I have yet to get a good photo of this. The trees are actually going upward in a diagonal line right to left, for one thing, their trunks, seed stitch, and the yarn gloriously soft.

If I were really ambitious I would have added the concrete Ghost Ship as it’s known locally, a concrete boat (do those two words really go together?) built too close to the end of WWI to ever go to war or even be finished and was instead towed to Monterey Bay, where it was used for a dance hall and a tourist trap and a good time to be had by all. Take a romantic stroll on the pier, watch the birds, fish a little, hey, watch out for those sea lions!

It slowly fell to pieces over the years and the much-repaired pier to it washed out for good in a storm three years ago. What’s left of the ship lives on as an artificial marine reef.

All war-making equipment should be so lucky.

I couldn’t resist at least exploring the things.

What’s that!?

A Pluerry, I told him. Andy’s had full boxes and one half box and I bought the half box out of sheer curiosity. It’s a cross between a plum and a cherry and it’s supposed to be very sweet. I don’t know if I should try to let it ripen for a day or if the cherry part means it isn’t climacteric and we should just go for it.

A discussion from there about the weirdness of that word and how did someone make it mean it can ripen after being picked. (Wait, let me go double-check that…) Merriam-Webster’s says “The marked and sudden rise in respiratory rate of fruit just prior to full ripening.”

Did anyone else just picture cherries having an asthma attack or was that just me?

I knew I should have changed my college major to botany. I seriously considered it.

That thing looks like a mash-up of Bugs Bunny’s squirting flower, Dr. Seuss, and the old Archie McPhee catalog. (Hey look! It still exists!)

Remember how, when we were little kids, it was a big thing for kids who hadn’t taken piano lessons (yet, anyway) to sit down and play Chopsticks? Some were taught by older kids, some proudly figured it out on their own, but it was a way to show off and make the most noise in the room for attention. While the older siblings with their friends over would roll their eyes and groan at having to listen to it yet again.

I never did. I wanted to play like my big sister, not little kid stuff, and as soon as my teacher deemed me old enough I was in. Lessons!

For years and years in my knitting I didn’t know how to knit lace and I didn’t particularly want to; the word itself meant great-grandma stuff, like, y’know, antimacassars (it took me a long time to find out there was a word for those), i.e. big cotton doilies for draping over the backs of stuffed chairs.

For protecting them by absorbing the grease from–think of every picture you ever saw of George Washington and his hairdo. There you go.

For decades I knew people here and there whose one and only lace pattern was feather and fan for making afghans. Some used the occasional purl row. Some did not. They assured me it was easy, and unlike plain stockinette stitch, the edges didn’t curl.

But I thought, but if the result is everybody-makes-that and they-all-look-like-that, why bother? Where’s the learning? The new?

And then Schoolhouse Press republished Barbara Walker’s stitch treasuries from the 1970s: the bible of the knitting world, written because Walker, according to a recent piece in the New York Times, didn’t want knitting to be boring anymore. Thousands of looks that simple stitch sequences could create.

I found out what I was missing. I taught myself lace knitting by trial and error and determined hours with her first book in my lap deciphering her how-to graphics at the front.

Still it took me nearly 20 years to get over myself and knit an actual, unembellished plain old feather-and-fan into anything. (For the non-knitters: think sine waves.) It definitely has its places. I was avoiding them. I think it was the pandemic that left me thinking I had the time to finally just get to it.

I woke up this morning with the sudden clarity: Feather and Fan! It’s the Chopsticks of lace!

It starts off so simple but there are so many variations... (Have fun!)  (Bugs Bunny!)

99F per the weather report, 102F per my Prius.

I had no way of knowing how the Australian wool had been stored nor had I asked; it seemed ungrateful to after all that other-Alison had done to get it to me.

It had come ziplocked and that ziplock seemed to have been in use for some time, given how easily I accidentally poked a hole through it. Good.

I took it out of the freezer first thing this morning and put it inside a black plastic bag and set it out in the back yard to heat up.

This evening I put it back in the freezer. Just in case it was only warm enough to prompt some unknown thing to hatch rather than die: freeze heat refreeze and I wish I’d remembered to move it to the car in the hottest part of the day when I ran that errand, but it should be good enough as is.

If you’re going to have a heat wave you might as well use it.

The mail came.

I’d wanted darkening gradations of the color mix I had in an out-of-print colorway and I could not have asked for better than what was in that package. I opened it in the moment of truth hoping hoping almost not daring to hope–and then stood there just staring: They. were. perfect. Thank you Alison in Australia!

Then in the evening we went to hear our niece’s husband playing in a band in a local park. He’s in the symphony but he also plays bluegrass for fun. This was the fiddle’s turn and those guys were good.

