Wow. What an afternoon!

Before Stitches East last year, I started looking for a website for my old high school; it was our 30th anniversary, and I was curious to see if there might be a reunion, since I was going to be flying East anyway.   Which is part of how, months later, my old classmate and friend Elizabeth and I happened to stumble across each other.

Who would have thought… She’s now an alpaca farmer in Colorado.  And when I told her how much I have a thing for baby alpaca yarn, she gifted me with these two hanks from one of her babies, complete with a picture of it. Oro’s Cocoa Puff. Cool!

And then!  I got to show the yarn off to Kris and Mel, who fondled it and oohed and aahed: they were in the area for a show at Half Moon Bay, and had phoned and asked if they could drop by.  COULD they??!  Ohmygoodnessyes!

And then they surprised me with this beautiful serving tray they’d made me.  I was already in I-don’t-deserve-this mode.  At least I was able to do something back this time; Kris had forgotten her cane, and I had a spare that worked.  I showed her how the crooked shape of the top of it was good for leaning your chin on from a sitting position to embarrass your teenagers into hurrying up when they’re taking too long shopping.  They guffawed.

My husband came home early from work to get to see them; I served chocolate and mangoes and we all swapped stories and told tales and laughed for several hours till they really had to go. Time to set up their booth over by the ocean.  If you’re going, tell them hi again from me.  And thank you.

Thank you so much to everybody for all your support and kind words.  They will be monitoring Michelle’s counts carefully; she’s doing fine.  And Richard feels good about how he did on that test.

We went!  Gigi and Jasmin aka The Knitmore Girls and No-Blog-Rachel and I carpooled up to Santa Rosa to see Stephanie. We left early and came home late and had a blast.

Stephanie gave her talk; the bookstore sat me where I could lipread, which was wonderful, but I’m afraid I still missed far too much.  But what I did hear was thoughtful, inspiring, insightful, and very, very funny.  I love that one of our own got Barack Obama to hold her sock on her needles.

Stephanie announced it was time now to sign books–and then instead, came around the table and first threw her arms around me.  Then she turned back around the table again to her seat and started, pre-boarders first.  We hung back and visited.  When it was my turn, she asked me to grab my book for her picture to be taken with, and I went for hers while my friends went, No, she means yours, silly!  I’m not convinced, but either way, look what picture I got!  I had to crop it way down to get WordPress to take it.  Hmm.  Given a choice between slicing her off at the forehead or slicing my book, um, yeah, I don’t think that would be the help with her hair she was talking about.

Laura came!  She told me she always keeps spare needles and yarn at the hospital where she works, just because, well, you never know, right?  (I see every knitter reading this nodding yes.)  She’d recently had a patient who’d been brought in under emergency circumstances, no chance to pack, whom she was talking to–and…

…Hang on a second.  Stephanie, in her talk, mentioned the satisfaction of knitting a particularly nice pair of socks while at the same time knowing that most of it was going to spend its life unseen inside some shoes.  I’ve got an answer to that: Laura’s patient saw a flash of color as Laura was leaving the room, and called out after her, hoping Laura would hear. She did.

Only another knitter would have instantly realized that those were handknit socks.  Only another knitter would have realized that that means either Laura was a knitter, or Laura was dear enough to a knitter for that level of effort and that if so, that knitter also knew Laura would appreciate them.  (Laura had made them.)  Only another knitter, or perhaps someone deemed worthy to be knitted for, would get how dire the patient’s need was.  Yarn!  Oh, please, anything, do you have any?  Laura ran down the hall and got her size 7s and some Encore and gave her patient a promise of more in that dyelot as needed.

Now that’s my kind of medical insurance.

(Hey, Jasmin–I wasn’t really kinnearing you. I was just being a klutz as I turned off the camera, and guffawed when I saw the result.)

During part of my growing up just outside Washington, DC, we had a family next door where the father (later Ambassador Cleveland) had worked in Indonesia for the State Department; their youngest child, at three, didn’t even speak English when they transferred to DC because his parents figured he’d pick it up fast enough once they moved back to the States.  He did.

