Playing a little with some Shibui Maai.

Photo two is closest to the color. Edit off left and right edges and what would remain reminds me of how in junior high we used to write on a piece of paper and fold it over and over till we had a numbered four-sided little toy you could pop over your hands.

Then you’d go ask a friend to pick a number. You would waggle the squares back and forth to the rhythm of your voice in answer; then stop, unfold the little flap that had the number they’d chosen, and there would be the great reveal as to what was written underneath. 1, 3? 4, 2? Life, the universe, and everything, there you go, the wisdom of our then-ages.

What did we call those things?

You know how, when you have a bad bug, things just kind of slide for awhile there?

Yeah, and it was getting to me. And so tonight the kitchen floor is scrubbed, the sink is scrubbed, the dishes are done, the mail is tossed, the yarn is more organized, the table’s cleared with a fresh tablecloth–oh oops, well, it was, and even some bathroom cleaning got done. And then I finished the cowl that was on the needles.

I think I’m getting better.

Stephanie Pearl-McPhee announced the very happiest of news and I guess I just got hit hard with spillover nesting instinct. Works for me.

I can just picture the first time she gets to snuggle that little one. I am so happy for them all and it just makes me head over heels with my own grandchildren all over again. There is nothing in the world like a grandmother’s love for that brand new person. There is nothing like that moment when they’ll first get to see her eyes looking back into theirs.

Except for the one after that, and the one after that, and the one after that, and all the years after that. To life!

Didn’t even know this was hiding under those leaves over there. More new growth and it happened all on its own.

I managed to get four inches done on a cowl before I had to let myself go rest, but it definitely felt good to accomplish something.

And today my sister Marian’s daughter Carole married her Josh. I would have loved to have been there, but it was just not to be, not with these germs. I’m glad we got to meet him at my dad’s 90th in June.

Two hundred thirty-odd yards on size 5s in one day while running multiple errands. This was so not going to happen.

Then I got another email that gave me yet another reason (though the sender didn’t know it) exactly why it had to be finished *now*. So I started winding the ball into another ball, weighing it till I got it at exactly half, and after not having wanted to ply that yarn as a six-strand because that was too bulky, I ended up knitting it at eight: one strand from each half ball. Sixty-six stitches on size 9s was doable in the time I had, barely, but doable.

It was pretty chunky looking as I worked–but ohmygoodness that yarn was SO soft. More of that up against the neck, nobody would mind.

I kept going till there wasn’t enough yarn for another repeat.

It’s blocking. Hey tomorrow: ready when you are.

Didn’t knit a stitch, but at least I got one of the butter hanks wound.

And then suddenly I have an unexpected reason to knit it up by tomorrow night–or the next afternoon, if I want to block it with a hair dryer going.

That’ll teach me.

I didn’t quite fill three bobbins before the white ran out.

Four-ply was surprisingly thick, so, two by two it was: 234 and 224 yards’ worth, with a bit left over on one bobbin that I then plied it with an end-of-bobbin of brown cashmere, making 78 yards. (Hmm. Baby hat?)

The yarns I was working from were very close in thickness and yet I used up 98 g of the merino/silk and only 67 g of the butter merino.

Now to go scour the mill oils out. The strands should bloom, fluffing out a bit with the wools felting together slightly. A little preshrinking is a good thing.

Meantime, yet another Cooper’s hawk sighting today–there have been several of late. Again it was one with its juvenile markings, which are starting to fade now; its chest kind of looked like that last hank. I think I’ve seen both a male and a female juvie in the past week.

A friend who is in hospice care is having a potluck tomorrow for people she dearly wants to see, and bacon-wrapped cheese-stuffed roasted ripe figs sounded divine to her.

I wanted them done right–and so I drove down to Andy’s Orchard for the figs. Besides, I’d been looking forward to going since just before our trip East. Oh wait–I sewed the “Created with pride by…” tag on the outside. Classic. Okay, let’s fix that, alright, now we really are ready. Go.

I got my figs, and I almost/sort of pulled off the equivalent of a doorbell-ditching of a handknit hat.

