After ten years of trying there was some serious celebrating to do. Saturday morning was the baby shower. Lots of friends, lots of good food, lots of baby gifts.

I found myself sitting next to a woman who introduced herself as the other grandma and she was delighted when I said, You’re S.’s mom!

Yes!

I knew that meant she had flown in for this. This is to be her first grandchild. So excited.

The friend handing the mother-to-be the presents picked mine up almost at the end.

G. opened the card and read who it was from and instantly realized why the wrapping paper was the size and squishiness it was. Her eyes went huge and straight over to mine, as if to ask, Is it?! Is it!?! while absolutely bursting with love.

My eyes loved her right back and I gave her a little nod. Yes!

Her mom’s a knitter. Her sister’s a knitter. She knows.

She leaped to her feet with the Rios baby blanket held nose to knees, wanting everyone to be as thrilled as she was. “It’s so soft!”

Fillory Yarns in San Jose had held a sale-by-mail during Covid lockdown. I knew that yarn would be *the* yarn for–something, that it would tell me what, when. And it did. It instantly did when my friend told me her daughter was expecting and that it was a girl. Even for Rios it was particularly soft. And washable. And a color she wears a lot. That yarn.

I said to the other grandma, I’ve known G. since she was born. When she was three she told us she was going to grow up and marry our John, six months older, and I wanted to hold her to it, but, no (said with a grin.)

Given that her son is the one who did marry her, it took her a split second and then she laughed and laughed at how we were rivals in mother-in-lawing and she’d won.

She was so grateful over that baby blanket.

It and the shower were a message that in this town where she didn’t know anyone except immediate family, she belongs, too.

Great times.

How often, when you ask a man what his wife’s favorite color is, can he tell you right away without squirming because he feels like he should be able to tell you but he suddenly realizes he has no idea.

But he did know, with certainty. Cool. I went stash diving and–oh, yes, that one exactly.

So. Doctor’s waiting room for a routine check. I pulled out the just-begun carry-around project and marveled at how finely spun baby alpaca yarn can be as jumpy on the needles as a happy toddler in an ice cream shop, especially old stash from when some mills were new at working with the stuff. But it makes such a soft fabric. (Why did I put needles that big in the bag? Stuck with them now.)

A woman was checking in and as she walked past me, she stopped and introduced herself as a fellow knitter.

Cool! Loved her scarf! I asked her about how she’d gotten started.

Her mom and grandmother were knitters; How about you?

I told her my family had traveled coast to coast and back when I was a kid and my mom had taught me how to knit to keep me from killing my little sister in the back seat. She laughed and asked if it had worked and I said yes, while thinking in my mom’s direction, I think so–I don’t remember any arguments after that. Mom, if you want to chime in?

I told her, Six kids and a camping trailer and she winced a little and yeah I don’t know how my folks did it either but they did it. Mom was knitting my sister an Aran sweater I seriously coveted so I wanted to learn to make my own.

We didn’t have a lot of time to delve in deep but we both would have loved to and I told her the name of my blog. So to her, if you’re reading this, welcome! And hi!

Love for love.

The next door neighbor showed up offering oranges from her tree.

She found herself going home with a baby blanket.

Meantime, the mystery at Grand Central Station is solved. NYC now knows where the five foot heart balloon on the ceiling came from: the elderly couple and their daughter were heading to a Valentine’s party and lots of random people wanted to play with it. Cute video.

Atelier Yarn Marin, a week ago, my last Yarn Crawl purchase: I found a pair of 40″ Lantern Moon ebony circs in US 5 and told them happily, This is exactly the size and brand I’ve been looking for.

Nina mentioned afterwards that she did not prefer the metal cord they’ve changed to; she liked the old nylon one better. I didn’t have much of an opinion other than that I liked the look of the nylon better. And true, I do not want my needles to flash light and distract from the working yarn.

So where I’m going with this is: I found that I did in fact have an old pair of size 5 (3.75mm) 40″ ones–in that brand and with the nylon cord, no less. So I started the new project on those.