A kid put on a purple dinosaur costume that I hadn’t seen coming. He had to pull the clear chest part down a few times so he could see but eventually he got the hang of it.

A two-year-old girl with a big princess flower clip in her hair ran over to investigate this brand new thing in her life.

He pulled his head out from the opening just below the clear part to show her not to be afraid and waved hi.

Next thing you know he was back inside and they were dancing together to the music in wild abandon.

Oh! her face said. I stepped on its tail. Is that allowed?

Yes! Dance!

Yay! (Twirl.)

It was just the most adorable thing you could ever have hoped for.

So this one’s going to be a riff on the one I made the neighbors’ baby due next week. Only, having seen how that one played out, I’m changing how often I do the yarnover-and-ridge rows in the sequence, for variety’s sake so I don’t get bored if nothing else.

I wanted to show better how the waves change as they approach the shore. This is for the brother who lived in Santa Cruz for awhile before we moved to California.

Notes: Started 5/26/26, 228 stitches, two strands of a thin dk cash/cotton 66/34, size US7, the swatch pretends to promise it’ll be 48-50″ or so wide. I have 2400 grams of the stuff in Snow from when it was on a 3 for 2 sale.

Someday a great grandchild will ask, What did hitting the gas mean?

So. No, I don’t actually have more of that–I used the rest up on my brother’s afghan, which is fine, and when I restocked my Rios via a Littleknits sale, Solis was not, in fact, one of the colors I bought. That’s right, I was going to and they were out at the time.

The plan was to have the cliff in the forefront in an older, lighter, and more highly varied version of Solis, then use darker gradations as the next cliffs reach further back. That wasn’t working either: the skein for that first one wasn’t quite enough to finish the job and the ones in the store were too starkly off to plunk in the front. That colorway has evolved over the years into lots of dark green with some dark blue smoothed in–the flashes of light aqua and camouflage green are out of there. No medium green nor blue in the base color anymore.

I went looking.

I finally found someone on Ravelry who had nearly a half dozen skeins of the vintage of the one I was using listed under For sale or trade. The pictures were very promising, and I could be highly flexible. I’d stopped at a point that left some mixing of rows possible for blending.

I could make all the cliffs the same, or nearly. Fine by me.

She was happy to have someone who actually wanted them, but warned me about the shipping, following up with their postal chart to make sure I really wanted to go through with it.

You do what ya gotta do. I’m two dozen hours of work into this thing. Just don’t let any kangaroos stow away in there and we’re good.

Meantime, my project after the coastal one was going to be my brother’s Christmas afghan, monocolor per his request.

I’ve now finished the seed stitch edge and started in on the pattern. It breaks my rules to have two major projects at once but it breaks them worse not to be able to work on one. And monocolor is way easier to pick back up and continue on later than color work is.

So somebody on the other side of the world is taking the time to box, label, get to the post office, and see that part of her older stash off in order to rescue my project, and I am very very grateful.

Seven sons and a dad who could fix anything. One said, Dad never took the car to a mechanic and so now neither have I, and described starting out sitting on a chair handing tools over as directed, to actually helping his dad do the task, to, many years later, his dad sitting on a chair holding the tools and handing them over and doing the watching.

Their dad was a friend to every human being he ever laid eyes on. He told bad dad jokes to embarrass his kids, because that’s a dad’s job. To anybody. His ice breaker question was, What kind of music do you play?

George was an electrical engineer and a tinkerer. One of the sons called out my husband on the time he and his dad were shopping electronics parts and ran into him. We were all nerding out, he said.

When one kid described his dad taking the dashboard apart on his car to hunt down an electrical short and the adventure that took them on (they did get it fixed), I quietly laughed: my husband did the same thing back in the day, only in his case he couldn’t quite claim the same success. He got the turn signal working again–except that the inside lever and the outside signal were now switched, so you had to remember that signaling left was actually signaling right. He was not going to go through all that again just for that: up lever or down. You know, you do. Good times.

As a boy George started off with piano and quickly went to fiddle and guitar. Loved him some high brow, loved him some bluegrass. Went to every music festival he could. One of his kids described his own friends in high school going, What are you *listening* to! to then deciding, since he kept playing it, that they liked it.

That kid plays professionally now and he described meeting one of his bluegrass heroes.

The man looked at him and exclaimed, You’re George’s kid?!

He took off his battered hat, threw it into the dust, stomped it with his foot, picked it back up, put it on his head and said, Kid? You’re alright.

While the young man (with his own signature suede hat with a feather) watching this, thought, What just happened here??