One of the children was a girl slightly older than me, and she told me a few stories on what it was like to live in a place that seemed perfectly normal to her, quite enjoying the fact that in her telling it, it was anything but, to me–having to wait for a hot bath till the elephants delivered the logs for the fire to go under the tub was just not quite in my daily experience.  Not to mention that the tub was on the outside of their house, I guess because, well, you don’t let the elephants tromp around inside, right?  But hey!  She could top that!  And she told me of the soldiers coming up the hill toward their home with their guns and how scary it was.  She reiterated the point: there was the government. And there were people fighting the government, and they all had guns and sometimes there was actually shooting going on.

I had a very hard time wrapping my mind around all that at seven or eight years old.

Now, one of the sayings around DC is that the definition of a diplomat is someone who can tell you to go to hell in such a way that you look forward to the trip.  And what I saw of the mom next door, looking back now as a mother myself, I imagine she could probably have dealt with those soldiers just fine by herself, though I don’t know if she ever had to or not.  She was a strong woman.  But I imagine that strength had to have been blended with a whole lot of that kind of diplomacy, on both her part and her husband’s, given where they’d been living; and so, her children turned out to be safe.

You know I had to go back over to Purlescence today.  Nathania happened to be just inside the door, ready for a hug.

I explained “Talk like a pirate” day to a customer who was wondering what was going on. There was a tv set up with Errol Flyn swashbuckling his way around, while the Purlescence-errrrrs were dressed the part: all the fun of Halloween and of welcoming the fall, without the sugar overload.  Perfect.

Kay’s holding Ellie, whose outfit says “Shiver me timbers;” Ellie got a few good “Arrrrgh!”s in for good measure as she slowly woke up.

And a very good day was had by arrrrrrgh.

I wrote this draft and expected to be able to come home from knit night and gleefully hit Post!, and I’m going to anyway, but it was Nathania’s night off and she wasn’t there.  Kay called her at home saying I had something there at the shop for her; Nathania put it to a family vote, and not surprisingly, the whatever nebulous thing it might be got voted down.  Mom time is not to be tampered with.

I said to Kay a moment later, we should have told them there was homemade chocolate mousse cake waiting here for all of them.  Kay asked if I wanted to bring the shawl back tomorrow?  No?  It’s burning a hole through your pocket?

Oh, you betcha.  So I left it there for discovery in the morning, and since I took a wrong-time-of-day bad-lighting picture before I left, I’ve got one for this post, and Nathania will probably find out the details here first.  Here goes.

Nathania (scroll down to the second to last picture) went to go visit her friend Tina at Blue Moon Fiber Arts in Oregon recently and came back exclaiming over some of the new colorways Tina was about to put out, wishing she’d been able to bring some of them home.

Which led to some behind-the-scenes emailing and scheming.  I thought I’d given it away when I mentioned this Geisha yarn in Oma Desala had arrived, along with the Potomac colorway Tina had concocted for me to play with in memory of our childhood homes near each other’s on the Maryland side of the river.  But no.

At knit night last week, I pulled two shawls out of my bag to show Nathania: one was the gray, not yet gone to its recipient, the other, my Geisha yarn shawl from awhile ago, where I’d used the full skein to see how much length I could get out of it. It totally swamps me, but then, I’m a fairly small person.

Both of those were in a particular pattern, I told her, that I needed to test on various body sizes–would she be willing to try this one on for me?  Sure.

She dutifully went over to the mirror with the Geisha; yes, it’s long enough, yes, it’s wide enough. Very nice.  She handed it back to me and the old pang hit me hard that I had knit a shawl for Sandi, I had knit one for Chloe, the other two owners of Purlescence, but I had not knit one yet for her.  And she would have loved it if I had, but instead, here she was, handing the shawl back.  Ouch.

I had wanted to for quite some time, badly, but what to make and what to make it of just hadn’t come to me at all.  I had to wait to see and I didn’t know why and it bothered me.  I had been looking for a yarn for over a year that would speak to me–and all I could come up with is I just felt, no, it’s not time yet. Something’s missing.

Till she took that trip and Tina and I started talking behind her back.  What Nathania didn’t know was I was having her try on my shawl to know how long I should continue this one for her.

And I knew now. This wasn’t just for me. This wasn’t just for her. This was to bring Tina into the circle of this shawl, too, in happy anticipation and love in together creating something to make our friend happy.

