Twenty rows this time. Two more and the color work will be over with and it will just be a single yarn from there to the finish line.

This has been such an intense knitting spree that I’m going to feel a bit lost–thrilled, for sure, though–when it’s done. Till the next big project, whatever it’s going to be.

Meantime, this is General Conference Weekend, a good reason to do row after row. It was interesting how many leaders of the Mormon Church felt a strong need to say today that contention and anger are not of G_d and have no place in our personal nor political discourse. Compassion and kindness and reaching out without judgment are how we follow the example of our loving Savior.

Amen.

Seventeen? But I started an hour earlier today. You can’t let yesterday beat today!

And so rows 18 and then 19 (hah! Take that, yesterday!) and the first of the three colors at the top of the barn got finished, at ~22 minutes per row. That should speed up a bit as the extra strands from the intarsia work get done with.

I’d even show you a picture, if my phone would hurry up and send it.

Knitted from ten a.m. to nine p.m. including three breaks for icing the hands and letting them warm back up again. It’s nuts–and if I can pull it off for the next six days straight I’ll have it done in time.

I did the first row of the upper window on the barn, so those strands are all carefully counted and aligned and set up, and then called it a night.

I was so intent on getting my row count down last night that I actually forgot to write, and was surprised to find this morning that I had not posted.

And yet, I’ve often thought if I had to lose knitting or writing, I, well, writing is like breathing.

But then some times more than others, so is knitting.

Adding sunflower petals now….

Now that is a sky with promises of the rainy season to come.

Meantime, I found a new use for finger puppets: every time I finish a row, I put one of those bright cheerful little things on top of the stack of books next to me that I’m not reading while I’m trying to get this thing done in time. I think I forgot to one time: 3484 stitches today if I didn’t, 3752 so far if I did.

I booked it. Then I did the math. What have I done to myself, knowing how much I’d wanted to hand my brother his afghan in person and computing just how many rows per day at 268 stitches (six strands per row currently and six rows per inch) I’d have to do to get it finished by then. I’m not even quite to the halfway point.

Every time I’d gone to book that trip I’d found myself going to a certain weekend. No matter how many times I checked the fares further out–and Southwest, for all their sale emails enticing me towards them, kept giving an error message that was very frustrating.

But that set of dates worked.

Okay, then, that one, I don’t want to wait any longer to see Mom. It just felt right. Done.

And then I sat down and spent most of the last three hours knitting like crazy even though that’s too much because I have to at least try.

To make myself give my hands a break I went to go check to make sure I’d written the flights on my calendar. I had not. Okay, looking up at the itinerary and then down to the page as I flipped to the–

–there smack dab in the middle of when I’d booked it for were the words in my own hand, written small and emotional at the start of the year: “Miss you Dad.”

It will be the fifth anniversary of his passing. My mom misses him so much. We all do. And so that brother and my oldest sister and my son and I will be there with her on that day, celebrating the man with the best laugh any of us ever knew.

I can just picture Dad doing just that at the moment it finally got through my thick skull. I’m sure he’d been trying to get my attention for awhile. For Mom. For all of us.

Spent lots of time doing that staring I talked about, then drawing, attempting to chart, repeat. I can’t wait to see how the rest of the afghan turns out.

And in between, rested my hands while reading about the third of a mile wide and long rock face that fell into a fjord in Greenland last year after the glacier beneath it had melted just enough that it collapsed into the water after lo these many millenia and took the rock above with it.

Which was found after scientists spent days trying to figure out why seismographs around the world were putting out a reading as of a nine-day earthquake but without quite the zig zags.

There had been a tsunami inside that fjord 650 feet high and it just kept sloshing around in that bathtub.

There are often cruise ships in that fjord. But not the day the mountain fell. Metamorphically speaking.

It’s 20″. Hey, that was two weeks ago, pre-water leak and pre-guests! There are lace parts (they’ll stretch out the moment water touches it) and stockinette (not so much.) It’s 25″. It’s whatever length it wants to be in the moment, but whatever, my needles say I’m back to work and making progress and it feels good to be back.

One thing I do know: I’m at the point where I need to put it on two long circs tomorrow so I can lay it out all the way flat and just stare at the thing awhile to make sure that what I think I want is still what I actually want from here.

Can I just, y’know, squeeze a Great Blue Heron in on this side? Could I make that picture work on a small enough number of stitches that it doesn’t look ridiculous in scale to the moose?

