There were some quirks to the Barbara Walker “Enchanted Cottage” pattern that were why I’d never knitted it: two bobbles on a baby item? You know exactly what’s going to happen to those, right? And the roof. Why are there two styles of roof on the roof.

Well, I can just skip those bobbles.

Oh. That’s why she did that. Well, I’ll have to do some make-ones to account for that kluge. Huh. Came out looking like–a bobble! But it’s not, and it won’t say Chew me! above the door and window, followed by, Pull me! as the baby gets bigger, and I can ease that ease right out of there. I was trying too hard not to let the make-ones shrink up the fabric.

Like that Daisy Stitch did. We’re going to need more photos.

Oh. That’s why on the roof. I still won’t knit it that way, I’ll draw two sets of diagonal lines meeting in the center…

Oh. That’s why you can’t.

I put it down for the night.

I picked it up this morning and a classic metal roof is going in on that gingerbread of a house, with all the lines slanting one way together. Helps roll those hailstorms right down it. I started on it after this picture.

Wherein the sunflower in its preblocked state kind of looks like a Narnia lamp, but actually I like that. (I told me it should have had leaves, though.) 

I knitted most of one of those skeins of Rios today and finished the five trees.

You want a taller tree than the typical Christmas tree lace pattern? Knit every branch twice.

Onward!

The power was going to be down for eight hours today for system maintenance work at our end of the city, they warned us.

So we cooked our way through a bunch of stuff in the freezer and fridge this week. Remember the ice in the paper cup with a penny on top for checking how much your freezer has thawed out? Turns out ours held on better than I would have imagined–and that penny was very comforting. Highly recommended.

So. Got up. Made our morning hot cocoa, constantly checking the time. Yesterday’s blueberry/orange and pumpkin/chocolate muffins (use’em up, use’em up, make’em shelf stable bake bake bake) were ready.

Finally, 45 minutes late, the lights went out–with my phone immediately buzzing loudly that they were going to stay out those extra 45 minutes.

Its aging battery is good for about two hours of actual use and there would be no recharging today. No electronic distractions.

I am late to knowing about it, but a week ago someone mentioned Clara Parke‘s book “Vanishing Fleece” and my copy arrived yesterday.

My hands need frequent breaks these days and that book was just the thing to alternate sets of rows with.

Her description of the shop “A Verb for Keeping Warm” was so descriptive and so “Yes! That’s IT!” on my part. I had no idea she’d gone to college with the owner and I loved that she’d been there, too.

She lives in a town that a friend of mine from high school did for years and was a state representative from. You know I have to ask her if she knows… And my friend’s husband, who was the reporter/publisher/the everything of the town’s local paper before he died.

The baby afghan progressed. Amazing how much faster it goes when it’s 105 stitches fewer and no intarsia. The book got read cover to cover. Even after the power came back on at five hours.

To my fellow knitters? I came away with the thought, we’ve done more than we knew to help keep the last of American woolen mills alive. And we need to do a lot more.

This was ten rows ago and now, right at 4×4″ from the edge, I am onto the start of the patterning.

Or rather staring at it. Doing the numbers again, trying to figure out how it could possibly be off center across the row by seven stitches when the count came out right but then but but but.

I’ll get back to you on that.

Edited to add: Oh. Duh. Got it. Fixed. Onward!

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.

A weird little puzzle for you:

I am knitting the ribbing with two strands, one large ball, one smaller. They sit there side by side getting occasionally yanked as I pull the next bit of yarn towards me, but they are not rolling around each other and they’re not entangling nor really moving much at all.

So how in the name of physics is it that the strand of the smaller ball keeps getting wrapped around the other? Always in the same direction, and to the point that twice a row I have to stop and unwind them lest the growing kinks wreck the feel and look of the thing.

The two splitty strands in a very dark blue against black wooden needles with the yarn constantly weaving back and forth for the knit one purl ones means I can’t really take my eyes off what I’m working on to investigate the shenanigans of those two balls as I go.

But it’s been consistent. And mystifying. If the yarn were overspun, that might at least feel like it makes some sense even if it doesn’t, but if I let a length of it hang down from a ball it hangs straight. As it should.

Huh.

…Which I never do…

…And I won.

Now to start on the other side with the other ball. (I didn’t have to splice on the cast-off, I didn’t have to splice on the cast-off, I can’t believe I didn’t have to splice on the cast-off!)

Picking up stitches along an edge is right down there with doing seed stitch: things I tend to put off.

I promised myself this was the week, and today I picked up the afghan, now in its fifth month, and I did it, I picked those up. One, two, skip one, one, two, skip one, one two, skip one….

Because (and I learned this long ago the hard way) knitted stitches are not square and going sideways from the ones you’re working from in ribbing, if you pick up every single one you’ll make a ripple that will never lie flat, not to mention the extra yardage and time it takes that you could be spending picking up more stitches on the other side and getting that over with, too.

Seven rows down seven to go on this side.

It feels like a mystery that somehow after all this time, that’s all it needs and then I won’t ever get to knit on this particular afghan again. Right when it’s at its most glorious.

When I give people things knit in superwash wool, I tell them it won’t shrink.

Although, a more accurate description would be, it boomerangs.

Sheep’s wool, unlike from other animals, has these microscopic scales that, when you add in water, temperature change, and agitation, interlock and latch onto each other: the wool shrinks and sometimes it ripples all funny but it can be very useful for all kinds of purposes when you want it turned into felt.

