I’m just going to post this right here to remind myself that even though I can’t draw, sometimes, just sometimes, I do okay enough on the third try that you can actually tell what it is.

No I don’t mean maybe pregnant. Never mind.

And now I have to figure out a jellyfish for the other side, because I think the turtle needs one.

I forgot to start in on time on the jointed back half of the first back leg and will have to either skip it for both or duplicate-stitch that part in over the blue on the first one later.

Maybe I should give the turtle a side view to match the fish. Yeah probably. I’d love to hear your ideas. 

It’s small, even if it looked big sketched on the page. So if I do make rolling waves at the top, should this be a baby sea turtle coming away from the beach? Meaning, do I change which direction I’d envisioned the tide and rolling waves coming in to? Two years of envisioning this makes that feel so, so, backwards, which I know is completely silly. I’ve been teasing myself about still being an East Coast girl at heart: the sun is supposed to *rise* at the shore. The turtle called it.

And for later: do dolphins leap near the surf or only further out? In the direction of, crossing the direction of, what do they seek out and what do they avoid re the waves breaking and yes I’m totally overthinking it to the point of silliness. Again.

Slow going, but slowly getting there.

Why I resorted to the Kaffe Fassett method of color work: no bobbins, no tangles of balls, just a strand as long as you think you can handle, weave in the ends and do another when you need to. So much easier to just grab one at a time and pull it clear of the mess.

I bought a sea tortoise pattern–actually a loggerhead turtle, I think, though not labeled as such–on Ravelry the other day.

Except it’s upright and I wanted mine sideways, and since knitting stitches aren’t squares on charts but rectangles I couldn’t just tilt it; I had to use their picture to try my own sketches on knitting graph paper, but at least it gave me something to work from. Also, I’m trying to shrink it down by about a third, so, following their zig zag lines but adapting where they should go.

Why did that first try bother me so bad.

It suddenly hit me.

It looked like a tick.

Sing it with me: You put the Lyme in the coconut and knit it all up you put the Lyme in the coconut (husk color).  (Who knew the Muppets did that one?!)

…Let’s fix the head on that thing, shall we? Enough of the tick talk.

Meantime, I just have to point out this crocheted aquarium I just stumbled across. Wow. Just, wow.

The city lifted what was going to be an eleven day curfew after two because the protesters have been relentlessly peaceful.

That let’s call it an anthias fish up at the top there that should have started an inch later but it wanted to be where it is and I let it boss me around like that.

I found the perfect shade of bright royal blue in my stash, exactly what I’d been looking for, and oh good it was labeled worsted weight superwash. Neighborhood Fiber Co. Nice stuff from nice people. My grandson Mathias has a baby blanket made out of that.

But I just could not make myself start that next fish with it. It was both thicker and more densely spun than what I was working with and the difference was just too much.

But the color!

I spent the day again wishing for it to be back to when you could simply drive to the yarn store to ogle the options in person.

But I did not want to waste a pandemic day, because this is what those are good for, how I make myself feel good about the isolation: getting that project finished after its two year wait.

And yet I didn’t have what I didn’t have.

Finally, it became, oh forget it, just go with the Malabrigo that isn’t the best possible dreamed-of color but it is what there is and I knew how it would perform with its peers in the wash and that counted for a lot, too.

Kalida’s Washington Square wool will get its turn in its own project–speaking of which, two circular needles arrived from her today for Venn-diagram-knitting the next hats at a denser gauge. Needles, meet yarn. From Ball’more, Maryland.

And then, at long last, I just did it. I grabbed a Rios color that would be just fine after all and simply started that silly fish. As soon as I did I loved it, with a strong sense of relief at the perfectionist logjam having finally burst. Who knew. It was right there all along.

Meantime, the English Morello tart cherries are starting to grow hints of red here and there, and I will definitely wait for that color.

Each fish has been started when I had just a few rows to go on the previous one.

I’ve worked out a design, the placement, and the placement of the one after that and I’m right where I should start it.

I thought I had the colors but when you come right down to it there’s this feeling that something’s missing, and it’s stumping me. I so want to just toss it in the car and drive up to Cottage Yarns in South San Francisco to find what that might be, but then, this *is* my covid-19 lockdown project and as far as I know that shop’s not open.