Her glasses are bright pink with sparkles and they fit her gregariousness perfectly. You would want to be her patient. She’s a nurse.

The lace cowls: I had handspun lime-ish green silk with sparkles. I had a solid vivid red silk from a tubular yarn. I had handpainted merino in a heathery bright turquoise, the yarn bought from Serendipidye at Kings Mountain Art Fair last year.

I lined them up flat in a ziplock and pulled it out of my purse today and asked her to pick one.

She loved them all, she assured me, but that red! Definitely the red.

I quietly remembered knitting it a few months ago thinking, someone out there is going to love this color so much and I have to knit it right now and not put off weaving in the ends. It has to be ready for them.

I had not at that point actually met her yet.

Today it was the most perfect thing.

So is she.

So this time Richard did the Saturday Trader Joe’s run.

He wanted to reach over for something and found himself saying, Excuse me, ma’am.

She looked up at him. And asked, Are you a ___ high school parent?

I am!

She said, Are you a ___ elementary school parent?

I am! Or was.

And… Is your wife that sweet little thing?

He laughed telling me this part and said he’d answered, She is!

And does she still knit?

She does!

He came home and told me he’d given her this address and I said, I’d better write something good tonight then if Penny’s going to be reading it! I’m so sorry I missed her!

Back when the Barbara Walker books of my childhood were republished in the late ’90’s (I used to pore through Mom’s copy of the first one in high school), I taught myself lace knitting from them, and when I started, I was only using lace weight and tiny needles. I made wedding ring shawls, ie ones so fine you could pull them through a ring. I was quite proud of them.

I also made a few people a smaller scarf or stole on those size threes. But I had to really love and admire you. I was new at giving away my knitting, much less making anything like that.

Penny was not my kids’ teacher, but she was one of the teachers at that elementary school when my kids were there and she got one of those. Only a handful of people ever did.

Hi Penny!!

I’m finding I’m enjoying the start of the gray baby blanket. The Rios is silky-soft with a bit of luminousness in the daylight and just that slight bit of heatheriness. It has happily claimed my time ahead.

I found a pattern I really like but I didn’t like how it starts, and it has this weird upward poof at the center. Less so for the author’s, really much so for some who’ve made it.

I thought of various fixes, including crocheting a flat circle and saying the trees are growing out from the world, but the idea of not knowing how it all would really pan out till I’d made an entire blanket–but wait. Actually, the thing that I think really stopped me was that it was a forest scene.

I love it. Someday I’m going to knit it (and get that center right.) But it needs to be the deep green of the woods back East that I grew up in and that is not the color the expectant mom wants.

So I was thumbing through my Barbara Walker stitch treasuries again (every knitter should have the red and blue ones) and a quick dash through a little of Ravelry again–and this time I found it.

And (grabbing a different Treasury) that should be in there, too.

Gauge swatch time.

Math.

Eyeballing.

Yeah. Yeah, I think I’ve got it, and it’ll tell me more the further I go but I think this one is actually already all planned out, totally unlike last time.

If I told you it’ll have a forest after all would you be surprised?

And it is a go!

I got myself to do 1876 stitches in ribbing yesterday because knitting is a stitch marker for time and I knew I would always remember that I’d finished it on Mother’s Day–as long as I actually did so.

I did it! I finished it! I told Richard. And then confessed… Except for running in the ends of that ribbing.

Well then it’s not finished.

Grrr/he’s right/okay. Did it.

And there you go. My Catoctin Mountain afghan with the nearby pick-your-own orchard. I’m hoping for much better pictures later–there’s a lot of detail in those clouds, and I’m still debating about embroidering some moss on those boulders–but I couldn’t wait to show off.

So when you only have ten skeins because that’s a Malabrigo dye lot and you want to make a baby blanket and you know that any kind of openwork will stretch the size/yardage ratio nicely but will also get tiny fingers caught in it–you know that really, it ought to be a solid knit. Also because (hopefully) it is going to be a favorite and loved and dragged all over the place in one hand with fingers in the mouth with the other.

On the other hand, this is going to be a Texas baby. Maybe the yarnovers aren’t such a bad idea.

My brain is having a hard time picking just one pattern. Actually, I am thinking of one, but it’s a right twist/left twist that will shrink the amount of coverage I could get out of those 1000 grams.

