Finally feeling this again.

Add a little more color to the rock in the water near the beach. Start some tree roots near the edge of the hilltop, not nice and neat but gripping tightly against the winds sweeping inland. Like that. Yes.

That’s what the coastal afghan had needed to get me really going again after a week on sewer cleanup: new parts, new colors, new interest. The dark green merino for the branches arrived a few days ago and is ready for me.

The latest mindless Mecha hat on the needles, where the colors do the work.

I actually need to go buy more for the next one.

P.S. Given how many of the most scenic homes in Pacifica are now swimming with the fishes, I don’t even know how this place is for sale. Don’t step out the back door. Did the realtor even go in to take those pictures, or did they send a drone there, too?

Update: if you can access it, here’s the history of the place. It was a telegraph and radio transmission station, and Richard Byrd reported on his Antarctic expedition through it 98 years ago. Someone turned it into a home in 1945.

The trees are coming along.

I didn’t manage to squeeze the whole thing into the picture and it was a quick photo in the fading light but this gives you the gist of the thing.

They were talking in church about the importance of service and asking for stories of times someone has made all the difference to you or you to them, and of course there’s the thought of, how do you sum up what all (sweeping arms wide) of life is about?

When it came to me, I said, I’m wearing socks that H made!

Which took her by surprise. She was thrilled. She tried to wave it off a little by saying it was the auction fundraiser, but hey, we were on to her. It was love, pure and simple, that got her to spend all those hours on them. All I did by donating to that camp fundraiser was to give her a direction to point it in for one moment out of many.

I didn’t work on the afghan yesterday because I was at the next stage in the picture but hadn’t decided how I wanted to configure my trees: branches reaching up? Or down? They’re more redwood-like if they’re going down, but the way the lace flows it’s just plain prettier reaching up.

How would you integrate that with trunks? How can you have redwoods without them? My typical lace pine pattern has repeats of each size of branch in order to add a sense of height, but a lace trunk would be off-center by a stitch.

So, I told him over dinner, I went looking through Ravelry patterns to see what other people might have done with the concept of a simple lace tree–and what I found, over and over, was people using Barbara Walker’s Christmas Tree pattern or her Fern pattern, which I hadn’t thought of as tree-like but okay.

Not much to learn there.

But it was the, Now if you’d done this with it it would have been more original and if you’d done this you could have had… Well, probably not like that but unless you wanted a date palm trunk look but like that…

(A side note: there is the iconic shot of Palm Drive, the entry to Stanford campus lined with palms. What they don’t say is that they take a chainsaw to the lower trunks to shave them smooth, obliterating their criss-cross patterning to keep rats and mice from nesting in all those little pockets going up to welcome the new students. And I could knit them back in now if I wanted to. Hah!)

Hey.

It’s not like it’s some great grandiose thing, and it’s not the palm trees. But definitely there is some personal satisfaction involved: I got it. My redwoods. I definitely think I got it. Given that I’m three weeks into this afghan, it took me long enough.

I didn’t know till I had to.

It’s 21″ unstretched.

Another repeat and a first rock that looks a little lonely and out of place there all by itself. It needs a couple of friends.

Meantime, the peregrine fledglings went through three rescues between the four of them and are all flying around fine now and having a good time. Here they are, mugging for the camera.

And another repeat.

I got a note from both the Australian post office and the sender to let me know my new Rios was in the US now so that I can finish the Big Sur afghan.

Meantime, 15″ on this one in one week is fast but our post office would really have to mess up for me to finish it before that gets here.

I know, don’t tempt them.

I woke up this morning with visions of how I was going to knit my rocks. I’m almost to the right place to start them.

I have no idea which one I’ll finish first. I’ll just have to wait to see that new yarn, put it together with this to have a good look at everything, and then let them be the boss of me.

So there I was, finishing up that fifth repeat before the distance between the waves starts to shrink going towards the shore, and I was remembering that time we went to the beach with my little brother and his wife. Pacific Grove. After a visit to the Monterey Bay Aquarium.

The tide was out and there were large rocks strewn across that beach. Not much in the way of sand, just smaller stones everywhere. The kids started climbing up to play king of the mountain and they were having a good old time, so, hey, why not. We’d already cautioned each other about never turning your backs on the ocean and sneaker waves and all that, even if the water was a fair bit away.

So I climbed up on one, too. Above waist high as I remember. So did our visitors. We were all a little spread out.

Now, this is a really dumb thing to do when your sense of balance died in a car crash and there’s this ocean thing that means the visual ground isn’t holding still.