George is the friend who’d been checked into the hospital just before Richard got checked out. In the months since, nobody was completely sure he was still in there very much but they all came to see him and they say the hearing is the thing that stays when all else goes.

So they played the music they’d jammed with their dad so many many times. They kept him and their mom company. They strummed those strings. They sang. They talked to him. They brought their kids.

One of them was singing to his dad and playing his own instrument when, he told us, I don’t know. Telepathy? He just felt like he needed to put it down and play his dad’s favorite guitar. So he did.

His dad’s breathing relaxed and slowed down. Slower. And then quietly, with love, he slipped away from them. He was just shy of 84.

Bad nighttime photo. Ten inches. Sixty-four rows, 20+ minutes per row, fourteen days… Pretty good progress.

The big projects always seem to get off to a slow start and gain steam steadily.

And yet this one. There isn’t much to see but every time I pick it up I think, Oh, I like this so much. The fact that the brightness of the poppies bleaches out the other colors to the camera’s eye made me laugh: just like in real life!

I had planned to use a more tamped-down shade and it just refused to go on the needle. They needed to be how they are.

You don’t have to make any color choices while knitting the seed stitch edge. So I kept going. I don’t love knitting purls into knits and knits into purls but I like how it looks so adding a bit more was a happy procrastination.

This evening I finally started into the colorwork on my Big Sur project.

I found myself going, Oh, I remember that green! That’s a remnant from Morgan’s afghan! Onto the needle it went. The gray from the dolphin in the ocean afghan? It’s part of a boulder this time. This ocean begins in Blue Jean blue.

I have the perfect orange for poppy flowers but it’s less perfect when held against the others. If I could find a slightly more muted shade… But it should be okay. Probably. And so the lupines got their first row and the poppies had to wait.

I was going to add side borders afterwards, but since the right third of the design is still the Blue Jean blue, I without thinking continued seed stitching to match the depth of the bottom before switching to stockinette. Got at long last to the other side and went–

–oh wait.

If I add a border later it won’t match the other side that’s now going to be part of it all along. I’ve done that before with two contrasting extra balls to untangle every single row and swore I wouldn’t do that again. But I just halfway did it again, and it’ll look funny if one side is added and the other not, so, hey, what’s one more to juggle, and besides it looks nicer that way anyway (a theme emerges).

So I had to stop, wind the next ball of that color, and add it in.

I can’t wait to see what it all grows up to look like.

But I’m going to get that poppy color right before it can go in.

I was hoping to do the bottom edge today, but a cast-on and 1800 seed stitches later on US6, I’m not quite there. My hands are looking forward to resting in their lined splints tonight. But man it feels good to get this project going.

Meantime, someone was nosing around directly outside the door not ten feet away from me yesterday. The double pane window fades the gorgeous white speckles against the deep brown contrasting with its scarf of a neck ring. It looked at me: hey, lady, got any birdseed?

No.

There were a lot of new holes in the neighbor’s front yard in the last week and yesterday they didn’t seem to be there anymore and I guess the ground squirrel was looking for somewhere friendlier. I was surprised, because the one I’ve seen has always been exceptionally wary of me or any movement on my part but this one, for a brief moment, had to be talked into remembering that it must act like bigger things eat it.

I noted its retreat went straight out the gate towards our driveway.

Where a burrow has been right under the edge for awhile. I’m guessing the paving material above helps keep its favorite spot warmer at night. After all, these homes were originally built with radiant heating; gotta keep up that mid-century-modern vibe.

Edited to add: they swish their tails to confuse rattlesnakes as to what and where they are. Someone captured a video of one doing that–and throwing mulch at it! I’m guessing it must have been near the squirrel’s nestlings. No harm done to either in this video, and now I know what a rattlesnake’s rattle in action looks like.

Balls of yarn are sold ready to knit. Hanks of hand-dyed are prettier, often bigger, and give you a better view of what’s inside, and I imagine they sell better for that.

It was a wind five hanks day. Rios, Mecha. Soft wool. Lots of colors. No big decisions, no trying to draw the next big idea on paper, just go get yarn I like ready for when it will say that it’s needed, big project, little project, it’s all good.

Winding yarn is not my favorite task so when I actually feel like doing it I try to drop everything and get right to it.

Drying…

And some sorting and considering happened. Dragons only get to hoard gold–I’ve got all these other colors, too.

I do need to add some of the right greens before I start. Today was a five-errand day between us and I simply ran out of time to get to a LYS, and Friday is May Day, consumers’ one-day strike across the country. I believe in supporting local yarn stores, but any interaction with any big corporation including any credit card transaction is right out.

I think I can find something around here to do to hold me till Saturday.