The amaryllis bud is still going up despite having start to split open; this is unusual. I’m quite curious to see how far it goes.

Biology lesson of the day: yes, that was (thank you Google) a black widow spider, and it can run faster than I can swing my tennis-racket bug zapper at it, even if that’s as close as I wanted to get to it. I am reminded of the time when I was a kid that I stepped on some leaves and startled a snake next to Cabin John Creek, and it threw itself away from me just as fast as it could go while I did the same in the opposite direction.

No, wait–having typed that, I went back in the bathroom, zapper in hand, and it had reappeared in the middle of the wall. Got it.

Sometimes, when an amaryllis bulb has been deprived of water too long, it’ll bloom, but instead of having the stalk towering two to three feet high, it will barely grow, the plant concentrating on opening up its flower rather than how high in the air it can put it on display. The leaves, however, will grow to a normal length to gather strength in the bulb, so that maybe it can really put on a full show the year after.

The bulb I found last week shot the tip of its bud up immediately, as I said–and then held its breath and held still while the leaves played catchup. Now the five leaves and the bud are coming up in tandem; but if you look closely, the bud is already beginning to break open.

I can really relate to this one. I have a lot of limitations it would be nice not to have, because of health issues: even a few minutes in full sun right now makes my lupus start attacking my eyes. (I’m okay, don’t worry, I have more sense than to risk that one.) So, thank you very much, I’ll stay indoors–but for the things I really want to do, reaching out to others, writing, knitting, making people feel cared about the best I know how–there’s no limitation there at all. The things that are most important to me, I can do just fine (the church Memorial Day picnic at Foothill Park that I have to miss notwithstanding… If anyone sees a coyote or herd of deer this year, I hope they snap a picture for me. Keep an eye out for the mountain lions. And don’t let the preschoolers pick up a baby rattler near the creek this year, okay?) It even serves as a reminder that those are the things I want to do, and not to let the time just slip by.

The “bloom where you are planted” cliche works just fine for me.

You remember how I walked into the garage in April and found those amaryllis bulbs that should have died of neglect, having been dried out far too long, that were instead shooting up buds? And how I gave one to Nicholas and his family to celebrate his recovery from falling off the ski lift?

Yeah well. Our garage is fairly dark, and it doesn’t help that the lightbulbs are in places nearly impossible to reach when they burn out. So. Last night I was squinting in there, looking for–what else–the lightbulbs. And thought, nahhhh… But… I looked under a tarp that was folded up inside its package, and there…

…You guessed it. My friend C. is going in for that surgery, and I’ve been madly knitting her that shawl. There it was. I found one more pot buried under there. I laughed, marvelling at it, although a bit ruefully, and asked my son, “Do you think this one could bloom too?” I poked fingers from both sides at it: if they met in the middle, it was toast, toss it.

The outer edges were indeed soft, but the inner core was as solid as you could ask for under the circumstances. I soaked it in water to break the dormancy.

Four hours later this appeared. That’s not a leaf, that’s a bud. FOUR HOURS. Go C.!!!

Last night, he hadn’t said anything, so I figured yonder blogminder hadn’t read the blog. So I opened the conversation as we sat down to dinner, with, “My pet gopher died today.”

You should have seen his face! “Your *WHAT*?!!!?”

And then we quickly moved on to other things. I’m posting these amaryllises in memoriam to the little animal. Richard did make a comment that had me suddenly realizing that the gardeners who come for maybe an hour a month happened to have come Tuesday, and they’d probably poisoned it. I once caught them spraying weeds between me and the neighbors, and I’d made it clear, I thought, that there was to be no poison in my yard. I guess they didn’t think that applied to gophers?

What I had been going to blog about yesterday before it showed up and acted cute was a tutorial on how to chop off lace without screaming and running. I had this project in Kidsilk Haze and Merino Oro that I’d started off doing, the Crohn’s flare had wiped me out, I’d put it down for most of a week and then when I’d picked it up I’d continued it *in the wrong pattern* without noticing until it was almost to a finished length. And then it suddenly hit me what I’d done. Oh my.

I was spending too much time outside in the sun yesterday, something I really can’t risk, which is one of the reasons I grabbed the kid and we went to Karen’s shop instead. While we were there, I mentioned about the goofed project and how I was going to just cut it off two rows before the change and undo it backwards just a bit from there and then cast off that end. When you’re frogging backwards, you have to pull the yarn through the last stitch in the row every time, which is a very good reason not to unravel the whole section in one uninterrupted strand.

