First, the technical info: this is the Four Sisters-patterned angora scarf before dyeing or blocking. I soaked the scarf in hot water in the sink after taking this photo, added water to the pot, brought it to a simmer, and added my dye.

Purple. I thought it would make a somewhat earthy purple. Um… The way to tell God a joke is to tell him your plans, right? Especially when overdyeing fiber, although, serendipity is part of the fun. But when the camouflage green started coming up, I was pretty horrified. If it had been wool, I could have lifted it out into another dyepot, added more of another color, or simply moved it to clear water to simmer some of that reversible dye back out. But this was angora, and very old and fragile angora at that. What I did was to take some Jacquard Fire Engine Red, add it to a paper cup full of hot water so as to get it in solution, hold the scarf to the side of the pot with my wooden spoon, and pour it in at the other side and then stir gently. I’ll show you the results tomorrow when it’s done drying and blocking, but it’s definitely not wearing Army boots anymore.

You know, that yellow is the color of my teenage rebellion. I vividly remember my mother buying a dress for me when I was in junior high school. It had been at the very edge of her budget; she had splurged to buy me something nice. It was to be my best dress, for church and the like. The color was very much in style–these were in the days of shag carpets and refrigerators in harvest gold and avocado green–so Mom thought she was being hip in picking that one out for me. I could go fit in with the crowd like all kids aspire to.

Except, there’s not a young teenager on the planet who likes what their mommies choose for them to wear. Not at that particular age. It was doubleknit and synthetic (maybe that’s when my natural-fibers fanaticism started.) Right in style (as were polyester suits for men; the horror, the horror.) Guilt over the price I knew she must have paid only added to the fire–I was NOT going to wear that! No way!

I did, once, actually, and vividly recall my shame walking through Cabin John Junior High’s library, sure that everybody was looking up from their books to stare at The Dress. All by myself, I managed to be utterly humiliated. I never wore it again.

I thought of that when, not long ago, a friend rolled his eyes over his 13-year-old niece’s being dramatic. I laughed: “ALL 13-year-old girls are dramatic!”

I should know. And hey: you see that scarf up there? It’s actually brighter and a little more orange than in that photo. And, like the four previous ones, it ended up the color it wanted to be when it grew up.

Because I never, ever wore that shade of yellow again. (Sorry, Mom.)

Angora scarf #2 was in the dyepot turning a gorgeous shade of red, and I was winding up the next yellow ball, checking for moth damage, wondering what color scarf #3 should become. Uh, oh–this one had a lot of moth holes. It was the worst one I’d seen yet.

And then it hit me. Thumper’s Admonition: if you can’t dye anything nice, don’t dye anything at all.

On to the next one!

Our front door was painted yellow. The former owner thought it would be cheerful.

Over a dozen years ago, there was a whitefly explosion in northern California, an invasive species from I forget where with no natural local predators. Gnats, you’d think something would eat a gnat, but white gnats seemed to be off the birds’ gourmet foods list–cauliflower au soleil!–and they multiplied quickly into great swirling clouds, like white dust devils twirling in a column in the sunshine. Our ash trees were emphatically not happy with them.

Which is how I came to find out that yellow is a color that is naturally attractive to insects: they’re programmed to see it as meaning “Flower. Yum.” Which meant that, until California started releasing large batches of counter-attack tiny nonstinging wasps that only ate whitefly larvae, every time we walked through our front door, we had to run a gauntlet of the little icky things en masse. One time, I got out there with a wet rag and mowed them down in strokes running down the door, just to see if I could have a clear door for even a moment. But there was no end to them. I gave up. Those wasps eventually did the job, though, and you almost never see a whitefly now.

I did get that first angora scarf overdyed green today; I’ll post a picture when it’s dry, and tomorrow the second scarf goes in the dyepot. While I was knitting it a little earlier tonight, a black gnat flew into it and got caught in the fuzz, making it an easy target to squash. Awhile earlier, I had seen another crawling up to a broken-off piece of yarn that I’d separated from the ball due to moth damage; I thought, boy, those hatched fast after I took that out of the freezer!

When that angora had shown up in the mail, the first thing I had done was to put the box in a heavy sweater-size ziploc bag and put it in the freezer to immediately kill any possible moths, before I even knew there had been any. Just as a precaution. It’s a pesticide-free way to kill them, alternating between warmth and freezing: kill the adults and larvae, then warm it up so the eggs think it’s spring, throw it back in the freezer again. I never have been quite sure how long the interludes between should be, though.

Two gnats in the angora in one evening, and I was sitting there wondering, since when do gnats eat yarn? Do I have to worry about everything biting it now? Is angora that much of a dessert in the bug world?

And then it hit me. Yellow. The yarn was bright yellow. Flowers. Yum. And I felt a whole lot better.

Pictures tomorrow when the first scarf is dry and there’s more to show off. Oh, and–our front door is white these days. But the ash trees, I’m afraid, are gone.

I once won a small cone of 100% angora yarn off Ebay for ten bucks, in a perfect shade of green. It was something I could never normally afford, given that 100% angora usually sells for about a dollar a gram in these tiny 27-yard balls, and yet–something more than just a chance at a good bargain called to me, on more levels than I quite understood, when it first popped up on my screen. All that softness, and no repeating yarn ends to have to work in, I was thinking.