And all those times I’d wondered what pattern I would ever knit for her: as soon as I had the right yarn ready to go, I just knew.  She and her husband had met in a singing group.  They are musicians.  And so, to celebrate two people I adore having found each other and having chosen to live happily ever after,  I started with the Michelle shawl, named for my own daughter and knitted here in celebration of her daughters, to the end of the yoke; from there, I switched to the Concert Scarf pattern, repeat after extra repeat across, to make a one-of-a-kind shawl but at the same time one that anybody with a copy of “Wrapped in Comfort” can follow. The only change is that you’ll need one fewer stitch in the increase row before the main body, and there you go.

I don’t usually put busy colorways with busy patterns, but here, it’s perfect: how they met and their love of music blends into the background of the overall fabric of their lives.  I’m really pleased with how this came out. And very gratified that, at last, I got to knit this shawl: to celebrate Nathania, for her close friend Tina’s sake, and to honor as well, with the pattern, the man who loves Nathania best of all and whom she loves best of all.

Hey, you guys: there’s some leftover chocolate mousse wheat-free anniversary cake waiting for you.

I got a note today from my son John, who is in Mississippi at the moment.

A year ago, the John who is the owner of Village Spinning and Weaving was selling silk yarn at TKGA that had been dyed by his local weaving group for fun for him.  I exclaimed over the price, and he grinned that yes, he’d gotten a very good deal on it.

I knitted up the one hank I bought into a Michelle shawl.  Weighing how many grams the ball was shrinking per row, I was able to figure out how long I could make it before I had to start in on the bottom edging.  I ended up with a shawl that was good for someone about my size but not a whole lot bigger.  I had not a clue who I was knitting it for; it was more like, well, silk is like type O negative blood: pretty universally give-able, allergies-wise.

The finished shawl has been sitting there quietly off in a corner for months, patiently waiting its turn. I’ve wondered who on earth it was for.  I had to wait for the moment that would tell me.

Our youngest headed off on a mission for the Mormon Church in December. They could have called him to anywhere in the world; they sent him to the one headquartered in Mississippi. (He came out okay in the hurricanes; thanks.)

I got a note from him today, telling me about a woman he’d met who has MS and whose husband is dying.  I can only imagine what she’s going through.  He told me he’d felt prompted to say something to her that had brought her great comfort, and he wanted me to know that it was all my fault: he reminded me of something I’d once said to him that I don’t even remember saying, that he’d passed on to her, about not being in fear and about the power of love and faith in our lives.  It had made all the difference.  He told me he felt that that moment was why he’d been supposed to come to Mississippi.

And then he just happened to mention that oh, by the way, Mom, she’s not a very big person, she’s about your size, and her favorite color is bright royal blue, and, like, maybe, you wouldn’t mind knitting a shawl for her, would you? She could really use to have something comforting like that to wrap around her right now.

I think this one will do.  And I think other-John’s weaving group would like to know what one of their hanks of yarn is going to, so I’m linking to his shop so the word gets around.

(Edited to add: here’s a better picture of it, though it’s a bit darker here than in real life. I beat the post office closing time by ten minutes.  It is on its way, and I hope it helps in the small way I can from way over here.)

I had an East Coast friend once beg me, “Please don’t tell me you wear socks with your Birkenstocks!”  I laughed and wrote back, “I live in California: *everybody* wears socks with their Birkenstocks!” And handknit socks especially, if they’re knitters.

When Mel and Kris came here, I meant to take a picture of our feet together, but I was having too good a time to remember to.

I have two pairs of these, one I keep for looking good, one that got messed up in some flooding, so you might as well wear them for splashing in the rain anyway.  Which is why I went back and bought a second pair while they still had them in stock–I was afraid the first was going to reek and split when they dried and that I was going to have to toss them, but no. They’re pretty indestructible.  When Kris exclaimed over how new these looked, I had to explain I was simply putting my best foot forward.

When I saw the two of them the week before at the art fair, I was surprised to see she was wearing my Birkenstocks.  But it gets funnier: she had bought the exact same shoe in the exact same color in the exact same size at the exact same store I’m sure the exact same summer, despite the fact that she lived three if not four hours north of here at the time.  She’d been in the area for a fair and had stopped by the Birkenstock outlet in Gilroy too.  And there you go. We artsy creative types, we all dress in uniform, huh?

