Finally finished the requested black cap and found a UFO that just needed the ends run in. That one’s Mecha, not Rios, so it’ll be nice and thick for June. Umm. It does get cool in the mountains there at night. And it was a fun hat. She told me yesterday that the only chemo caps she owns are the three she’s gotten from me. So off it goes.

I looked for a small box, struck out, went to the post office and decided to use one of their all-you-can-squish-in ones. It was definitely tight but it would do.

Maybe.

Trying to figure out their origami packaging, I was distracted by a short older guy I hadn’t even seen coming throwing a wad of trash hard at the other end of the table from me, and I thought, well that’s charming; making some employee have to clean up after you? The trash can is right there, dude. But I kept my mouth shut.

His face looked like, Do NOT mess with me. I have had it.

There were three clerks and a long line that did not move, and then #3 went on break. #2 went looking for someone’s stray package in the back. Clerk #1’s customer had a problem that took awhile. None of us were going anywhere anytime soon and #1 had from the time I walked in looked as angry as that guy.

Some minutes later, he suddenly appeared from the back (I’m thinking: he works here?!) and grabbed a package from next to her and threw it through the plastic-strips screen to the bin hidden behind. Hope there was nothing fragile in that.

Breathe. The only person whose behavior in this scene I could change was mine.

So I turned to the guy in a working man’s uniform behind me and asked, Are you in a hurry? You’re welcome to go ahead of me.

He was, actually, and quite grateful at the offer, even if it didn’t seem just then like it would really change a thing. We switched places.

There was one more person behind me: an older dad with a kid of about four with nothing to do. I repeated my offer. He turned me down. I offered him a finger puppet to keep his little guy amused, and it took him a moment but when I said Happy Birthday to make it clear I did not expect it back he decided why not.

Crocodile? He asked me, stating the obvious, I mean, we could quibble alligators vs caimans here but sometimes a finger puppet is just a finger puppet. ( –Oh wait, don’t let the staffs’ bad moods get to me.)

Yes.

The kid soon did what bored kids in strange places whose dads are staring at their phones do, which was to run his new pet up his dad’s leg and try to get his attention.

Clerk #2 returned. The line moved.

Finally I got called over to the one who’d looked so angry earlier. She wasn’t now. I asked for help figuring out that box, pleading bad eyesight re the tiny instructions, but she had a better idea and asked if she could put them in this padded envelope for me?

She didn’t hear me say Sure! so she repeated the question and I was amused at not being the deaf one for a moment there, but she just really thought this was a better idea so we went with it. (Maybe because it wouldn’t pop open if thrown hard, come to think of it.)

You make? She asked brightly, admiring the hats quickly and then looking up into my eyes.

Yes!

Cute! She exclaimed, looking at the address and clearly being glad for the person who was going to get to have not one but two hand knit hats! Made just for her!

She did the usual circling the tracking number on the receipt before handing it to me.

And then she waved me goodbye and wished me a nice day with the biggest, warmest, very real smile on her face, ready for the next person and utterly transformed, and I wasn’t expecting that at all, either.

Question. Weaving or knitting? (Embiggen to see the rest.)

Answer: Yeah, pretty much.

I figured that when you’re dealing with a new cancer diagnosis there must be moments when you need both a distraction and something to look forward to. So I ratted myself out and sent her the tracking number.

Plus I had this Zoom-knitting hat ready to go in a particularly soft skein of Rios, a lighter weight than my usual thick winter-warm Mecha.

(What update/why does this thing now consistently cut off the tops of my pictures while refusing to let it be fixed? Huh. Oh well, you can see the rest if you click on it and then not quite stand on your head.)

The chemo cap will go in the mail tomorrow.

Sublime brand bamboo/pearl viscose 70/30 from stash. Slippery, so I knit it relatively tightly to counteract that.

I played yarn chicken with the small ball and actually had 70″ left.  Super soft. Note to self, since I have another ball of this green: I used US 5, 80 stitches, 10-stitch fern lace after three rows of ribbing, and it stays on. I’m quite happy with it.

I have no idea if Kathryn at Cottage Yarns in South San Francisco has any of that yarn left–when I bought mine, Sublime was referring people looking for it to her and I just happened to luck out. Pearl chips made into yarn!