Another customer in there immediately responded with an idea that should have been obvious to me: “Make it a pattern!”

I thought about it: she was right! The scarf was not quite long enough to call it done; all I had to do was repeat that beginning section at the other end. The midsection was similar enough anyway that a non-knitter might not even ever notice.

And now that I’ve done exactly that and liked it, the funny thing is that I’m sitting here debating which yarn and needles to repeat the whole scarf with to make the contrast show up more. It needs to be a denser knit. I like it!

I have a doctor (bless him!) who believes in being careful (it’s that white cell count thing) but very much in still going and living your life. So with his encouragement and the help of my friends, live today I most thoroughly did.

My friend Nancy and I drove up the gorgeous 280 freeway, with views of the unbroken and blooming springtime hillsides to the west, over the Golden Gate Bridge, and on up to Marin Fiber Arts in San Rafael. There, we met up with Warren, the owner, and Patricia (right) and Niki (left) with Nancy catching me just before I burst out laughing after she snapped the shot. Patricia had set up a cruise ship with how many knitters? Was it 60? And they disembarked in San Francisco, chartered a bus, drove to Warren’s shop, and generally created happily packed-in pandemonium. Niki and Patricia had wanted to meet me, I had wanted to meet them after being online friends with the two for I don’t know how long, so, hey!

Niki, by the way, is the one who knit me these socks awhile back.

You can tell I’m a newbie at this author thing: someone tried on one of my shawls, handed her camera to Nancy, and all I could hear with the background noise was that she’d asked for a picture. Nancy pointed the camera at me, which utterly confused me–she wanted a picture of her in the shawl, what are you doing? Nancy laughed, She wants a picture of you!

Me? Why? Oh, (duh), okay, (there’s still a part of me that will never truly get why, but okay.)

And when I got home, another Picotee amaryllis had opened up, just to top off the day. Thought I’d share.

Doing better, had another blood test, got the results, and shared a sigh of relief with my doctor, who can now go enjoy his vacation tomorrow without worrying. Alright!

One of these days I’m going to design an amaryllis pattern in lace.

All it needs is a watch.

Back when I first started getting seriously back into knitting, 17 years ago, as a way of coping with my new lupus diagnosis, I went looking for–something; I wasn’t sure what. Plain stockinette certainly wasn’t going to do it for me. (The Barbara Walker stitch treasury books had not yet been reprinted.) I went to the local yarn stores and pored over what gansey and fair isle patterns I could find. I knew I could substitute colors from the ones in the pictures, but still, whatever it was I was looking for–and I wasn’t sure what it was–it just wasn’t there. Hmmm.

So eventually I headed over to the library, where Kaffe Fassett’s Glorious Knits book practically fell into my hands; I opened it to the page where he has two models dressed in his Big Diamonds pattern, posed in an amaryllis garden in Holland.

Now, you know I love amaryllises. There was no way on this planet that my hands were ever going to produce anything like the projects on his pages. (I thought.) But that garden! And (oh yeah, those too) those sweaters! I could wish,anyway.

So I checked the book out and took it home. And then renewed it. And renewed it again. Took it back, waited the requisite day or two, checked it out again, renewed it, and finally decided, this was nuts, and simply went out and bought my own copy.

You know what happens next. There was no way I could not at least try that intarsia stuff. The first project was a long mohair vest for my mom, just four colors, Big Diamonds. But now that I was past my fear of the technique, I went whole hog and made his Carpet Coat in 68 shades of wool and mohair, with the yarn carefully collected over quite a few months from many of the local stores. “These are large, but they drape beautifully on everybody…” Yeah, uh huh. I later met Fassett. The man ain’t short. My husband crowed, “It fits me better than it fits you, go make yourself another one!” Note that I am 5’5″ and my husband is 6’8″. The sleeves on his are short for him, but go ask him if he cares. I made that second coat; mine had 86 colors. So there, dude.

Mom wore her vest soon after she got it to a concert at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, and as she was taking her seat, she noticed the woman sitting behind her: who was likewise decked out in a handknit sweater in Kaffe Fassett’s Big Diamonds pattern. They looked at each other a moment, not quite believing the impossibility of it all, and then the other woman laughed, “Don’t you just love that designer’s work?”

