Tree near the shore, day two. These lower leaves look like a palm, the trunk does not because that’s not what I was going for. We’ll see how this comes out.

I know I’ve told this before, but when I was first diagnosed with lupus at 31, I read Norman Cousin’s “Anatomy of an Illness,” where he talks about the need for a creative outlet, any creative outlet, to cope with a major new diagnosis.

Okay. Choose one.

I went to the library to look for books on knitting to see if that could be it for me; I’d done a lot of knitting in high school but had given it up for lack of time and money in college.

Kaffe Fassett’s coffeetable “Glorious Knits” was easily the most prominent book on that shelf and practically fell into my hands. The center of it was two models in multi-color coats in a Dutch amaryllis field holding my favorite flowers.

I knew I could never knit any such thing but I had to check it out for the sake of those amaryllises if nothing else.

That book changed my life.

My first try was a tiptoe into it: four colors. A vest for my mom.

She wore it to the Kennedy Center in D.C. and when she sat down in her seat the woman behind her was wearing not only a sweater from that same book but that same pattern! The woman told Mom, Don’t you just love his work!

I got braver. I finished a wool coat out of 68 separate colors, where Fassett wrote, These are large, but they drape beautifully on everybody.

Then I met the guy and he almost had to duck to come through the door to do a booksigning at Uncommon Threads. My husband does have to duck through a standard doorway. I suddenly saw how it came to be that when I got done, Richard had said, It fits me better than it fits you, go make yourself another one.

And I did! Spent a little more time collecting more yarn (it is fair to say there were leftovers) and my coat had 86. So there.

I’m convinced that wanting to have that colorwork without that having to do all that intarsia work–I remember counting 64 strands across a single row for one project that I was knitting doubled, which was a little bonkers, because guys, those were cotton–is how the hand-dyed yarn industry came to be.

So here I am knitting what’s aspiring to be a Monterey Cypress overlooking the ocean in my intarsia afghan when the news came in that the area near Henry Miller’s library and Nepenthe in Big Sur are on fire. Not the buildings so far. They’re doing everything they can to save them.

Kaffe Fassett’s parents built Nepenthe. He grew up there. His family still owns it. His colorways reflect the area again and again.

A small part of this whole project all along has been an inward sort of a thank you to him for showing me what knitting could be and why I would want to do it. For me, he changed–sweeping my arm across the whole of these past 36 years, like the Kaffe Fassett vest for the foster teen who went on to graduate from college–everything.

For so many more people than just me.

Ninety-nine skeins of yarn on the wall, ninety-nine skeins of yarnnn… Take one down, wind it around, ninety-eight skeins of yarn on the wall…

There you go, a picture came through.

This is the left half; the darker blue of the edges continues out into the ocean to the right, the lighter blue is the water near the shore.

The Rios from Other Alison in Australia (thank you thank you thank you!) joined the picture last night.

I have awhile yet to think about it: I debated making a whale tail to look like the one on some California license plates? (Yeah, I think of those as the portobello mushroom slice plates.) Or less straight-up-and-down. I think curved over is better.

Just to show off a little, here’s the dolphin I put in an earlier afghan with three shades of Rios in variegated grays, managing which went where to the point of breaking off sections in the strands a few times that were veering off in the wrong direction. There is no pattern; I basically knit-drew it.

Picked up the needles after a week of trying to get myself to after finishing the white blanket, found myself surprised at just how many long strands and full balls were attached to that thing, and dove back into my intarsia afghan anyway.

And with every single stitch found myself marveling: I had no idea I had missed it so much. What took me so long.

(Glancing upward) Two words I never expected to type together in my life.

Someone in the neighborhood posted video of a momma possum with her nearly-grown babies clinging to her fur and climbing her and over each other on her as she walked across their yard.

To which someone responded with this hilarious link on Proper Possum Product Placement by someone spoofing Minnie Pearl. Go have fun!

The woman in it does wild animal rescue in real life.

69″ x 53.5″ unstretched.