They live in Oregon now, though, so I guess we’ll have to let them skip the socks.

You know, that header really needs a celery stick in the picture to finish it off, but we’re fresh out.  The charcoal shawl, she is finished.

I wrote a draft last night that I will finish when I finish the project it goes with.   A blog stash.  I can’t wait!

Last Thursday at Purlescence‘s knit night, I was feeling very broke, having just paid college tuition and college rent and the first half of my new hearing aids.  I took a good look around the shop, as I always do: looking at yarns is the best way to come up with new ideas.  Colors trigger memories, memories trigger patterns…

And so I noticed just the most drop-dead gorgeous new color ever over that-a-way, in a yarn from Claudia’s Handpaints that for right now was just plain out of my reach.  One look at it and I knew exactly whom it should be for.  Nothing else would do.  I hoped it wouldn’t sell out.  It was just so exquisitely THE color. (Okay, I’m suddenly stuck with Barbara Streisand singing “Misty watercolor memmmmmmoriesssss…” in my head. Shhh, stop, get out of my post!)

Sandi, one of the LYSOs, came over, checking up on me–I’d had a sudden severe bout with my dysautonomia two nights before, and I wasn’t going to mention it, but one look at my worried face and she’d decided to ask what was up.  Those bouts are when the brainstem and the blood pressure and the heart and lungs forget to all stay connected to each other for a little while there.  It had been rough.  I’d reacted to it with the thought, Tina Newton and Lisa Souza both just sent me yarn out of the goodness of their hearts and I am NOT going to die with it sitting in hanks in ziploc bags! Those are going to become LOVE first! BREATHE, you stupid body, BREATHE!!!

A little adrenalin goes a long way, and the body did this, Right-o, old chap, carry on.  And I was fine.  And that was that.

Sandi was hesitant to say it, so I did outright for her: knitting for others helps keep me alive.

And she handed me that Claudia silk I’d been admiring, and said, “Take it.”

Ohmygoodness!!!

And now I have a blog stash and I can’t say… yet. But Sandi–you’re a peach and I adore you.  Knit long and prosper well.

Kris and Mel, my potter friends, stopped by here today on their way down the coast; art fair season isn’t quite over yet.  She got her pink shawl (which came out shorter than I’d expected; rather like the original Bigfoot in the book.)  And since upcoming surgery means sleeves will be an issue for her this winter, and my shawls seemed exactly the thing she needed, ie, they’ll keep her warm and they’ll stay on without effort, I had it all planned out and I gave her this blue one too; it ran longer on her.  Variety is a good thing.

They certainly didn’t need to, but they came bearing gifts: handmade soap, and a doorknob hanger of handfelted honeybees from Plum Blossom Farm’s sheep, with beads and a little bell at the end.

I rattled the bell and actually heard it–not very loud, but hey. I heard it!  They didn’t know I grew up on Honeybee Lane; and hey, wool taking over the house all the more, I love it.  I can’t wait to tease my kids.

The handmade soap was wrapped in felted Wensleydale wool.  Again, in the they-couldn’t-have-known department: the AP once ran a one-paragraph little filler story about a woman in the British Isles trying to keep the last herd of Wensleydale sheep in the world alive, and how glad she was to get a large Japanese order for fleeces: it gave her the financial wherewithal to keep going.

I spent ten years after that trying to track down a source of Wensleydale wool.  It has had a real resurgence since that article, helped by the handspinning market, and I did find and spin some for a coat.  And here there was not only someone with some actual Wensleydale sheep in the US now, but Kris and Mel actually know her and brought this to me from her!  Along with Wensleydaled honeybees! Life draws in in small circles that surprise sometimes. Totally delightful.

Before we let them go, I had to take them in my kitchen and open the cupboards and let them see my Kris and Mel collection.  I showed them how I take my tiny rice-type bowl, mix cocoa and suger in it every morning, zap some milk in my Mel and Kris mug, and make my morning hot cocoa.  Looking at the size of the cup I use for it–it was not their coffee cup-type cup, Kris laughed, “Yeah, I like lots of hot cocoa too!”

And I’m glad I live in a climate where it’s cool every morning, y’know?

