins? They were triplets!  The last blossom opened yesterday.

I hadn’t bought Stephanie Pearl-McPhee‘s latest book yet because I wanted to get over to Kepler’s to support my local bookstore. Then she announced she was going to be in San Mateo at the Maker Faire tomorrow, and I pictured a mad scramble of knitters across the Bay Area looking for copies for her to sign.

Jasmin scored me one at Borders and brought it to Purlescence last night, after checking and finding out our Purl Girls were out. Thank you, Jasmin!  Nathania did her part: she waved some new Casbah at me in the most exquisite shade of deep teal, just to make sure I’d have a good portable project for knitting while waiting for Stephanie.

So. I went home, I sat down with Stephanie’s book, and I didn’t go to bed till I’d finished it. I went to bed laughing and knowing exactly what I was going to be blogging about today.

If you go to page 33 of my own book, “Wrapped in Comfort,” I describe running back to the (late, lamented) Rug and Yarn Hut after finding I was short for the project pictured here. Immediately after they opened for the day, there I was, throwing the door open and yelling across the long expanse to Kat, the only person in there just then, “Nobody touch that alpaca! It’s MINE!!!”

Kat will be telling that one on me for years.

So here I was, blissfully minding my own business, reading Stephanie’s book, and suddenly burst out laughing. On page 153, she warns her readers not to dither about that 50% off alpaca or Alison would “swoop it up with the precision of a strike missile.” Note that most of the projects in my book are in baby alpaca. Yes, I’m not the only Alison she knows, but I am totally claiming that page for my own with great glee. Why yes, I do have an ego.

Stephanie, you’re wonderful. Now, how long since you wrote that sentence have you been waiting for me to read it!

(I told you I had an ego!)

First, the technical stuff. After I dyed that Fino in amaryllises the other day, I threw in a 25 g ball of Elann’s Baby Silk, the last one from making the original Peace shawl. There was still some color left in the pot, and when I had a few more wilting red blossoms a few days later, I threw them in to boil too. I don’t know if it was the aging of part of the batch, but the pink was gone and what was left was a deep rust color. Not much of it, but enough to do something with. This time, using merino sock yarn, it took up very nearly every bit of color. Does this mean wool takes up amaryllis better than alpaca or silk do? Seems that way. Silk always takes up dye a bit slower anyway, which is one reason I love dyeing a silk/animal fiber blend: you often get a heathery effect with zero effort.

Meantime, I got permission to share this from Tunie, one of my readers, as my son’s wedding nears. This is the best piece of advice to a bridal couple I think I’ve ever heard; I really like it. She specified after sending this that no words need be spoken, the gesture is understood as is:

“We are celebrating our 40th anniversary in June and I think being good friends (we’ve been best friends since age 16) is one of the keys to a happy marriage.

Something a friend told me when we were engaged helped a lot when we were first married. If during an argument you want to say you are sorry, but are too stubborn, angry or are afraid it will continue the argument, give the other person a glass of water (we used a special silver goblet). It means I want this unhappiness to be over and we can resume discussion when we are calm at a later time. But let’s not continue holding the anger. If the other person drinks it, the anger is suspended. Believe it or not, it worked for us. It didn’t matter who was at “fault”, just that the feeling was not what we wanted to continue.”

Then she mentioned that they used the silver goblet just to make sure a crystal one wouldn’t get broken. We’re all human.

When we bought our house in ’87, it had this red climbing rose that resembled the ones lining the fence at the edge of Stanford campus. I had always thought of roses as the most fragile of flowers, and yet theirs grew in the middle of a dried-out area and climbed and bloomed happily and freely. My red one, on the other hand, was in terrible shape with black spots and I didn’t expect it to last a year.

Which shows you what I knew about them. It’s grown into a magnificent plant.

Meantime, the Picotee has opened up, and I moved it to where I could see it better looking out my window here.

Every good family photo album has to have a set of bunny ears in it. This amaryllis is coming up next.