I considered how to make the redwood trees, and the fact that they often have most of their bulk near the top, but chose to do them emphasizing the upward stretch–because I like how they echo the flight feathers of the raptor above.

There were nine rocks. Somehow I ended up with photos of only seven, but anyway, the last one down is where the undertow pulls at your feet as you stand in the water and gives you that one small taste of the power of the ocean.

(Photos taken with the afghan thrown over the Big Sur one that I can finally get back to work on. Thus the lumpiness.)

Seven weeks to the day, which was longer than I wanted it to take but entirely reasonable for a large afghan. The forty-five minutes spent casting off felt like anticlimactic somehow, but the breaking of the yarn? That felt almost ceremonial. Done.

Now it just needs the mill oils finally washed out to let that glorious cashmere bloom into the softness it’s been waiting to show off and it’ll be ready for my little brother.

Oh, and, the yarn chicken? I had 17 grams left on the smaller cone–and I found the package I’d been sure I had of five more cones that matched, so we were good there. The afghan took 1.15 Kg, ie about two and a half pounds.

Alright! Twenty-five hundred and eight stitches later, the raptor is finished, and from here on out it’s plain stockinette sky and seed stitch edging with a minor game of yarn chicken and this will be done!

I’m working doubled from two cones that I think were 600 and 900 grams and I can always break off the rest of the 900, wind it in halves, and work from there. But I don’t wanna, so we’ll see if that smaller cone makes it through.

There are general knitting rules like, go down two needle sizes for ribbing edges, that cable work averages a third more yarn to do than stockinette (which is one reason cabled commercial knitwear usually weighs and costs more), and when you’re picking stitches up the side of a piece to work a perpendicular edging you work two out of every three side stitches unless you actually want the ripply edge one of my kids’ afghans got years ago.

If there’s a guideline for yarn usage for seed stitch vs plain, you’d think I’d know it by now. Clearly the backing-and-forthing of the seed stitch will take more.

But if anyone wants to hazard a guess how much so, I’d love to hear it. Thanks!

I have yet to get a good photo of this. The trees are actually going upward in a diagonal line right to left, for one thing, their trunks, seed stitch, and the yarn gloriously soft.

If I were really ambitious I would have added the concrete Ghost Ship as it’s known locally, a concrete boat (do those two words really go together?) built too close to the end of WWI to ever go to war or even be finished and was instead towed to Monterey Bay, where it was used for a dance hall and a tourist trap and a good time to be had by all. Take a romantic stroll on the pier, watch the birds, fish a little, hey, watch out for those sea lions!

It slowly fell to pieces over the years and the much-repaired pier to it washed out for good in a storm three years ago. What’s left of the ship lives on as an artificial marine reef.

All war-making equipment should be so lucky.

I couldn’t resist at least exploring the things.

What’s that!?

A Pluerry, I told him. Andy’s had full boxes and one half box and I bought the half box out of sheer curiosity. It’s a cross between a plum and a cherry and it’s supposed to be very sweet. I don’t know if I should try to let it ripen for a day or if the cherry part means it isn’t climacteric and we should just go for it.

A discussion from there about the weirdness of that word and how did someone make it mean it can ripen after being picked. (Wait, let me go double-check that…) Merriam-Webster’s says “The marked and sudden rise in respiratory rate of fruit just prior to full ripening.”

Did anyone else just picture cherries having an asthma attack or was that just me?

I knew I should have changed my college major to botany. I seriously considered it.

That thing looks like a mash-up of Bugs Bunny’s squirting flower, Dr. Seuss, and the old Archie McPhee catalog. (Hey look! It still exists!)

Remember how, when we were little kids, it was a big thing for kids who hadn’t taken piano lessons (yet, anyway) to sit down and play Chopsticks? Some were taught by older kids, some proudly figured it out on their own, but it was a way to show off and make the most noise in the room for attention. While the older siblings with their friends over would roll their eyes and groan at having to listen to it yet again.

