Ten tall clumps of green that, a hundred years later, would become a fairy ring of redwoods towering above. She grew up in the redwoods, she knows every stage well. A single tree to each side towering alongside the height of the inner section of blooming bougainvillea, then a matching row of those clumps again.

It all sounded good in my head.

I botched I don’t even remember what on the first clumps and so since I was going to have to rip it out anyway, I took it off the needles and spread it out to see if the width matched my gauge swatch while I was at it.

Wow. No.

Well, then, okay, eight clumps.

But then the flowers were going to be too close together. At that point I’d frogged three times and the baby’s due date was looming and it was getting late that night and I didn’t want to think about it, I just wanted the clumps to stay done this time and to ditch the frustration and get the thing finally past that point. So I did. With seven repeats across.

Which is why as soon as I’m done with the fifteenth repeat (might make it sixteen) I am going back to that beginning and snipping a few rows below the line of purl stitches and working the strand carefully out across to drop the bad part off while leaving enough yarn to go back and cast off from.

And then–this is the hope right now, anyway–after a minor blocking to make sure I can get the sideways to match the lengthwise, I’m going to knit two pieces that look like the sides and sew them on to frame the thing all in the same pattern. Fallen redwoods provide a great deal of life in the forest.

Or I could keep it simple and rib the live stitches upwards at the top and downwards from the bottom or just skip all that altogether and leave it plain. Eh. We’ll see how patient I feel at that point and whether the baby comes early.

But that mismatched bottom–it has to go. It kinda hurts to look at, it’s so bad.

So I ordered this little 6.25″ round leather shoulder bag from a used-goods site that was new to me. I remembered seeing them for sale elsewhere back when those were new, and at $13 for it including tax and shipping, yeah, now it was something I could let my curiosity give in to.

It came, and I tucked the box under the tree.

An email from the seller: did I like it?

Yes, but I’m waiting till Christmas to open it.

A few hours later I got a note from the site explaining that the seller was not going to be paid until I’d inspected the goods and officially accepted it.

Ohmygoodness. I wasn’t trying to hold up her money… I ran, opened the box, made it official to the site and sent a message to the seller explaining my newbie ignorance and apologizing. She was quite gracious about it.

So the point of all this?

We’ve been doing a lot of flying the last few years and my very tall husband likes to sit in the front-most seats if at all possible so his knees don’t hurt–but you’re not allowed to put anything under those seats, your stuff all has to go up above.

Having a ball of yarn wedged between and behind the two of us (no flight attendant has ever said boo to that) means that occasionally it goes flipping out of there. I can’t set it up in my purse at my feet.

The canteen bag: it’s by the same company that made my big purse with the trio of knitted cables embossed into the very nice leather, and I would dearly love to find one like it when it officially gives up the ghost, to the point of having shown it to handbag makers who show at Stitches West and asking them to make something along those lines–it would sell like hotcakes there.

It is clear that Charlotte Ronson of the CR logo, whoever she is, is a knitter. And that she likes to work with good materials. I wonder, did she think of ball winders when she designed this?

Imagine flying with that canteen bag as your necklace, pulling a cowl or hat or socks-on-circs project from it and having the ballwinder-wound flat cake of yarn in a place so custom-made for it as you knit away.

If they tried to count it towards my two carry-ons I could easily tuck it into my larger purse while embarking.

The only question is do you think I could get away with calling it leather jewelry so I could keep it on the whole time? But if not I could always tuck it behind and between us at landing if need be.

(Edit: and then I found a version that IS a necklace, in my eyes, anyway, in wood. Not that I’m buying another nor at that price, but, proof of concept.)

Four white afghans out of six in two years. Because you can’t go wrong with gifting someone with 50/50 pima cotton/highest grade cashmere, and it came undyed.

But my brain, my brain. Colors! Save me!

Some of these looked better together here in the sunlight than they do now at night, so not all these will go in. The orange got ripped back out. But these are way more fun to look at.

Does anybody else do this? I sometimes put a bit of random yarn next to the second stitch in from the edge as I start knitting so that I have a marker to show just how much I’ve gotten done that day and to nudge myself to do better after days when I don’t.

Sixty-eight hundred stitches yesterday was a bit much, though; I mostly gave myself a break today.

Impeachment hearings, the Democratic debate: given Sondland’s testimony today, we could impeach the entire administration. Think of the knitting time!

The eagle is begun and done and now for the mountains.