A superwash treatment coats those scales so they just sliiide right on past each other.

All by way of saying, my carry-around project suddenly isn’t anymore and in my surprise I forgot to take its picture first.

As it dries it will shrink back closer to the size it was coming off the needles, with some variance for the fact that lace stitches of themselves relax out the moment they’re wet.

So. Malabrigo Rios, Gemini colorway, US 7 needles, 90 stitches to start, and if you look closely there’s this slight jog (more like the jogger was limping) about a third of the way up where instead of doing a plain row between the yarn over rows, I put in an extra yarn over at each point where the next one would go, ie on the equivalent of the wrong-side row. That took my stitch count to 99 to give a little bit of shape rather than just a straight tube to the thing.

Not only is the cowl wet, it’s upside down in the photo. But that’s okay, we can still have nice things.

I laughed till I cried: Alexandra Petri at the Washington Post, brilliant satirist that she is, taking on Taylor Swift’s new album via a chat group of dead poets. That link should share it from my subscription.

To borrow a sample and add another link in case not everybody was an English major or minor like *cough* some people…

William Carlos Williams:

i listened to the songs that were on the album

forgive me

Dylan Thomas: Shut up plum thief

We were enjoying some old rock classics after dinner; I was finishing off the last of the blue on the afghan, there was the occasional comment back and forth, we were enjoying each other’s company on this fine spring evening.

And then Black Magic Woman came on.

That one always, always, I said, takes me back to that guy at the Stanford clinic in Redwood City.

He raised an eyebrow in question.

I was working on Mathias’s baby afghan, I told him, the one in the pattern with circles surrounded by contrasting colors and then more contrast at each edge: all those balls of yarn hanging down. I was well into it and it covered my feet. You were having some testing done that was going to take a long enough time for me to declare that one a portable project for the day because I really wanted to get it finished.

Just before you came out there was a guy being wheeled past me by a couple of family members and he had them stop a moment. Right in front of me.

He made a point of looking, really looking, over the expanse of afghan, the needles in my hands, and then up to my eyes, which he held in his for several heartbeats.

And then again with slow deliberate motion to make sure I understood how he much he meant this, he raised his whole arm in an emphatic thumbs-up with an exclamation point at the end, nodding.

Then he glanced over his shoulder at his family affirming that it was okay to move on now and they did.

It was one of the great compliments of my knitting life and I will never forget it.

And the guy was, if not actually, then a dead ringer for Carlos Santana.

Richard considered that a moment.

“Well he does live around here.”

I had wondered what the next big project was going to be. Now I know. There’s a baby on the way on my husband’s side of the family and some serious celebrating to do. I’d say more, but I’m not sure they’ve announced to everybody yet and they haven’t quite quite hit that three month mark yet.

It’s conference weekend. There were two two-hour sessions and one ninety minute one, and Sunday there will be two more two hour ones.

I had finally reached the part where I was doing one color straight across, the exception being the soaring raptor to come and then somehow I got all of that done, too. (Even if crumpled in the embiggened photo.)

The afghan has been taking 4.5 rows an inch, I did nine rows, and the tape measure says that today I added…black hole alert…0″.

Re the conference. During the first two sessions today, there were, as always, beautiful flowers at the podium.

But one kept grabbing my eye. It was an anthurium, and the camera kept hitting it just wrong: in trying to focus the lighting on the speaker, it turned it into a large floral eyeball looking back at the audience in Ukrainian yellow and turquoise, complete with a dark pupil where the spadix split the spathe (plant part definitions in link) up the center.

In the third session it appeared as if someone had moved that one plant. Just a bit.

Yet again, it rained more than double the forecast that the day started with.

On a cold rainy day, pulling the needles of an almost-finished blanket up to your hands is just the thing.

Those rows where I was wrapping the second color across the back of the first color or the other way around, every single stitch across the entire row, are finally over. It took nearly two weeks to do seven inches. Now all I have to do from here is finish on upwards and add a raptor as I go and add the navy edges for a picture frame.

Unless… Unless I do this morning’s sunrise, where a third layer of darker storm clouds put a top bun on my sky sandwich of bright white clouds and bright blue: so. Five stitches of the current blue to each one of the new, stagger in the first few stitches to recenter and then do three, then alternate 1×1 during the transition between colors before you get into the shapes of the clouds… Ask me how I know…

It was so pretty and it so called out to me.

Then I turned away from the window and half-deliberately did not take a photo of it to tempt myself with.

Considerably bigger than two months ago; it’s not a baby anymore. Such a beautiful animal. (Typed while fully aware we went from one wild rabbit that we knew of to seven for awhile a few years ago.)

It does eat the worst of the weeds, which is great–but it also chews on young fruit tree trunks. The most vulnerable are enclosed in heavy-duty Erva bunny -proofing cages, highly recommended even though they’re pricey, so  that’s not an issue there.

The mango doesn’t have one. It probably should.

I want to put the rest of my sunflower seedlings out there but you know they’d be gone in a night. I do need to buy more Ervas.

Pro tip: do not follow the instructions to stake the cages to the ground: you want them to rattle when a possum or raccoon tries to climb over it, because then they won’t. Mine don’t.

Meantime, the camera isn’t doing a great job of picking out the differences in these blues as I play with the fog/clouds and sky, but I’m getting there.