I never did. I wanted to play like my big sister, not little kid stuff, and as soon as my teacher deemed me old enough I was in. Lessons!

For years and years in my knitting I didn’t know how to knit lace and I didn’t particularly want to; the word itself meant great-grandma stuff, like, y’know, antimacassars (it took me a long time to find out there was a word for those), i.e. big cotton doilies for draping over the backs of stuffed chairs.

For protecting them by absorbing the grease from–think of every picture you ever saw of George Washington and his hairdo. There you go.

For decades I knew people here and there whose one and only lace pattern was feather and fan for making afghans. Some used the occasional purl row. Some did not. They assured me it was easy, and unlike plain stockinette stitch, the edges didn’t curl.

But I thought, but if the result is everybody-makes-that and they-all-look-like-that, why bother? Where’s the learning? The new?

And then Schoolhouse Press republished Barbara Walker’s stitch treasuries from the 1970s: the bible of the knitting world, written because Walker, according to a recent piece in the New York Times, didn’t want knitting to be boring anymore. Thousands of looks that simple stitch sequences could create.

I found out what I was missing. I taught myself lace knitting by trial and error and determined hours with her first book in my lap deciphering her how-to graphics at the front.

Still it took me nearly 20 years to get over myself and knit an actual, unembellished plain old feather-and-fan into anything. (For the non-knitters: think sine waves.) It definitely has its places. I was avoiding them. I think it was the pandemic that left me thinking I had the time to finally just get to it.

I woke up this morning with the sudden clarity: Feather and Fan! It’s the Chopsticks of lace!

It starts off so simple but there are so many variations... (Have fun!)  (Bugs Bunny!)

99F per the weather report, 102F per my Prius.

I had no way of knowing how the Australian wool had been stored nor had I asked; it seemed ungrateful to after all that other-Alison had done to get it to me.

It had come ziplocked and that ziplock seemed to have been in use for some time, given how easily I accidentally poked a hole through it. Good.

I took it out of the freezer first thing this morning and put it inside a black plastic bag and set it out in the back yard to heat up.

This evening I put it back in the freezer. Just in case it was only warm enough to prompt some unknown thing to hatch rather than die: freeze heat refreeze and I wish I’d remembered to move it to the car in the hottest part of the day when I ran that errand, but it should be good enough as is.

If you’re going to have a heat wave you might as well use it.

The mail came.

I’d wanted darkening gradations of the color mix I had in an out-of-print colorway and I could not have asked for better than what was in that package. I opened it in the moment of truth hoping hoping almost not daring to hope–and then stood there just staring: They. were. perfect. Thank you Alison in Australia!

Then in the evening we went to hear our niece’s husband playing in a band in a local park. He’s in the symphony but he also plays bluegrass for fun. This was the fiddle’s turn and those guys were good.

A kid put on a purple dinosaur costume that I hadn’t seen coming. He had to pull the clear chest part down a few times so he could see but eventually he got the hang of it.

A two-year-old girl with a big princess flower clip in her hair ran over to investigate this brand new thing in her life.

He pulled his head out from the opening just below the clear part to show her not to be afraid and waved hi.

Next thing you know he was back inside and they were dancing together to the music in wild abandon.

Oh! her face said. I stepped on its tail. Is that allowed?

Yes! Dance!

Yay! (Twirl.)

It was just the most adorable thing you could ever have hoped for.

So this one’s going to be a riff on the one I made the neighbors’ baby due next week. Only, having seen how that one played out, I’m changing how often I do the yarnover-and-ridge rows in the sequence, for variety’s sake so I don’t get bored if nothing else.

I wanted to show better how the waves change as they approach the shore. This is for the brother who lived in Santa Cruz for awhile before we moved to California.

Notes: Started 5/26/26, 228 stitches, two strands of a thin dk cash/cotton 66/34, size US7, the swatch pretends to promise it’ll be 48-50″ or so wide. I have 2400 grams of the stuff in Snow from when it was on a 3 for 2 sale.