This time, I wanted the mountain range to be a better match to the view where they live, so I spent a lot of time looking at photos, both online and some I took in September–and I actually did a pretty good job knitting that skyline the first time, especially on the left.

The new ones have begun.

I was at Fillory yesterday, sitting at the large table there visiting with friends and knitting away as people came and went around us, when I found myself getting up to check on the yarn they were winding up for me.

Usually I start off by picking out a skein, paying for my afternoon’s entertainment with it, then pulling up a chair to knit the previous week’s ball into a hat while the staff turns the new hank into a ready-to-knit ball and then they come and bring it over to me. There’s a line at the ballwinder? I’m in no hurry.

But that all just felt too passive this time.

There was a customer I don’t remember seeing before: browsing, going to the clerk to ask a question, looking around some more, kind of hanging back from other people the whole time. She’d been in there about ten minutes.

It wasn’t the head scarf that caught my eye, it was that she seemed so unsure of herself. Maybe she was a beginner and we all looked like experts to her.

But maybe not. Her clothes and accent marked her as an immigrant, I’m guessing from Africa, and I know that rather than the welcoming country we used to be our government has of late made it harder for those not born here, no matter how they arrived, to feel at home.

Often of a Friday afternoon every seat of that table is filled, but this time there were several nice chairs open. Good. I invited her to come and sit and knit with us, if she would like to.

You should have seen the transformation in her face! She had not expected to be welcomed. She had not expected to be claimed as belonging.

Practically speaking, she probably didn’t know if it was a formal class or group or what, but clearly, intruding on it would never have occurred to her. That particular good time and camaraderie she was quietly observing over there was for others.

But we were just random people and she had every right to be right there with us. I knew that it would make our group all the better if she did.

She smiled and shook her head no.

But she was just transformed and she stayed happy and that made all the difference to me, too.

So this is fun.

Or not.

I could just rip out all seven pine trees to get down to an easier do-over. Tried four times to make it come out looking right. Any variation on the concept will do at this point.

And then I ditched it for the evening, because trick or treaters were coming and you don’t want to have to break the concentration, right? Riiight. It does actually look a little better than this at this point but it’s amazing how much time can disappear into so few stitches. And no, just working them straight up as a solid piece and disappearing the dandelion forever won’t work–look how much extra yarn there is by the time you get to the top. All those yarn overs.

What it needed was a double-pointed needle at every stitch. Got it.

I didn’t want to lose 3000 stitches in a grand frog-for-all but at this point I probably might as well have.

Meantime, the neighborhood posted a map of who’s giving out candy, and in the large square block, that would be us and all of two other homes, the three of us being the points on a large triangle.

Not a single kid came. We were just too far out of their way. But I did get to wear my dad’s jewels-colored jester hat!

Two men approaching. Turning in tandem just so. Lifting then folding the flag that had been draped over the coffin. Smoothing it down in a crisp motion. Again. Again.

The one striding in controlled, perfect steps to Mom, bowing low with the now-three-sided flag in his hands, thanking her for Dad’s service to our country and then placing the token in hers.

I was sitting next to her watching his eyes looking straight into hers and it was deeply moving.

I know it’s memorized and rehearsed. And yet–how often now do those two young soldiers get to pay their respects to the new widow of a WWII vet? To honor her as well. Our Greatest Generation.

May our country do the same for their families, hopefully seventy or so years away, when it is their turn.

I’m still having a hard time squeezing my whole Dad into something so confined as a blog post or two, so a bit of knitting instead.

The yarn was a gift and not one I’d used before, but it said baby and it was a superwash wool and it didn’t require a trip to the yarn store to get, so, hey. I grabbed it for my carry on bag last week and some needles and finished a baby hat out of it just before the flight home landed.

Threes or even twos would have been better. But I didn’t pack them so 4 US needles it was. It came out more for cold indoors than blustery weather out, but that’s fine, there’s lots of indoors, too.

I ran the ends in and mailed it northward today.

(P.S. If you should happen to have a Procrastiknitting mug like this with a ball of pink yarn with two straight needles through it pictured on the other side, much though I like mine, test it. The handle got hot first in the microwave which suggests there’s lead in it, so I use it by the computer to hold pens. Particularly don’t put anything acidic in it to drink.)

Well, if I want to say I added another hat to the pile for the guy to choose from I’d better go hurry and finish the thing.