(Blouse by MargoEmbroidery in Ukraine on Etsy. I special-requested it in long sleeves and a blue cotton/linen 50/50 blend that they call homespun because it’s woven in Ukraine, rather than the polyester shown in her photo, and I love what she made. Even if I flipped the tassels out of the way for making dinner and forgot about it till just now.)

I sat down in front of him. He looked at my face and asked what’s wrong. I stuck out my lower lip like the best grumpy pout a five-year-old could pull off in order to make fun of myself so I wouldn’t take it all too seriously and explained.

He said something I don’t think he’s ever said before: “Well then you have to rip it out.” He never tells me what to do with my knitting. But he was telling me what I was essentially telling him I had to do with my knitting, and yes, I did have to.

All those eighteen-strand rows: gone, and it feels much better now. There shall be a clean start.(The roots were supposed to go twice the width of the tree, not four times! I had counted from raccoon+tree rather than just tree. It was impressively bad.)

I managed to do it in an hour, including reknitting the last blue/green row, far less time than I’d expected, probably because I was willing to take scissors to those roots when they snarled.

And then I did what I’d been trying to get myself to do all weekend: walked away from the afghan, picked up the long-hoarded Sublime bamboo/pearl chip viscose yarn, paid lots of attention to the length at cast-on and hoped for the best fit as the chemo cap on size 5 US began. That yarn is so soft, and it temperature-controls for both warmth and cold like silk does. It’s in a soft green on the sage side and would go well with the cotton jacket my cousin with Stage 4 ovarian was wearing last time I saw her.

I can’t promise it’ll be perfect. But I did promise the love would be made tangible and get put in the mail, and for right at this moment that is by far the more important project. I just had to get over my fear of doing it wrong to be able to do it right.

Begin: the rest is easy, the saying goes.

The math: a sixty-row motif equals how many inches and can that be worked properly into the eye’s need for the design to be in thirds or at the very least set up in odd numbers visually. That’s heighth-wise and at the start of the piece: now, how does it affect it width-wise when you need space to have this and this and add this and this later.

After more sketching and staring at colors in various lights, today I knew I would be disappointed if I didn’t finally just dive in and start to see what it wants to become in real life. So I did. And now the next big afghan project is past the ribbing and on its way.

Eight color changes on that last row, sixteen strands, mostly in yarns that grab as they go past. I signed up for this–and it helps that the new green goes so much better than the one I just, just couldn’t and that caused all that waiting for the new.

(Never did take an updated picture.)

You know those times when you really really hope someone is as knit-worthy as you expect them to be?

I found Hayley. First, I totally threw her with the question, Are you allergic to wool?

That was so far away from anything she expected to be asked that it took her a moment to say she wasn’t.

I told her that most people hand me back my phone and say they can’t make that closed-caption app work–that she was the first person to immediately get it and not only that, that was the first time I’d ever felt fully included in any of those group out-loud chats.

She caught her breath as she almost cried.

And I wanted to express how grateful I was…

Is that a scarf?!!

An infinity scarf, yes, I tried to match your skirt from last week.

I got the biggest hug.

But then, I’d already gotten one when she did that for me.

People like her are how a knitter decides to knit for the next person like that.

A sudden guffaw at the dinner table.

What??

I just remembered what kept me awake last night: can raccoons bend their tails over their heads like squirrels? They can’t, right? But why not, or why would they. Wouldn’t they want all that fluff keeping them warm in winter when they’re asleep?

Off to Dr. Google. The AI summary that is the first thing that pops up these days (it used to be Wikipedia with Google supporting it and should still be if you ask me, but anyway) said that squirrels use their tails to control their falls and raccoons don’t fall so they don’t need it so no they can’t.

Remove the squirrels from the question and the AI said they could. They just often don’t.

Alright, let’s try to find the info where those are plagiarizing from and maybe we can get the real story.

(Too many minutes later) Or maybe not. Still: clearly, it’s not really a thing for them.

Oh look. Calvin Coolidge got sent a raccoon for Thanksgiving dinner (say what?!) and wound up naming it Rebecca and turning it into a pet.