And a very, very good day was had by all. It is amazing sometimes how much of a difference we make to each other even when we so rarely get to see much of each other in person.

Robin wearing her new shawl–note to the women at Purlescence: I did find my Ocean Casbah yarn…

Nina’s hands at work as we waited for our lunch.

Warren of Marin Fiber Arts checking with Frederikka Payne on the phone about the Whisper merino laceweight in his shop.  It will stay available?  Thanks!  Cast on!

In the it’s-a-small-blog-world department, there will be a Mr. Washie (yes, Dad, that’s an official knitter’s term) transplant team today operating between our house and No-Blog-Rachel’s.  No-Blog-Rachel has a blog now, although she will forever be known by her previous description given her by the Yarnharlot.

Rachel is from Vermont and now is a a member of my knitting group at Purlescence. Meantime, my daughter now lives in Vermont, and guess where I’m planning to visit?  Rachel, you want to hitch a ride in my luggage?  Just let me catch up on the laundry first, and I’m so glad the people you bought your house from left you with a superfluous washing machine.  Much appreciated.

I finished Kris’s shawl at about 11:30 last night, which, come to think of it, is the same time of day that I finished designing it Monday night.  Kris now knows about it; I’m still paying a bit for the sun exposure last week, so since Nina was at the Kings Mountain Art Fair yesterday, I called her, she told Kris and Mel, my potter friends, and we arranged how to get the shawl to them without my having to be outside.  Kris is ecstatic.  She apologized that she couldn’t pick it up last night, and I was going, no, no, that’s quite alright.  It’s not quite done.  (I can only knit so fast.)

And now it is.  And I can’t show it to you all yet, which gets really frustrating because I’m absolutely a born show-off.  But trust me, it’s blocked now and it feels like one of the most gorgeous things I have ever knit, and certainly one of the most meaningful.

I’m picturing my readers flipping through future pages and then the blog and going, wait–the original was pink? How does that work for a landscape scene?

Um, early foggy dawn?  But then, a shawl is an article of clothing first of all, and this was a good color for her.   And I am very, very pleased.

(P.S. Kris–Lisa Souza sends a hello, old friend!)

The dryer was having problems. Then the washing machine died.  Glug glug clunk splat.  So I did what any reasonable knitter would do: I went to a yarn store.

And one that was north of San Francisco, for that matter, a good 80 minutes away–if you’re going to run away from handwashing yours and your 6’8″ husband’s clothes in the bathtub, you might as well really run away.   While telling myself that since I only get to Marin Fiber Arts on average maybe once or so a year, there was no point, should I happen to truly fall in love with a yarn there, in spending the whole next year wishing I’d bought it–just buy the durn thing already.  Justify that gas money.  Support that LYSO who is absolutely one of the nicest and best.

This proved not to be a problem.

Note that it was actually Warren’s day off, and he drove over despite an appointment later that was a goodly distance away simply because Robin, who’d come from an hour north while on vacation, and Nina and I, coming from the south, wanted to see him.  (And each other.)  He has a fan club.  He’s a sweetheart.  We took him to lunch and thanked him.

I fell in love with the Whisper merino laceweight and asked if it was Frederikka Payne who was the dyer?  He told me she was. Cool!  I met her in Moss Beach a couple of times, back when she had retail sales.  Um, yeah…when she was closing out a very soft superfine kid mohair for two dollars a ball I bought dozens of balls, started knitting it, realized how really really nice stuff this was and went back and bought a hundred balls more–I mean, you could make a kid mohair afghan, even knitted doubled, for under twenty bucks!  And within eighteen months I’d knitted nearly all of it.  Frederikka definitely smiled hello at Stitches afterwards…  When I asked a question about the Whisper’s ongoing availability, Warren whipped out his cell phone and asked her on the spot.  And now I have a new yarn to go play with.

And I needed something….I was hoping to find something… redwood-y. In the right texture and the right weight, which isn’t easy, because I am very picky about the hand to a yarn.  If it’s not soft enough, I’ll never get around to casting it on.  I went through the store twice before it hit me: don’t fixate on burgundys and rusts.  Look at that Jade Sapphire cashmere/silk in greens in the far corner!

I’d hoped to come home with something really nice, something that would really celebrate Warren’s shop to me.  And with those two, I did.