I forgot to put care instructions with it, so, to Andy: it’s extra fine merino wool, spun a bit tightly so as not to pill. It was a mill-end cone, which meant I pretreated the yarn in hot soapy water to get the mill oils out. Still, it could shrink more, so the thing to do is to hand wash it gently in tepid water as needed. Just a bit of suds in the sink, put it in, let it sit a bit, take it out, put it back in in tepid rinse water and then lay it out to dry, shaping it back in place a bit if needed.

Thank you for feeding my family and loved ones so well with such great fruit!

Now, this yarn I did remember to take in my carry-on and finished it on the plane East. White cashmere, spun into a braided tube, and it was a splurge a few years ago that I had been saving for some future bride. The reason for spinning it that way is to give some strength and structure to it without having to add the friction of any extra twists you don’t have to: you want to keep it as soft as it deserves to be.

Did I mention another niece is about to get married?

Lots of waiting times today, part of what happens when you only have one car and (helpfully delayed) appointments six cities apart. And the lab. And the…

How much time?

This much, minus the half-repeat I started it with several days ago and the two hours added this evening. Cashmere, about 50g worth of tomato-colored, knitted on 3.5mm needles. About 13″x9″measured flat. Done!

Meantime, I got an email purporting to be from an organization I’m familiar with but from an email address I am not, saying that I needed to check my voter registration.

Given that there were a number of Democrats who showed up at the primary polls in Arizona to find their party affiliation scrubbed from the records–including an official from said party who likewise found herself disenfranchised despite having been on the rolls for years–yeah, not a bad idea.

But I wasn’t about to click through their links. Who knows…

So we went to California’s Secretary of State site, clicked on our county, found Voter Registration, and on that secure site found ourselves verified as registered to vote, and since it’s not the primary, party doesn’t matter so we stopped searching at that point. We can always verify at the polls.

But we felt it was worth checking.

(Almost finished this hat project, putting it into its ziplock for the night.)

It’s probably a little early, but it was chilly this evening, and I figured if I needed a jacket, it needed a little something, too. And so I officially inaugurated the fall season by plugging in the newly reinstalled Christmas lights on the mango tree. Our own little constellation shining in the night.

Finished a quick little project from the cobweb cashmere and silk that I 9-plied on my wheel recently to a fairly thick yarn. The splittiness was a pain but it was worth every minute now, now that it’s warm and so soft and pretty and–this is important–done. (Note to self: US 7 needles.)

Interesting stuff, meantime: an art-quilt wallhanging made for a museum exhibit in Australia pieced from handknit swatches and bits. I particularly like the digitalis flowers. So graceful.

And for those who haven’t seen this article yet, a bit of Viking history, starting with a 600-year-old reused sail found insulating an old church in Norway.

And so we know they were woven not of linen but of wool, shrunken and fuzzed out to a solid surface that was then coated against the water.  They would have needed 700 sheep per sail, and their entire fleet, two million animals. There is speculating that the Vikings set forth in search not of treasure of gold so much but of pastures for their flocks.

There are lines like this one: “Not long ago, researchers found that laundering synthetic fleece floods aquatic ecosystems with tiny plastic microfibers, which made wool look even better in comparison.”

I’d never heard that before. I imagine it’s surely better if you stay away from the fluffier types that tend to shed a bit? But all the more reason to buy wool to keep warm in.

Which you will need while reading a description of sailing in a replica Viking ship in those icy waters. Enjoy.

I wanted to show it off while not wanting to show it, too, not yet. The not-yets win: creating something for the first time, discovering what it is as it comes to be, undoing, anticipating visual trajectories, redoing, stopping again and is this angle quite the one that I want…

One becomes both more and less aware of time. More grateful for it. More immersed in what it lets happen.

And it takes more of it.

Not done.

I was thinking that after this weekend I could tell the rest of the story.

Only, it turns out there was a lot more to it than I had anticipated.

Back at Stitches West in February, my potter friend Kris told me that not only did they have sheep at the farm they’d bought, but her son had learned to spin and he had a wheel now.

He was there helping her and they surprised me with the great gift of a skein of his very own handspun yarn. From their sheep! So cool.

This is Kings Mountain Art Fair weekend, where I’ve seen Mel and Kris every year since long before they started going to Stitches.