Can you just see that trash panda roaming the White House. Wait till it finds the kitchen.

Although, they do have a high degree of intelligence. You wouldn’t catch one of them, say, *cough* cutting off the lunchtime food source of their young in rural areas.

(Spent a lot of time today counting stitches in patterns and mind’s-eye patterns and doing math and finding there just won’t be room for every detail I want to put in. Richard said, Well then you have to cut half out.

Not half. And the raccoon stays. I just have to knit it first.)

There were five two-hour sessions of the General Conference of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints this past weekend, all of them watched from home.

Which means I could knit.

And boy did I have something I wanted to knit. I’d spent all week sure I had a particular yarn but completely unable to find it, not in the place it was supposed to be and not in the places it wasn’t supposed to be and I just couldn’t knit anything else till I’d gotten it out of my head and made real on my needles. Which wasn’t happening.

Till Friday night. At which point the little hide-and-seeker jumped out yelling PEEKABOO! It had fallen behind. I cast on and did the first row to get the chore part of it done so that in the morning it would just be the good part.

Because.

Sunday a week ago, they’d decided at church that with new people moving in, people needed to get to know each other. So they’d set up chairs in circles of about a dozen and handed everybody a sheet of paper with a list of questions to ask each other. There were two sets.

I groaned to myself because this is the kind of thing where it’s all white noise to me. Lots of people in the room talking at once means that the weak-to-me higher pitches of the consonants are obliterated by the decibel level of the rest.

Hmm. How’s that battery…not too bad… I pulled up the app on my phone and asked Haylee next to me if she’d be willing and explained how to use it: for it to pick up what you say, it can do it in this noisy environment but you have to put it right to your face and you have to keep this button pressed while you talk.

I didn’t say, and if you let go of the button and then push it again it erases everything.

I had become a tad reluctant to ask people to use it. They don’t get it. They let go of the button. They hold the phone at the distance they want to. It stares back at them with its initial little prompt unchanged and then they think it doesn’t work.

Haylee, whom I barely know, immediately grokked the whole thing–and not only how to use the app but how the situation was for me. She not only used it to help me hear her, she used it to tell me what everybody else in the group was saying, repeating softly rightupclosetoit.

I took careful note of the colors in the pattern on her skirt. I knew I had that in Rios. I had just finished the afghan and I couldn’t wait to do this next.

Five days. But finally I found it.

So: Conference. (Which had given me a week’s grace period on this.) GO!

I cast off during the last session.

Even the ends are run in now.

Note to myself, and anyone else potentially following this later should know that I am an exceedingly loose knitter: 90 st, US 6, two half-repeats of 10-stitch fern lace, then an M1 in the single stitch dividing them, two more half-repeats, another M1 and then continue from there. Probably should have done it again and taken it from 1 to 4, but it was all a doodle anyway. Maybe next time. I just didn’t want to make it floppy-wide at the bottom, but I don’t think I needed to worry.

It sits in ever-larger folds down the front, not too tight at the bottom nor too loose at the top and I really really like how it came out. I cannot wait to surprise her with it.

Twenty rows on the bottom edging, not 13, 13 was the number of edge stitches. Darn. Of course. Fourteen done now, six to go.

Those long rows are giving me a little more time to plan the next one in my head as well as on paper.

I had had a particular yarn all set to go for the next project, but…

I finally messaged my little sister. I told her I had asked Mom her take on it and that she’d thought the same way I had, that Anne has all the pictures she could ever want in her house and with my turn to give to her next Christmas, I should knit her a monochrome afghan to play as quiet backdrop to all her gorgeous watercolors.

And I sent her a picture of the yarn that it was purportedly going to be made from, making clear that that was an offer, not a requirement.

By this time my siblings are on to me: Carolyn got her picture of her house right down to the tire swing with the scuffed grass below it, the one that started all this, Morgan got the moose and the river and forest and strawberry farm from our childhood memories.

I want one with a story! she texted back.

She wanted me to give it my all like I had with them. She was really hoping for a picture, too.

Part of me felt a near-giddy sense of having been set free. Intarsia is where my knitting soul is right now. But also–a story? Which story, out of a lifetime? How on earth do you choose?