The good times with good friends, and new ones made, though–that was, as always, the best of all.  A special shout-out to young Gavin, who drove with his grandma-by-love for an hour to get there and then was the sweetest kid you could imagine while we all talked knitting around him.  I asked him at one point who was winning the game he had in his hands, and he smiled shyly and grinned, “Me!”

Nina and Rod joined my husband and me for dinner afterwards.  And a good day was had by all.  (Pictures tomorrow. I’ve been knitting madly, trying to finish something.  It’s late.)

I am heading up to Marin Fiber Arts in San Rafael shortly, hoping to be there noon or a little after; I have a knitting friend from my hometown who’s visiting in the North Bay, and Nina of “Wrapped” fame and I figured saying hi to Warren, the LYSO, whom RobinM of the comments and I adore, is a great way to get together while RobinM is here.  In case anybody up around there wants their copy signed.  If you can, come!

My friend Michelle of the Monterey shawl fame, talking to me once about high school reunions, told me she’d gone to all of hers: that at her fifth, people were still showing off.  Some showed up in limousines.  At her tenth, some people were still finding themselves. At her twentieth, they were the selves they’d grown up into.

I missed my first few, wanting to go, but being thousands of miles away, it just wasn’t going to happen. But I kept saying I was going to my 20th.  Nothing would stand in my way. I would go.  And I did.

It was worth every penny of the airfare: I got to see friends I hadn’t seen since graduation, and  I have kept in touch with some of them ever since, never again to let them disappear from my life.  And I got to see…a guy who had tormented me my first two years of high school, and then after that we had pretty much ignored each other’s existence as we went from class to class.  I was surprised our senior year to find out he was turning out to be an okay person after all, though on my part that was simply a quiet observation from a distance.

And at the reunion, there he was.  I took a chance and called him on the early-on behavior and the torment I’d gotten over the things he’d said, and he apologized.  We’d been, what, fifteen years old then? What had we known about anything?  Twenty years long of needing–well, not needing really, but only in terms of any future interaction with each other–that out-loud reconciliation.  And we got it.  I found myself delighted that he actually lived now not only in the town just north of mine here, but that his commute on his bicycle took him within two blocks of my house here every day.  Wow. Small world. And we’d had to fly to Maryland to find out we were both right here in California.

He’s apparently moved back to Maryland since then, but one of his brothers was here in the area too.  I found out because today the headline screamed about the Cisco executive, such a nice guy, with such a sense of joy in his life, on a business trip to Detroit: shot and killed.  A city street, and, apparently, a life for a wallet. The face in the paper looked vaguely familiar. The name did too.  When I read “grew up in Potomac, Maryland,” I gasped: that would be MY high school!  I turned to see if there was an obit with more information. There was.  He was.  The family’s names.  Oh goodness.

And the only reason I have any right to do what was imperative for me to do under such horrendous circumstances, to reach out with a quiet note of condolence that is going out tomorrow to a widow with two small girls to raise unfathomably alone now, is because I made peace with her brother-in-law eleven years ago.  Even if she could never have known anything about any of that.  I did.

Going to that reunion had given me the right, now, to care out loud.  The note is written and ready to go.

I had no idea, when I was booking that ticket.

My friend Phyllis called yesterday: “Alison! Your favorite potter is at the art fair here, come see her! She’s at the corner of…”

I asked what time the thing ended. Six?  Sure, I can do that towards the end of it.  I went.

Kris saw me and was thrilled: “I was hoping you would come!”  She knew I would understand, besides the fact that she just plain wanted to see me.  She stepped into the shade for me–she’s a good friend–and we talked.

She had a dear friend who was a regular blood donor.  The friend was cooking dinner for her guests coming one day about seven months ago when the phone rang.  (I think Kris and her husband were to be the guests, but I missed part of it there and didn’t want to interrupt to go back and ask.)  It was the hospital, in desperate need of immediate O negative blood, would she come?

She dropped everything, hoping her guests wouldn’t mind the delay, and ran.

The trauma victim who’d lost half her blood was Kris.  The transfusions and superb medical care saved her life.

The hospital had Kris’s friend’s phone number only because she’d donated, and donated often.  One good choice after another led to a lifechanging good moment where it all came home.