The mom wants gray. Anyone got any baby-boy favorites for a solid color blanket?

We were offering finger puppets to the parents of every toddler coming on board the flight for home. It had been much delayed, they were on Texas time, and we knew those kids were going to be tired. Their folks could use all the support they could get.

A woman holding a box full of exquisite, perfectly matched white flowers watched the family boarding just in front of her getting one and something in her smile had me offering her one, too. Her choice.

Oh cool! She quite liked the little gray cat.

She and her very new husband were coming from their own wedding and looking absolutely radiant.

We settled in our seats, Southwest flight 1489 took off, and I was alternating between book and needles; having done an awful lot of knitting that weekend, I was trying to take it easy on my hands. When the crew served apple juice I used the little cup with its ice to hold against tender muscles.

About an hour in it dawned on me: I was knitting an infinity scarf in a colorway Malabrigo had named Anniversario. A blessing of an infinity of anniversaries together to come. How had I not seen this instantly.

There were about three hours left in the flight and I had maybe a little over half a cowl at that point. I considered, a little doubtfully at first.

I could do this. If I didn’t stop at all, after having already knit for two hours in the airport, then yes, I think I could. G_d, if You want me to, I’m going to need Your help because my hands otherwise aren’t up to it.

And so the marathon began, with a prayer for the outcome to be whatever He wanted (including stopping if I needed to to protect me.) I was leaving it in His hands while trying to thank Him with mine. We had gotten to our family’s wedding after all the Friday stuff. We had shared in so much happiness. And here was a chance to bless another new marriage with a story they could tell their grandchildren someday, of love from the whole wide world on their day.

I found to my half-surprise that my wrists had stopped twinging. I did stop every now and then and stretched my fingers and wrists but then I got right back to it. I timed how long it was taking me to do a repeat and when I would need to stop in order to be able to cast off and work the ends in before we landed.

I did it. At sixteen repeats it was long enough. I was quite happy with it. I did it! I even still had time to read just a bit.

Then the trick was to find her again, and I knew if I didn’t then it would happily go to someone else. But also that I’d be a little disappointed, maybe even a lot more than a little.

Baggage claim. Maybe they’d gone straight out the door. I didn’t see them. With my face blindness I probably wouldn’t know anyway unless she smiled–facial expressions are easy for this damaged brain to do still, and also, if, hopefully if, she was still holding those flowers, that would make it easy.

Those suitcases were very slow to start coming out. It was nearly 1:30 a.m. Texas time.

Suddenly there she was again with her box of blossoms, right next to us.

I told her what I’d done. She was blown away. What it was and how to take care of it. I explained that the lace would lie flat and show off its pattern the moment she rinsed it. She would have to finish that one last step I could not do there (oh, and snip those ends, they’re already woven in.)

An infinity of anniversaries to come. To life!

The postscript is that somehow my hands are fine today. But they had earned the day’s rest and maybe tomorrow’s too (like I could stay away from my afghan project that long) to help stay sure of that.

So here’s the story. Someone in my online+Zoom knitting group that I’ve been in for years decided to throw out an idea: how about if anyone who wanted to were to knit a little something for some random other person in the group? Something that was adaptable to all skill levels and universally usable. You wouldn’t be told who yours was coming from, just whom to give to.

How about a knitted coaster, only, they didn’t call it a coaster, it was instantly dubbed a mug rug. Mugrug? I mean, how can you not love a name like that? (Maybe this was an old word to the others, I don’t know, but it was a new one on me.) The group mod offered to do the name drawings and I exclaimed, Oh COOL! quite out loud a few days later when I read whom she’d assigned me to.

And so began the hunt for just the right shade of purple Mecha that was finally found at the eighth and for us last local shop in the Bay Area Yarn Crawl that Nina and I went gallivanting on these past two Saturdays.

Half the skein from Aranea became the darker color here; the lavender was a leftover from some other project.

And here’s what it looks like on the two sides.

I wanted it thick and dense so it would be hard for leaks to get through. I wanted it washable, of course. I wanted it soft. I wanted it pretty. I wanted it purple for someone who loves a good hand dyed merino yarn but especially in those shades.

And it needed to be flat. It is. Even if the edges draw up lengthwise a bit, they don’t curl. (I *knew* that garter stitch creates shorter rows than intarsia’d stockinette but I forgot till there it was, so, there it is–and for this piece I find it more interesting that way anyway.)