You know that twitchy scritch scritch sensation with each stitch on wooden needles that haven’t aged well? You won’t get that with the pressure-treated Holz and Steins of long ago but they’ve been out of the American market for twenty+ years. On the third row of this I couldn’t wait to get to the end so I could switch to the new pair. Thank goodness for that new pair.

Even the ever so slightly rounder tip shaping was better for the splittable yarn at hand.

I have completely cured myself of wondering why I spent the equivalent of a skein of good yarn on a pair I didn’t need. Now it’s, Man am I glad I bought those!

To answer KC’s question: yes, there are prizes for filling out the bingo card, including a large basket of yarn and I think more, but I never paid attention to the details. You get one entry for a single line filled out, three tries if all 25 are, and the Crawl continues this week.

One well-thought-out part is that you can choose the bingo card that matches the route you want to take; it does not force you to drive 150 zigzag miles each way to fill out a single line.

We’re talking north of San Francisco to south of San Jose and from the coast to over two mountain ranges to the eastern side of the Bay. That’s serious road tripping and carpooling. It’s taken us all three years that they’ve done this for us to make it to–I think we finally made it to?–every single shop.

For that kind of driving it’s about spending time with the friends you’re carpooling with, with the bonus of running into people again and again doing the same sequence. If we can’t have Stitches anymore, with how all its faces became familiar over the years, we can make our mini version.

The prizes are lovely (but just make sure you wrote your name on that card, the first year whoever would have been the winner wasn’t because they hadn’t and nobody knew who to give it to.)

But Nina and I agreed we rather hoped we won’t be picked: we have a goodly amount and the means to buy more, but for so many people it would mean so much more to their ability to access really nice stuff that would motivate and keep those needles going. I remember those days. We want them to have it.

Those two days happened and we made the time to catch up like the old friends we are because someone out there knew that not only would knitters want to buy yarn, we would want a reason to find the time to spend the time with each other in pursuit of what we love to do anyway and hey, they could certainly make a buck in the process. Cool.

Sometimes you just need a thing scheduled.

I drove to Andy Mariani’s farm in December in part to buy small containers of his best specifically so that Nina could snack on her favorite dried apricots this weekend from a container that fit in her console.

Hey wait, did we get to that Redwood City place we missed last year? Maybe we’re not quite done….

Lunch with the delightful Peggy and Nina, Dharma Trading Company and Atelier Yarns and I now have some one-off hand-dyed skeins of thick warm soft wool to knit Zoom hats with: where the colorway does the showing off and I don’t have to look at my hands while I read the captions.

The lady at Atelier noted that I had a straight line on my Bingo card and did I want to turn it in or try to fill the whole thing (meaning, by visiting all 25 shops on that card for the Crawl.)

I kinda laughed. No, thanks, it was fun but we’re done.

We drove home with me going, After thirty years of ordering dyes from them I finally finally finally got to see what Dharma is like! And I loved the place!

USPS said last Thursday that my package from Colourmart had arrived in the US.

And then it vanished off the pending list.

I went to look up the tracking number…

Till it dawned on me that everybody on the east coast reading this is smacking their forehead and looking out at the multiple feet of snow and thinking how-did-you-think-it-was-going-anywhere thoughts. (Sorry.)

So I finished the hospital Piuma cowl just to prove I was ready when it’s ready, even though (looking at the queue) I’m clearly not.

Stay warm, you guys.

Another day, got interrupted amidst decreasing so a few rows left to go on project #3–only because I didn’t realize I’d done 68 stitches not 70 (did I drop some of the cast on?) until it was the day’s worth of work and it took me a few minutes to figure out whether/what/if I was going to do anything about it. So sad too bad the decreases aren’t spaced perfectly, if it doesn’t pass the galloping horse test put it on a Ford Mustang and rev it up. It’s just a hat. I’m not doing it again.

Hat, cowl, hat. After reading up on his infectious agents I’m not letting anything I’m working on touch anything there it doesn’t have to no matter how good he looks.

Which stashling should I use up tomorrow.

Today: swatching for the next baby blanket when the current one has the edging left to go. That will be the third blanket for the third long-awaited baby due at about the same time as the others.

