In real life there’s not such a strong demarcation between the different skeins of darker blue between the deeper and shallower waters, and everything is much brighter. Except the whale tail.

Our coastal fog obscures everything except the vivid California poppies, so that’s the effect I was going for. The camera just can’t seem to reconcile the differences. There are three shades of purple lupine in there; I’ll keep trying to get a decent picture.

Dolphins or whale tail. Dolphins or whale tail.

At 42″, that afghan wasn’t going any further till I decided and figured out exactly how I wanted to do that part.

The first time I saw a California license plate with a whale tail on it I wondered ever so briefly why that car had a slice of portobello mushroom on it.

(Sketch sketch sketch measure math placement)

Whale tail it is.

One very proud daddy brought his eight-year-old son over to me before church started.

Both of them loved it when I gasped in delight at what they had to show me: the kiddo’s knitting.

Clearly someone who knew kids and who knew good yarn got him started: it was bright, had lots of colors, was soft, and a wool with just a bit of fuzz to it. Tactility, but not enough to snag on the needle. Hefty but not too thick, needles about a size US 9 or 10–not the tense-grip broomsticks like some kids get started on. Yarn that said Knit Me. It was gorgeous.

There were about three dozen stitches and they were close to perfect. He’d knit about an 8″ square in garter stitch.

Except it was a little wider at the top third.

The daddy explained (trying to help me hear over the organ prelude music, which my captions app was struggling with, too) that his son wanted to know what he had done that had done that and how to fix it.

I looked at the kiddo and told him, Every new knitter does that. I did!

He laughed with his dad while his face went, OH good!

It’s fine like that, I said, but if you want to make it smaller again, you put your needle into two stitches, as I gestured as if my index finger were the needle.

He clearly instantly grokked it. He’d already figured out that that’s probably how you do it but he wanted to ask before maybe messing anything up on this piece he was so proud of.

I saw him after church. He had made that slight decrease and from there the width matched the bottom part. He had already knitted about three more inches, maybe four.

What makes it all the more perfect is his name: Shepherd.

I spent most of the two hours of watching church by Zoom with a cowl project on the needles. Nothing big and heavy, just that one-skein project, wondering with each row how long my hands would hold up. How long I would.

They were ready to quit at the last amen. Me, I went and took a nap.

But man did it feel good to actually create visible progress while anticipating the reaction of the future recipient. Another two hours of work and it’ll be done.

There’s so much depth of color that the camera refuses to see because it’s too busy staring at those bright orange poppies. Which in real life are striking for that very brightness in the context of the fog and surf obscuring the view.

Can you just hear my Iphone going, Told you so!

Monterey Cypress trees can be all kinds of shapes in adapting to wind and drought or water; a flat-top effect like this is more likely the closer you get to the beach.

My thought has been to pick up the sides of the stitches that are at tidal edge and knit a billowing feather-and-fan surf in a near-white fingering or even laceweight yarn, reaching sideways from the direction of the rest of the stitches.

But we’ll see how that tests out. When I do it, I want to do it all at once and the rest of where it would go needs to come to be first.

I’m wrapping the unused colors within the tree across the purl backs of every stitch, as I do. (Don’t mind the untrimmed ends.) It’s slow going, but there are no floats to catch on future toenails or for small curious fingers to get under and yank.

It looks like the backs of my dad’s tapestries. Solid.

It is one-third done.

Six rows, one inch. At about twenty-five minutes per row it felt good to get that much done but for now, I’m kind of done having to make any more stitch-by-stitch color decisions today. I do like that the wide swath of ocean to the right is just straight-across blue, a nice break from the intarsia.

Hmm. Should I put a whale tail or a pod of breaching dolphins in the middle of it further up? In this older project, I simply sketched and knitted the whole dolphin but I’m not convinced that works for me this time.

Maybe bits of twirling i-cord in light sky blue for it to be bursting out of the curls of spray?

Man, those would make a great cat toy out of it!

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!