Today was a day spent knowing I’ll feel better tomorrow–I’m already starting to–and that it was worth it.

The antlers aren’t quite *that* big–the fabric needs smoothing out.

Added two rows’ uplift on the wings vs the swatch (cue the “uh, I meant to do that”) and decided to keep it.

Am debating adding an edging afterwards to make sure the thing can shrink all it wants and still be useful. It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve done that if I do but it’ll be the first time (remembering a certain unforgettable ruffly edge that with all its extra stitches took forever to do–but the kid liked it) that I’ll have done it like I want it to come out.

One hopes.

Pick up three of every five up the sides this time. Right?

I had just picked him up from work.

I reminded him of that time at that reindeer farm in Alaska several years ago, where I asked the guy what they do with the downy undercoat of their animals in the spring and he kind of held out his hands to show it going away poof on the wind, explaining that they’d been told the fiber was too short to spin. He added wistfully that it *was* marvelously soft, though.

I was agog. I promised him that handspinners would card it with merino to anchor it and pay a small fortune for it–after all, look at the price of qiviut!

He was convinced it could not be.

I pled my case. I told him that come next spring if he sent me some I would very happily demonstrate.

I almost had him. So close. Enough that I knew that after I left he would at least make inquiries–I mean, why turn down a revenue source that could help support his farm?

Today, not looking for any such thing, I stumbled across this:

These merino skeins are softened and enhanced with 20 percent reindeer.
To our knowledge, Coyote Trail Farm and Fiber Mill, is the only mill in the country—probably the world—that processes reindeer. 

At $65 a skein I didn’t buy any, I quickly assured my husband in the passenger seat. With a grin: Yet.

He immediately exclaimed, with the eagerness of a small grandchild, But does it fly?!

That one little puffball in front of the moose is for the above-the-knees single dandelion flower outside the front door that so transfixed me on our first visit to Alaska.

So: this is how I draw. This is how my little sister draws.

You know that old insult, Stick to your knitting? Well yeah. Makes perfect sense to me, I think I will, thanks.

The conching was to the point where you could stop any time now.

This has always been a two-person project. It’s one of the things we like about it.

He had a migraine and I was avoiding the chocolate: usually it’s one watching and stirring as it cools and eventually adding the cocoa butter at the right temp while the other cleans up the equipment, and then one pouring, one smoothing the bars over, but none of that is something you can do in the dark holding still holding your head.

Which is how the big cherry tree that’s needed pruning got pruned. Avoidance is a productive thing.

And then I came inside, washed up, dried my hands exactingly–no water near chocolate–and with a few check-ins with him to make sure I was remembering the right temps for each stage, I did it.

I didn’t get the cookie sheets under the molds shaken to help get air bubbles out, the amounts aren’t perfectly even from mold to mold, and the tempering? Yeah well. I did my best. But I did it, and now I know I can.

Run the ends in, tighten up that little open circle at the top, call it done.

Ed. to add so I’ll be able to reference it later when I can’t remember which variety is which: Guatamalan-Cahabon cacao nibs, roasted 12 minutes at 350, in the melanger now. It had been awhile and we’d been missing the homemade stuff so after writing the earlier part of this post I got a batch going.

Chocolate gets smoother in scent as well as texture the longer it conches. A few kind of smack you in the nose with CHOCOLATE!!! almost burning your nostrils at this stage. Not this one. It smells great but high acidity it is not.

We’ll see just how mellow it actually turns out to be tomorrow when it’s done.

The plan was to work on the afghan.

But that brown Malabrigo insisted I go get it, insisted I wind it, and then when I said okay did that and picked up the afghan, I found myself putting it back down and giving myself over to the urge to not just cast on a hat but actually make that hat.

It felt important.

I guess I’ll find out why soon enough.

The bottom half of a gansey moose (if I can get the picture into the post–the update really scrambled things.) To my eyes it looks more like one of those Star Wars mechanical Trojan horses but we’ll see how it turns out.

We played a bit of a game tonight: trying to guess the size and type of the critter just outside by the sounds it was making.

Big sounds.

I turned on the porch light. No sign, but a moment or two later, more sounds, light or no light–to use an old expression from back home, it didn’t pay it no never mind.

I opened the door so as to hear better and the tiny skittery sound off to the right was probably the target of the I don’t care that you know that I’m here sound off to the left.

“Close the door, you don’t want to get sprayed.”

Well that’s a better thought than a mountain lion. Did I hear that awning bounce a minute ago? Skunks don’t climb nor do they jump down.

I closed the door.

Trying to see if the blog is fixed.

Edit: It is! Yay for the resident computer scientist!

Buffalo Wool Co is moving to a new mill and dyer and cleaning out old stock. They held a mystery offer: for $20 you would get…yarn. What color or blend or how big a skein would be random and unrefundable, but given the warmth and rarity (not to mention natural machine-washability) of bison fiber that $20 was going to be well spent no matter what you got.

My husband has some of their socks and admitted that he didn’t want to wear any other kind anymore, only theirs, preferably their bison/silk ones.

I splurged and he has six new pair of the bison/silks, despite my knowing that “Mom got me socks for Father’s Day” was a line that could live in infamy–except that he really did want them. And he really did appreciate them.

So here I am, I’m seeing that mystery yarn thing, I passed on the chance so that other people could have what few skeins those might be at this point because hey, I have more than my share of good things.

And then, closer to moving time, my friends Ron and Theresa from Stitches and whom I adore ran that offer again.