But that new head injury. It’s certainly not bad, but not pushing it is a good thing. Richard wasn’t up to doing that much walking yet–parking is all car-by-parallel-parked-car along the narrow mountain road there with many many many people coming. Michelle couldn’t make it and it would just be me. Which normally I wouldn’t mind.

So I did the only thing I could do: I said a prayer and asked, if I shouldn’t go, please help me feel bad or hesitant about it and I won’t. If I should, please help me feel reassured, because I honestly don’t know what the most-right thing to do here is.

I very much felt reassured. It was a bit of a surprise. I had thought that waiting till the last day of the fair made the most sense, for that matter, but felt like, no, today. Don’t miss out. Go.

Huh. Okay, then. I really wanted to see my friends and feeling that it was okay to helped a lot. (That’s also why I had to be careful in that prayer, so that I was actually listening to the guidance I was asking for, not just hearing what I wanted the answer to be.)

I had wanted to surprise them back with something made from their wool, meantime, because nobody could treasure it like the ones taking care of the sheep it had come from. One large skein of aran weight: a cowl seemed the sensible thing to do for potters and farmers. It could keep one of them warm while leaving them free from having it blowing around in their way.

The yarn refused. It wanted to be a hat.

I started to cast on for a cowl.

I cast on a hat.
I made that hat. I put it in my purse last night to make sure I wouldn’t forget it.

I came around a curve in the hillsides of 280 and found myself driving into a dense fog as I approached the mountain pass and marveled, This is summer. That’s winter looking. It’s way too early for that. (It was bright and clear not too many miles away at home.) It softened the light, which rested my brain from the sharp reflections that otherwise would have irritated it. It was beautiful and it was perfect. As I drove upwards and turned left towards the fair at the spine of the mountain, there were splashes of raindrops from both trees and sky.

Rain here is the distilled essence of ocean: warm summer showers are not even a concept, locally, and I can remember trying to convince my then-young children that such a thing existed. If it’s raining in northern California it’s chilly, and for the first time that I can remember, it was cold at the fair. That forecast of 67 up there was way off–my thick turtleneck and sun jacket and wool knee socks were not enough at 52 degrees but not so bad as to get me to walk the quarter mile (I got a really good spot!) back to my car for the spare fleece jacket that’s always in there. (There’s a chartered shuttle bus for the really-way-out-theres.)

Mel had one on himself but he was still cold. Kris was comfortable in her jacket, but he was in sandals and his socks and warmer clothes were simply out of reach while they were working their booth.

So much for waiting till they’d rung up my purchase before surprising them–he needed that hat now, and I pulled it out. I told them, referencing their son, You guys are all going to have to work out whose this is.

They laughed. They loved it. Mel not only wore it, he doubled over the cuff for extra warmth and I was glad I’d knitted it to a good length so he could, and I could because they’d given me a generous amount.

If I’d waited till Monday like I’d half-planned, then…

If their son hadn’t felt like sharing what he’d made, and when he did…

And yet all that had happened and it had come out exactly right. Mel kept marveling at the chill, exclaiming, In California! On Labor Day weekend!

The show ended for the day and as Kris pulled the covers over their booth, Mel walked my purchases all the way to my car for me. I in turn drove him to where fair vendors are required to keep their vehicles, well away–and to where his socks were. He was then to drive back to Kris to pick her up, but just before he got out of my car, I told him this:

I get to wake up every morning to beautiful art, to Kris’s and your talent, your skills, your colorwork, and your love in my home and it makes every day of mine better and I just wanted to thank you. It makes such a difference.

Come to think of it, I need to go tell my sister that, too. (Edited to add: done!)

Was looking for something this afternoon and stumbled across some leftover Burnside Bridge yarn I didn’t know I still had. Abstract Fibers does nice work.

So tonight, regardless of what I’d intended to knit next, this got started. Cowl. Needles US 5. Knit till I run out.

Cascade Epiphany cowl for the medical resident: done! (Other than running the ends in.)

Afghan: thirteen rows–done! Three more and the cast-off to go, but after two and a half hours of seed stitch my hands are done for the night.