Saturday night, working together: hold the heavy bowl, pour, I can do that part your back’s bothering you you flatten with the knife–fill one mold, two, three…eight, nine…

And a half. Well we’ll just give it a bit of a swirl as we scrape the last cooling bits off the spatula so it’s not just random blops wherever.

The Madagascar variety turned out to be a particularly strong chocolate with an acidity your throat will notice. The Chocolate Alchemist had warned that it warrants roasting this one just right, so for once we’d let him do that part for us.

It wasn’t till the batch had set that we realized what we’d made. It so fits.

Turn the ship! Here Be (just one) Dragon!

The woman at Fillory who helped me find a sturdily washable worsted merino? She also happened to mention a favorite baby alpaca shawl she’d made, that she adored, that her husband was stunned to find that the shrunken mess he’d just pulled out of the laundry had been that. He didn’t quite believe it could be till she affirmed it.

I remembered how crushed my son-in-law was at how badly those first handknit hats for his baby had miniaturized.

I’d thought I could stretch any possible shrinking out because of the silk. I was so wrong.

That all stewed in my brain for a few days and then today at the start of two more two-hour blocks of Conference watching, I went into the stash room, pulled out an 1175 gram cone of that cashmere/cotton 50/50, and cast on.

I just couldn’t do that to him again. Or my daughter or their daughter. That baby alpaca/silk blanket was marvelous but it had to find its own purpose later.

The highest grade of both cashmere and cotton, the listing said. I believe.

I’ve gotten to see a baby blanket I’d made out of it after it had gone through a year of both washer and dryer. It wasn’t fluffy anymore but it was still very very soft. This was not going to be a come-down.

I don’t really have to worry anymore about the cotton part not being warm enough, which is the reason I didn’t use it in the first place–they’ll have moved away from Alaska by the time they get it, which I didn’t know then. But which is why they don’t already have the original: they didn’t want to worry about losing it in the move.

That’s still an Alaskan-born baby it’s for and I figure she still needs that landscape and her moose, and so does her daddy, who’s leaving the area he’s lived in since childhood.

I’ve finished the seed stitch bottom edge.

This time I have more than a sketch on a page to go by and the little details that I thought of after the fact that I wished I’d done I can now do. It will be better than the original.

39, 38, 46, 37, 39.

Our outside thermometer readings these last five mornings a half hour after sunrise.

Good thing I started zipping up the mango tree at night, but what on earth is it doing being in the 30s here in September and October?? The average low is supposed to be 55. Next thing you know we’ll be making snowmen.

It was some peach baby alpaca spun loosely to keep it as soft as possible, with a bit of bamboo thrown in to keep it together. I saw it at Cottage Yarns in South San Francisco in August and my instant thought was, the Honeyladies owner recovering from being shot at the Gilroy Garlic Festival: she’s a redhead. Surely that would be a great color on her.

So I went home and sat right down and knit it into a cowl and didn’t take a picture yet and then forgot all about it in the drop-everything-and-run-to-Alaska-tomorrow thing after Lily arrived early.

I came home to a spoonful left at the bottom of the first bottle of Poison Oak Blossom.

Trying to avoid more fattening desserts, I’m again dipping a fresh fork in there several times a day. Skip the baklava and go straight to the heart of the thing. It’s less sweet than many types and darkly caramel and thick and lovely, but I’d only bought so many bottles at Andy’s Orchard.

The second one was going down fast. This called for reinforcements.

So after making sure I had the right place, today I went to the Honeyladies’ part-time store and bought a half gallon of the stuff because there is no honey like that honey.

I didn’t quite ask it right and the person who let me in didn’t quite understand why I would be asking so she didn’t get what I was asking and so maybe that was my answer. To, essentially: you guys rescue bees and property owners who suddenly find themselves with an uninvited swarm. Is the Poison Oak Blossom a one-time run and done with the bees now removed from there, or are there honeybees currently employed amongst such?

She answered in terms of seasonality.

That implies repetition from year to year, which is great! But I’ll ask more clearly later to be sure.

I waited till the woman had run my card through before saying I had a get-well card for Wendy.

In yarn. I pulled out the ziplock that had that cowl, said what I’d knitted it out of and wished them all my best.

I’d been a stranger and there’d been just a touch of wariness up till that moment, fully understood because a very different stranger had done them so much ongoing harm and pain.

But in that moment I saw it fall away from her as she looked forward to giving and making someone she cared about happy, just like I’d just gotten to do.

We are all in this life thing together.