And so my brain has been (mostly) glad to have all those long tedious seed stitch rows in order to leave it rummaging through its drawers these past two days. I poked around on Ravelry this afternoon to see if there were any already-invented wheels on some ideas.

Ooh, look at… And… I could tweak… Yeah….!

Now to make them all come out to scale to each other and to the afghan’s overall size. And how much of that green did I use up last time. Okay then. Let me just finish this last little tiny bit….

It felt so strange as I picked up all those balls and all those colors, counting as I went.Thirty-one. Won’t be needing them again this project.

Three are left on the afghan; a few stitches and rows and tomorrow it will be just be the Matisse Blue at the upper edge.

I worked all day to get it to where I could say that. I was on the last two fish–and then decided it needed a third one above them, right there, to balance the picture out, had to, would never have been happy with it if I didn’t so I did.

Three months’ work and I’m actually going to get this finished before the calendar flips to April.

Yesterday’s yarn purchases. I don’t usually buy chunky, but when you have a granddaughter whose favorite outfit is, to quote her mother, “rainbow leopard sparkle” and you find some Urth yarn like the one on the left, well there you go.

Just got back from celebrating the anniversary of old friends of ours. Their kids flew into town, we got to catch up with them all–I went to college with one of them–and I took the youngest aside and told him,

You changed everything.

I what?

I told him, I argued with that feeling that I should knit for you, going, I can’t knit for everybody who ever compliments my stuff, there’s only one of me and there would be no end of it, I mean, c’mon!

The feeling was so insistent (and he knew the end of that story. It was a vest. A Kaffe Fassett vest, with him at 15 picking out all the colors for it in disbelief as I egged him on to choose more because I knew he wanted to) and his reaction had been so intensely grateful that I’d wanted to be a part of that again. I wanted to knit for other people again. You did that, I said. I’d kept a running list for awhile of the people I had knit for after that and at 182 went, That’s not what it’s about–ditch this. And that had been about 20 years ago.

I thanked him again for changing my life.

His foster/adoptive parents were celebrating their 70th anniversary. Good folks.

This is all bunched up on the needles; spread out, it’s a bit more of an effect of fish to one side and fish to the other with more space between as you go up.

My goal for the week was to get to 40″.

Done.

Nina threw herself a birthday party and invited her friends. She told me to bring my knitting so she could work on hers. So I did.

I pulled mine out first, a white lace cowl in Malabrigo Rios at about the 2/3 mark, and then she showed off her much more elaborate project. Gorgeous. Another friend there was also a knitter. And one said with some regret that it had skipped a generation and she didn’t–but she took a picture of what I was working on to send to her (daughter I think? It was loud in there) because she so admired it.

Turns out she was the woman who had translated all those letters Nina had found in her mother’s closet that had been sent back and forth between relatives in concentration camps during the Holocaust.

Pattern repeat #12, done. (Checking the time) it really needs at least one more after that, all I can hope for is she doesn’t leave early. She and someone else got quite into a conversation–good, good, keep talking, guys.

Repeat #13 got done. That’s shorter than I normally  prefer but it was just long enough to look okay to my eyes. I cast off.

Sitting next to me looking the other way as they talked, she didn’t notice at all.

I retrieved my purse, where there’s always a yarn needle in the change pocket of the wallet. I sat down on the floor in the kitchen where I knew her view of me would be blocked and wove those ends in. I should have some folding scissors in there somewhere… No sign of them. I asked Nina. She got hers and snipped those two little umbilical cords to its beginnings off and the thing was born.

The interpreter of those letters was dumbfounded. And ecstatic.

I explained that its nubbly texture would disappear and the lace lie flat and stretch out the moment it touched water, it’s the nature of the thing.

Totally fine by her, and she put it on and hugged me.

She took it off again to stroke the softness of the Rios.

And at last she did leave a little early, like I’d had a feeling she might.

I was a little wistful that I didn’t have one to give to any of the other friends but they all said that for all those hours she’d put into doing that great gift for our Nina and her family she had earned every stitch of it. And she had.

Nina said as we were leaving, That was the right person for that. That was perfect.