Meantime, this XKCD comic, just for fun (and so I can find it again.) Don’t you wish we could?

Picture taken a few rows ago.

Somehow a few darker purple stitches came out in a line that makes the fish looking like it’s making a tight-lipped face. I may duplicate stitch over a few to break them up and make the odd stitch more random.

Taking the recycling bin to the curb this evening, I got to meet the woman who put an offer on the house next door and her realtor.

The neighbor on the other side was coming over to introduce herself, too, and she chatted with the buyer while I chatted with him; he asked me if I’d like to see the place and I said, Sure!

He’s a birder with arborists in the family, so he was thrilled at having me point out where the hawks have nested in those trees–and he knew from the get-go what he needed to advise his client re what work should be done to trim them back to safety. And now, why one had to be sure there were no raptor fledglings left when they do.

Looking over the otherwise cleared-out back yard, I told him she could plant any kind of fruit tree she wanted and would likely have a pollinator from across the fence for it. He grinned.

It’s not a done deal, there’s a contingency, but I came away really hoping she gets it and I think she came away really hoping all the more, too. I can’t wait.

Finally, finally, the skein of Rios in Archangel arrived–and in a colorway that can vary by a lot, it was exactly what I would have picked out had I been able to go into a yarn store. It was postmarked May 7, so they got it out the next day and it only needed to travel across the Bay, but shipping is what it is at the moment.

I have not replaced the ten stitches across three rows that I mistakenly knit in the wrong weight yarn; if it really bugs me I can come back and do that later. I just wound up the new and got to it and man did it feel good after being exiled from my project for a week.

The seahorse is the one that started me down the path of one multicolor yarn per critter and the rest solids. Its multicolor was a bit…much, even if the original intent was to have it hiding amongst the seaweed, but after its face and punk-rock mane got done I liked it.

The octopus has a yellow body continuing into the lower part of each arm and a varying pink/peach along the upper and I wish I could show the colors better because in real life, every time I look at it, it, most of all, makes me want to pick the work up and get back to it to see what happens next.

It’s kind of an inverted under-the-seas ’60’s hippy sun sketch. I like it.

Why was that one strand so thin…

Oh. Oh rats. It was Arroyo, ie about 300 yards per skein vs the 200 yards per 100g skein of the Rios, and it looked it, and I stopped, found a similarly-dyed skein online in the right weight–judging by the picture, wish me luck–ordered it from across the Bay, nice and close by, put the afghan away and hoped.

I really wanted to work on it.

And went out and checked on the mango tree because I needed that.

So the plan is: I’m going to get the new yarn, weave a strand around over and through kitchener style over all the existing stitches in that grouping–ten, I think–and then work the original strand back out of there with the replacement already in place.

Or maybe it would be simpler just to undo the entire three rows but I don’t want to. 

What would you call claymation when the medium used is felted wool? We need a word for how this animated history of handspinning was created, because it definitely deserves one.

So, it was like that yesterday, and I sat down and got four rows into the next fish before it was time to rest my hands and call it a night.

It was only after that that I went, wait a minute….

Ohmygoodness. It was true.

I had ordered the Ankara Green to mix with the blues at the top of the future waves. I hadn’t even glanced at the Water Green because it looked lighter than anything I wanted to deal with.

But that’s what it was and after opening that bag yesterday I’d immediately paired it with what had been an orphan skein: if one critter was going to be multicolor to the point of overdoing it, well, as Eleanor Roosevelt says, repeat your mistake and make it a pattern.

And then it’s not a mistake anymore.

This sure wasn’t.

I emailed Uncommon Threads, thanking them profusely and enthusiastically–it meant I hadn’t had to wait a week for the mail from someone else for me to be able to start in on the next fish in colors Uncommon didn’t have–but letting them know in case it messes up their inventory.

I won’t need that Ankara for awhile anyway.

But I put in a second order of it now because I wanted to say thank you. They’d totally rescued me.

You guys!!

I spent more time working out the design, even made paper cut-outs of fish with circles of tape on the back to be able to move them around my drawing while keeping them to scale.