I do indeed. He helped pull me back into knitting, bigtime. His work was what I’d been looking for, and all else followed from how thoroughly he got me hooked. I will add the stray thought that I personally believe he is responsible for the popularity of the handpainted yarns that are now on the market; for those who want to play with color for far less work, they’re a great way to go, and he popularized the idea of knitting in many colors in the first place and paved the way forward.

My thanks to Nina for playing model with me.

A Dancing Queen double amaryllis celebrating the day

and a package that should have arrived on time, with silk, cashmere, and lambswool, one of the two laceweight strands dyed by me to complement the other. This is in a pattern I’d admired but never gotten around to actually trying before; it seemed to me that having your first child hit a quarter century is a good time to learn something new.

Heard at dinner last night: “So, which would you like on your” (acorn) “squash?”

“Not the bee barf, pass me the tree blood.”

Teenagers. Ya gotta love’em.

(No amaryllises were harmed in the staging of this picture.)

Edited to add: I have been corrected. It was the hubby who first called the syrup tree blood in the conversation.)

I once told a friend that I believe God speaks peace to people in whatever way they personally can best feel: and that to me, He spoke Amaryllis. This was right after I’d had a bout of meningitis, it was the end of the summer, and I had an amaryllis plant that had been dying down for the season, as they do–and then all the sudden it had shot up a bud, against all odds. The stalk, usually two to three feet tall, never got longer than an inch, but the flowers were a full 8-9″ wide, blooming merrily upwards while I was sick, telling me I’d be okay. And so I was. (And probably the only patient on chemo who ever was disappointed to test negative for West Nile, thinking then I wouldn’t ever have had to worry about WN again. Having opened my front door about a month earlier to watch a beautiful little bird die at my feet on my entry mat, in a hot territory for that virus…)

Anyway. So I mentioned earlier on this blog that I’d staggered the start times on my collection to try to get them to bloom as late as possible into the year. Normally you start watering to break their dormancy in time for them to bloom at Christmas, but I waited all the way to February for a few of them, hoping the prolonged dry period wouldn’t kill them off.

I went in the garage today and discovered several pots that had somehow been misplaced. With little light, and with no water whatsoever for at least six months, two of them had buds shooting up. There’s no way! But they did.

This one’s for Nicholas. Who comes home tomorrow.

I have a number of last year’s amaryllis bulbs whose re-starting times I staggered this past winter, trying to have my favorite flowers for as long into the season as possible. Amaryllises in April. Kind of a flowery metaphor for teenagers sleeping in till noon (not that we know anything about that.)

Meantime, someone asked the Knitlist if she could make a scarf with 250 yards of yarn. Here’s what I did this weekend with about 125 yards, size 9 needles, fingering weight baby alpaca, and about three hours’ worth of time. Length: 56″.

(Last year’s amaryllis, blooming again, late in the season under the skylight in the bathroom.)

I have a friend I owe several favors to, who picked me up last night to carpool to our knitting group. Remember when I posted about bold and red and big? I thought I had just her color. Yeah, well: without showing what they looked like, size or width or pattern or anything, just the colors–because color is everything–I offered her that or that spring green scarf I’d just finished. I kind of pushed the red a bit, I realize in retrospect.

“Well, I really like the green,” she answered. Green it was, and it looked perfect on her. I’m so glad she got what she really liked! Didn’t take long for those lace-knit leaves to go to the right person.

We interrupt this frigid January to haul my birthday present, a red amaryllis bulb, outside for a photo session. Add a little water and window time to that dead-looking brown clumpy thing in the dirt and see what you get. It’s that simple.

Emma and a friend of hers stopped by for a visit today; the friend brought me red dinnerplate dahlias from her garden, absolutely gorgeous, just because. She likes to give flowers like I like to give knitting, which is why she owns a silk scarf from me done in Barbara Walker’s Dayflowers pattern; it was such a perfect match.

I was all ready. Emma’s granddaughter had brought her that soft Suri Dream baby alpaca scarf, so, now I had the second one all finished for Emma to give one back to the kid. They could be twins. Emma thought it was a total hoot. Grandmas are cool.

I had a quick errand to run at the post office today. I didn’t think to bring my camera, this blog being such a new thing. I wish I had: the road runs quietly alongside the marshes at the edge of the San Francisco Bay, and there was a small flock of pelicans, a number of egrets, and a few mallards keeping them company. Paddling in the water, diving for a fish, circling around each other a bit. Absolutely beautiful. God’s knitting: in, around, out and up, repeat.