This time my greed got the better of me before the day was over.

The package came.

It seemed…dense.

You guys!!!!!

It’s the bison silk. Nearly two thirds of a pound in laceweight.

I feel like I just won the yarn lottery.

Does yarn ever leap out at you and jump on your needles and ignore you telling it no?

Yarn is secretly cats.

Yes the baby needs something soft and small enough to drag around behind her.

I was afraid the single-ply baby alpaca might shed a few fibers.

I was wrong. It sheds like a Maine Coon in summer . The silk percentage does not anchor it in there.

But oh mannnnn. That stuff is SO soft. And SO pretty.

So since everything there goes through the laundry the fibers will just felt in place, and, bonus, it’ll even cover over the yarnover holes to keep the baby warmer. Knitting this is fine to do because it claims that it is as it races ahead. It’ll be great.

Right? Right?

Now I just need a pattern of a moose. There are lots of patterns of moose.

Just not in lace.

Every knitter needs a UFO stash.

No, seriously.

So: about three, four years ago? While visiting with a cousin of mine, she clearly had something on her mind but couldn’t quite say it. She almost–but no.

We were about to leave for the airport. She knew this was her last chance and she could only ask such a thing in person, if even then, where she could see my reaction and back off fast and apologize.

I could see those wheels turning and grinned. Out with it!

There was suddenly an even more tortured look in her face mixed with such fervent wishing.

Knowing who she was and how much I adored her I added, Of course I’ll knit it, before she’d even answered.

Which is exactly what she was hoping for while knowing it was too much to ever ask so she wasn’t going to. But she was about to move to England and she didn’t have anything really against all the cold rain she anticipated there….

A scarf and a hat? Sure! Color? Purple? What kind of purple?

Oh I like all purples!

(Well, that doesn’t exactly nail it down…)

So I found some purple yarn, and it was Malabrigo, which I love, so, I bought it.

And it was Arroyo, which I quickly found I didn’t love when I was going to have to do a whole long wrap around your neck it’s cold here and it might not be warm enough and then I’d have to do a hat, too, and then worry the same things about it. I wasn’t the least bit sure that that hand-dyed aspect was her thing. Solid was a safer bet. So I found a thicker, worsted-weight very soft plain-purple yarn with some cashmere added to the wool that I wouldn’t have known about nor found had it not been for her request and she got a lovely set that she adores.

And a bunch of other people got nice things made out of that yarn before it was discontinued.

I still had the beginnings of that Arroyo.

Many times I thought about ripping it out so I could use the needles for something else but that would have meant my hours spent making something perfectly nice but not yet useful were worth less than a $7 pair of cheap ones. So, lacking some better immediate use for that yarn, it stayed.

Until today.

I picked up a few dresses I’d bought for the baby to get an idea on pattern sizing, which answered my question as to whether I needed to continue the lace part further: no.

I went down two needle sizes and started ribbing, because babies grow and ribbing stretches. I decreased for the armhole edges, then eventually at the neck, on up to the shoulders, and there you go: the front of one baby sweater, about six months size. Easiest fastest start to a project ever.

Ten more rows and it’s done, ten more rows and after a hundred+ hours of work it’s done and that’s my excuse for not fixing this silly sideways picture tonight… Seed stitch rows, but there are only ten of them and you can do anything if it stops at ten rows. Ten more rows and it’s done…

Meantime, Bill’s (the guy in yesterday’s post) late dad is the person who, twenty-five years ago, told me about gopher plants and where to find the seeds. So I went to the little ’60’s-hippie-holdover Uncommon Ground place (now a high-rise) and bought some from a man who was serious about gardens in a way that I in no way was at the time. It was a little intimidating, though I’m sure he only meant to be helpful.

They’re biennials, which means they do all their flowering and seeding the second year. And boy do they. Their roots give the gophers the equivalent of poison ivy and they stay away, so, two years for the price of one.

I planted a few. I got one particularly big one and then some more joined it.

This is after having followed another neighbor’s advice and having stuck my hose in the ground to flush them out to get them to move on. The only thing that did was make my Californian water bill jump by a hundred dollars that month. Yow.

So, the gopher plants.

They seemed to work. Cool.

And then they got determined to take over everything, which would not do. One must take them out carefully. They’re not overly friendly above ground to people, either–wear gloves, you don’t want to find out you’re one of the allergic ones.

So I spent a few years discouraging them from coming back and eventually all that ran its course and was over. (With the exception of one plant nine years ago.)

I did, however, see evidence of a gopher again near my fruit trees in 2016 and fought them with the newly-Internet-approved cinnamon sprinkled down every hole and cinnamon sticks on top to be emphatic about it, and that seemed to work, too. This year’s new peach got planted in a gopher-proof wire cage (bought there along with the tree) to be on the safe side.

I haven’t seen any sign of them since the mountain lion came through the neighborhood. Although, truthfully, a hungry raccoon would probably go after them, too.

Look what I just found popped up behind my Fuji apple.

It’s late and it’s small but it is standing guard and I know if I let it, it will soon command an army.

Um, let’s not this time.

On a side note, just for fun and so that I can find the link again: an Alexandra Petri column on state flags that made me laugh.

Since I am alternating rows to blend dye lots, I am now on skeins 13 and 14, at, unstretched, about 49″ square.

I had to pick something up the other day that I knew was going to be good and heavy–and to my surprise it wasn’t so much this time.

I guess all those dozens and dozens of hours of lifting and moving and shifting all that wool in my lap as I worked across those rows is paying off!