The new yarn is dk weight. I was going to knit it doubled. It’s another 50/50 cash/cotton, but Colourmart described it as softer than their others of the same blend–and they’re right. This is seriously nice stuff, they all are, but wow. I’m glad the mother-to-be chose that color because it’s the only one I have of it.

You could (doubling it) have a thick warm cushy blanket for easily setting the baby on the floor. Or (single strand) have one you and later the baby could easily carry everywhere because it’s not too cumbersome nor heavy nor hot.

That child’s infancy is going to be during the summer (why are we still arguing when we know what we have to do.) So lighter weight would be good–and it would also mean there’s no question I’d have enough yardage from those cones.

I still hadn’t shaken off the plans I’d had when ordering the stuff.

The only thing to do was swatch and wash and prove it to myself, and I half-deliberately started with the single strand to make myself fall in love with it looking that way.

I went down a needle size. I swatched again.

That was it. That was definitely it. Even if it takes a lot more knitting to make it. I could even go down to a 3.25 mm, but I’m just not that virtuous on a blanket scale.

Yet.

But also it’s a matter of what my hands can comfortably spend endless hours on.

Let’s see how this photo comes out. Okay, so, it’s cutting off the bottom too. Eh.

The big brother of the baby on the way got lace pine trees and I wanted them to each have their distinctive own patterns.

Thank you for chiming in on re odd numbers vs number of family members; the smallest and fourth tree for the littlest felt right.

I had seen pictures of the pattern and impassioned reasons for making the red hat with the sharp decrease lines at the top with the braided chain and tassel below. A knitter resurrected the pattern from the history of Norwegian resistance against Nazi rule; the Germans eventually caught on and threatened to arrest anyone who wore one.

I still didn’t much like the pattern.

At the same time, I could see how it would be the one you’d want to be wearing while protesting ICE. It’s like the pussy hats ten years ago: everybody would know you took the time to make your protest known. Others could find you in solidarity. The photos from the Woman’s March showed just how amazing that could become.

Today I actually found the website where the pattern is (Ravelry link to it here. Crochet version here.)

Here’s how the New York Times got my attention about it: it doesn’t matter if you’re going to knit that hat. What matters is that that five bucks for the pattern is not going to the designer nor their yarn store–it is going straight to the people helping people in Minnesota right now. The ones taking people food and clothing, the ones helping them pay their rent while things are so closed down.

ICE is arresting people without warrants, holding them in the Whipple building, stealing their phones and coats and then dumping some of them at the snow at the back of the building. Frostbite can set in fast. Volunteers are there to rescue and warm them. I want to help with that.

Needle and Skein‘s owners have given out $250,000 so far in $5 hat pattern sales plus donations from people who want to do more. There’s a major run on red wool yarn.

Five bucks. My next Zoom hat. Who’s with me.

Coming along. The gansey-stitch redwood trees on the right have begun.

When spinning fibers into yarn, there’s always this tradeoff: how much twist vs how much softness do you want.

Twisting adds friction. Friction helps hold the fiber ends in place. It adds to the longevity of the garment you make the yarn into. Too much can make even pure rabbit hair feel like the roughest burlap. (I did that once just to prove it. I didn’t waste much, just enough.)

Now, I would never even aspire to buy a dress like this but I might daydream knitting something like it. At thousands of dollars and that brand name you would expect it to be of the softest baby cashmere, spun to hold onto that sweet feel. Scrumptious. (Although disappointing that they don’t show the model’s face. C’mon, Loro Piana, you’re using her coloring to stage your product well but skipping out on her humanity? Less than cool.)

But.

For me it would have to be dyed a color not associated with ICE uniforms.

Why I don’t think I would attempt to make one with potential mill ends of such yarns: picture sitting down in that thing.

Pilling is going to happen the most where the most contact does, especially with the addition of weight against it. Can you see walking around in an extremely expensive fuzzbutt alert?

I may just be fable-ing fox and grapes here, since you’d have to have far more money than I to even begin to consider buying such a thing.

What Aesop probably never knew is that the coveted grapes–as I think of how intense wealth has skewed the humanity of some of its more notorious owners these last few years–are poisonous to canines.