When my mom had me on the way, in 1958, she and Dad went on a trip to France. France at the time was the worldwide center of angora yarn production, and Mom was a knitter, so she bought two boxes as a souvenir of the trip. It had been fairly inexpensive; had she had any idea what it was going for in the States, she later said more than once, she’d have bought more. She had two daughters at that point, and bought 20 10g balls of soft green and 20 of a rather bright sunflower yellow. She may have been thinking baby blankets or sweaters and had someone later talk her out of knitting angora for babies; I don’t know. What I do know, is, ten years later, Mom finally knit the green up into a sweater for my oldest sister, who had started high school. At ten, I was a brand new knitter, but Mom made it clear that that yellow had been bought for my other sister, it had been promised to her, and not to even think about it. Sorry there wasn’t a stockpile set aside for me, too, I hadn’t been born yet.

Well darn.

But my oldest sister was allergic to that sweater, it turned out, and couldn’t stand the itchy eyes and running nose; it stayed in a drawer for a few years till I hit high school, at which point I begged for it–and they gave it to me! AlRIGHT! I looked like a walking furball, with a massive floating halo around me as I walked, but there I was with something so cool and so soft and so unique and so handknit and nobody else had one like it. Nobody else could tell the story of their mother knitting in the round a la Elizabeth Zimmerman, and then finding they’d been knitting a mobius strip in unfroggable angora. Part of the mystique. (But then Mom, being Mom, had managed to frog it anyway and reknit it right. They let you be Mom when they know you can fix anything and take care of everything, right?)

That sweater came in handy the winter the school district decided to save money for a few weeks by turning off the heat to the buildings. Despite the snow. Other people wore jackets all day; I couldn’t, not with that sweater on, too, that was just way too much.

By high school, I should add, I was knitting passionately myself. I came across that yellow angora in the box inside another box in the basement. Put that back! It was just waiting for the right project for my next big sister. Still.

Well darn.

The unfortunate green sweater died of a massive moth attack one summer while I was in college; it’s been how many years, and I still wince at it. Although, it did serve the purpose of teaching me to guard handknits with a vengeance. Guilt does that.

Green angora via ebay–not the same shade of green, no subdued quietness, rather, a more vibrant color of living and growing leaves. Nobody bid against me. It was mine. And so it became a lace stole in a leaf pattern for the mother of a friend, at a time of unfathomable grief; a hope of sharing what comfort I knew how to offer, to wrap around her when things just felt too hard. I was told she loved it, that I’d somehow picked just her favorite color, and I’ve forever since been grateful for that.

My parents just finished boxing up their 6-bedroom house, giving away tons of stuff accumulated over 44 years of raising six kids and living in one place, downsizing, down down down. I couldn’t quite believe it though I knew it, being 3000 miles away and unable to come help pack up. The photos of the moving van helped make it seem a little more real; one of the movers was a woman, and, I was later told, she was a knitter! Somehow, in a way that knitters everywhere can relate to, somehow…that made having the homebase of my life be gone feel a little better. A little. There are worse things to go through, certainly.

A box arrived in the mail. Barbara Walker’s stitch treasuries, the Schoolhouse Press editions that I’d given Mom for Christmas when they’d come back in print. Mom was letting go of her knitting now, mentioning her arthritis only enough to explain why; at least, though, she had quilting as her creative passion now. She’d hung on to her yarn stash for years, but she’d finally given it over to a neighbor who’d really wanted it. My daughters might want copies of those treasuries, though; so, here they were back, with thanks for the years they’d been useful.

I can’t imagine not knitting. And with all my jokes about my stash being at STABLE levels: Stash Acquisition Beyond Life Expectancy. But I was glad to have those books come back here; my oldest has started knitting a little, and those books are the knitters’ bible of stitch patterns.

And then, to my complete surprise, last week another box showed up. A very thin, very old one, with the lid secured to the bottom and a completely unfamiliar address handwritten at the top left; the bottom was punched in and taped back together by the post office.

With yellow fluff on the tape and trying to break through the sides as well, like chicks pecking out of their eggshells, curious to see the world.

Of all the things I never ever ever expected in my life to be given.

It took me way more hours than it should have; there were bug bites and partial holes and complete holes and places where I had to spit splice (note to my sisters: yes, that is exactly what you think that means) just about every row till I finally frogged that part and searched for a more whole segment of the ball and reknit it. That yarn had waited too long, I wasn’t about to let an insect defeat me now. And I can frog angora. I’m a Mom. I finally realized the only thing to be done was to pick up a ball, put it on the floor, and wind it up into a new ball, so that the weight of the thing would help pull apart any weak points in that 48-year-old yarn and make them obvious to my eyes.

But I did it. My second-older sister has a lace scarf coming. I did it! I’m taking a break from the hassle of working with the stuff to go write this. Tomorrow I’ll start another scarf–for my little sister. Then one for Mom. Then maybe one for me. Four balls down, sixteen to go.

But that bright yellow is just really not the color I think any of us would ever wear. Maybe that’s part of the reason Mom’s second angora sweater project never came to be–that, plus, I think Mom was always wishing she could divide it evenly somehow among her four daughters, or at least the three that could wear it. Or the two who hadn’t ever gotten anything. Well hey. With something as warm as angora, a lace scarf is just the thing: warmth where you want warmth, decoration where you want decoration, without its being a snowsuit unto itself.

First, though, that scarf I just finished has got a dyepot session ahead of it. I think I’ll dye this one green.