My sister-in-law took in the situation and quickly ditched her rock to climb up on the platform that mine made, and just barely in time–I suddenly in spite of myself started to pitch forward headfirst onto the rocks below and she grabbed me hard and fast and pulled me back to safety.

We took a deep breath and I thanked her as I got immediately off that rock, common sense reclaimed. I was and will forever be grateful to her.

Stitch after stitch after stitch… What would make this more interesting and more of a memory…

That day at the beach!

I started thinking how I could add rocks. With yarn overs? Add stitches, since lace expands and crossed stitches contract, then cable them? I tried to visualize possibilities.

If you make like a honeycomb cable, only bigger, so that you have three or five stitches in the center at the widest part, you could with that center do a yarnover-p2sso-yo. It would be a depression within the cable-raised circle with a focal point at the center. You could have another bit of Old Shale bumping up against it with the k2togs split and the purl ridges sweeping around the outer edges. I’ll have to try it out.

I might not have perfected rocks yet but I just figured out how to knit tide pools by texture rather than color and I am inordinately pleased with myself.

So one 12-row repeat is about three and a half hours plus all the required breaks thereunto.

Meantime, my apricot tree that went into the ground last spring was (finally!) growing visibly this spring, to the point that you could see the difference day to day if you paid attention.

Not so much this past week.

I went out there and took a closer look today.

Instead of new red leaves what I’m seeing instead is brown and in the crotches of the existing branches.

Those take a lot of energy. Those are fruit spurs for next year’s flowers. My seedling is actually getting there.

It’s come a bit of a way since Wednesday. Eight and a half inches in four days plus the cast on the day before.The waves will come closer together as they get towards the shore; they’re starting out farther apart than the last time I riffed on this idea.

Math says that a gradual decrease the way I want the way I’d planned it means doing four of each set.

Four is an awkward number visually: if the eye can tell, if the numbers are low enough, it wants odd numbers. Hmm.

Once Australia’s postal service gets the Malabrigo yarn to finish the other project here then this one goes into timeout. But it feels great to be getting what I can done in the meantime. As for how many of which repeats, eh. It’s all good.

The coastal afghan on small needles is just long enough that I can begin to see how it really is going to be, but there’s not really enough to show it off yet. Eight and a half by 49″, five rows per inch or six and a half as the black hole yawns, either way, it takes time.

I found the color I’d wanted all along but couldn’t find and didn’t think existed in Rios: a near white with a touch of not gray but blue for the fog. Littleknits had it. Cosmos. It’ll be here when I need it.

I just got a good reason to push hard and get this done at a not-leisurely pace: there is a third person I really need to knit an afghan for between now and Christmas, I mean, like, I really really do.

P.S. Peregrine update here.

66/34 cashmere/cotton. I finished it this morning. The weather is going to be cool through Friday, then start being hot–I wanted her to have it now.

And so I broke my own rule: I did not block and dry it. I figured those were both limp fibers and the pattern wasn’t curling up like it would in wool. Good enough to go.

This was for a friend who looks out for everybody. When Richard was in the hospital for nine days, she brought me a half gallon of homemade soup to eat when I got home from the hospital for the night not wanting to do anything but just sheer survival.

She told me not to worry about bringing that giant Ball jar back.

Today she was talking to her cousin, who is going through a rough patch, and I slipped a small handled bag next to her trying not to interrupt; I got a small nod of acknowledgment and got out of the way.

Richard had watched me with bemusement as I’d pulled a sheet of blank printer paper into a circle, put the ends of it into that jar, stuffed the cowl in the center, and pushed them both on in there. I adjusted the paper so there was no gap to let one see what was inside it and with the lid on top, there you go.

I didn’t have to be there when she pulled the jar out of the small bag to put it away. When she went What? over the paper. When she opened the lid. I got everything I needed just out of anticipating it all and yes when she did she immediately called, deafness or no deafness on my part, to exclaim over it to me.

I told her her husband had told me her favorite color.

And now she needs to tell me her cousin’s.

I’m finding myself in that spot where I have some idea of what I want the next big project to come to be like, I’m fully aware that it could turn out nothing like that once I get going and start letting it boss me around, I’ve sketched a few sketches and wince-laughed at my drawing inabilities and no not like that and in the end, nothing has shown up on any needle yet.

I know that if I rush it for the sake of having something that feels important to make I’ll regret it. I have to take the time.

I also know that the aphorism, ‘Begin: the rest is easy’ surely applies as well.

In case you ever wanted a working definition of the word ‘dithering.’

The pictorial afghans take about four months and I can’t give one to one grandchild till I have at least enough for all of them. Plus I need an afghan for my younger brother for this coming Christmas.

Okay, now that I’ve got all that out of my system, where’s that blue Rios?