Went to the post office yesterday and was quietly admiring the sweater of the woman several people ahead of me. She had nothing in her hands.

The line did not move by a single customer in ten minutes and I was debating putting my boxes on the floor and pulling out the latest hat project. But didn’t. Finally it was her turn, and I couldn’t hear the conversation, I just got the faces and the tones of voice: sweater woman presenting what she thought was a reasonable request, clerk lady quickly turning to sounding like what I can only describe as almost triumphantly unhelpful.

Finally, the lady in the thick single-ply blue top-down hand knit gave up and turned to go in disgust.

I’m picturing myself back when they told me they could not pay out the insurance on a package that was a “this must never be lost” but was, and being blown off and being told it had to be missing for one more day than that before they could make good on it.

Five minutes after I got home I got the message that they had miraculously found it. Right there in that building after a month or two AWOL. I guess I’d put the fear of payout into them.

I hope they didn’t lose something she’d knit for someone.

Whether her issue gets resolved too or not, I wanted her day to go better than that, so as she went past me I asked her if she’d knit her sweater.

She had–but in her moment of trying not to voice how she felt at that clerk she took it out on the yarn: she grabbed a bit of fabric near her elbow and told me, Yeah, but it pills!

It’s beautiful! I said as she continued on by.

And it was.

And that’s the last thing she heard walking out of that post office.

I got the same clerk. She knew I’d seen all that. Maybe she even was glad I’d tried to make things better for the woman. Or maybe it was that because we were actually doing a transaction, her job required that she ask me at the end to click the pointer at the screen to mark whether I was smiley face or sad face at how I’d been helped.

Her face was such a funny mixture of pretty please!!! and this bared-teeth smile that was trying too hard that I fought back the ‘you have got to be kidding me’ impulse, the laugh-out-loud one, too, and gave her her hoped-for smile.

One for each of them. Fair’s fair.

Two days ago I thought he’d spilled a glass of water  (“No…”) and dabbed it out with a towel. Yesterday my sock got wet again when I stepped on the edge of the carpet there. Today it was Houston, we’ve got a problem. The soaking went several feet wide now.

This house was built with the water pipes running under the slab but ours failed years ago. The then-plumber explained that the reverberations from one leak can make a weak old pipe give way in more places and in fact we had, suddenly, 16 of them. We could jackhammer the entire length of the house–or we could run new pipes across the roof.

Done.

And so here I am 32 years later, going, yeah we had a freeze, but there’s nothing under the house. The wall is dry. No sign of dripping through the ceiling. Somehow water is seeping up through the concrete from the ground, is the best we can tell, even though it hasn’t been raining. This is going to be $$$.

We tried to figure out who we should call for a problem whose cause we don’t know.

Well, a plumber would be able to pinpoint the sounds of the water if it has anything to do with pipes.

I’ve been pushing towels at it all day and the washer is running a load of them as I type. But I think at the very least we’re about to lose the carpeting in the living room.

So I did what one does in such circumstances: I went outside this evening, looked at my oldest Anya tree (2019) that didn’t get to go in the ground because it didn’t look as healthy as the other, but that could be because it’s been potted too long, and finally, a year after I bought a bigger pot and soil, did that transplant. By myself. Without telling anyone.

Those branches are fragile and so am I. It was heavy. That rootball was an impenetrable mass, no easing individual roots apart like I had intended, not while trying to keep it from falling over and crashing. I hope I didn’t leave bare spaces between it and the new soil underneath because air prunes off roots but I’m sure in some places I did. I ended up pushing the mass down with my knee from trunk to pot edge, around and around to try to connect it to below. And then threw those pants in the washer with the towel load.

It was all frankly a stupid thing to do because a friend told me he was going to get some kids from church to come do it for me, but I never got a firm time nor day. I didn’t want to pay another repairman, I didn’t want another major home repair (termites were $79k) and in that moment what I wanted most was the satisfaction of getting this one thing done that had bugged me for over a year so my plant could go live happily ever after and maybe even give me some fruit.

Besides, what are back exercises for.

It feels so good to have gotten it done.

I half-apologized and warned the friend from church so the kids wouldn’t be disappointed, and thanked them for the offer.