And I went through all my Rios, ie all my soft superwash worsted-weight merino in the house.

Amazing how much that stuff gets used up.

Being with other colors changes how you perceive them: context matters, and there were a fair number of perfectly nice skeins that just weren’t going to work out with what I’d done so far. That not-bright with that bright but not that one with it.

Which of course means that some of what I’d originally planned on using next, but that I’d kept mentally dragging my feet over the more and more I got into what I was doing so far… But I’d been reluctant to order more sight unseen and right now that’s the only option–it’s not like anybody can go browse anywhere. I’d been avoiding the issue until finally I had no choice.

Rios, it turns out, is a popular yarn to order online when you’re stuck at home. For good reason. It took some searching.

I did, though, I found what I wanted–and inwardly lamented that I was going to have to wait till it came from the east coast. Plus Illinois. I did not want to lose my momentum, but the very next row was where I was going to need to start the next fish in some new color and that yarn just wasn’t here. What I wouldn’t have given to have been able to dash out to Cottage Yarns–you couldn’t ask for a better Malabrigo inventory than Katherine’s.

I did spot some light seafoam green at Uncommon Threads a few miles up the road, though, and thought that would be good for the mixing of blues and light at the tops of the waves to come. Their Living Coral was redder than my Glazed Carrot, cool, some of that, too, for the clownfish that I’ll be doing after the ones coming up. If I’m going to be a perfectionist I might as well be a perfectionist.

They didn’t even charge me for shipping.

All. Day. Long. I wanted to knit on that afghan but not if I couldn’t do it right. Color (quoting my friend Constance) is everything.

I was out back watering the mango after dinner and when I came back inside, Richard was wandering down the hall calling my name, holding a pretty little paper bag by its handles. “Where did you go?” He’d seen someone running away from the door and clearly, this was meant for me.

They did?! Seriously?!

It was from Uncommon Threads. Niiiice.

I pulled out the seafoam green and compared it to what I had and suddenly one ball at the bottom of the bag whose tag and colorway name are lost to me leaped out at its new best friend. “That’s IT!” I exclaimed in delight. I could do it! I can do it now! I started doing it now! It’s perfect, both with what has been and with what will be.

Man, that felt good. One fish two fish red fish not-blue fish. Thank you, Uncommon Threads!

That sourdough starter needed to be used, right? (Hey look, a personal XKCD cartoon!)

The pumpkin in that last loaf didn’t strongly flavor it but it did help keep it moist from Thursday to Monday–not bad for a no-fat bread. The birthday boy requested cinnamon bread; I used a stronger cinnamon (Penzey’s, not Costco this time) and doubled the amount but kept the pumpkin for the moment, since I need to use that up. It definitely passed inspection. This could get to be a habit.

The seahorse looks much better with eyes now.

The former President of Stanford University died of COVID-19 today.

Suddenly my patience with staying home went right back up again to where it needed to be.

I’m going to go knit another row.

(Photos finally came through.)

I had a general idea and the pieces of the puzzle but not necessarily where they all should be placed. I had to do the first two critters to see how they looked size-wise across the picture before deciding where the others should go.

They’re not finished but close enough.

So today I measured and counted and compared and sketched and tossed and tried to make visual what my fingers knew how to do.

And yeah, I was right that that one bright multicolor would both make the seahorse stand out and let it hide in its seaweed surroundings, being gorgeous and–no. That was a mistake. Or it sort of feels like one so far.

I could scissor out the original, pick up the stitches and reknit that swatch, catching the sides going up and grafting across the top to put in its replacement so you’d never know. In a yarn that wouldn’t put green in the seahorse itself.

Or I could just wait and see and let this whole thing be what it wants to look like when it grows up. And hey, there’s nothing wrong with that seahorse. Although it does require that the fish above it turn out bright, too, and some of the planned yarns won’t cut it for that.

The old Eleanor Roosevelt take on knitting: repeat it and call it a pattern, don’t confess that you didn’t mean to do that.

Besides, I sort of actually did, so here we are.

I’m finally comfortable with getting to the rest of this afghan. I know now what’s going to be next. It was a long time coming.