I knitted a little today.

I hold the weight of the work in my left hand when I knit and I had just started a cowl project before my fall, i.e. something small and gratifyingly easy to see progress on, so since the right hand had the easiest job I figured just run the yarn between ring and middle finger and over one from the usual and see where that might get me, tension and gauge-wise. Just try it.

There being two black velcroed strips holding my pinky and ring fingers snugly together for at least the next four weeks.

This is where it got weird: I think I was keeping the tension okay, not that, but the fact that–the yarn tickled. It kept, y’know, moving, too, pulling across those unaccustomed skin surfaces for enough minutes that I wanted a break from it aside from needing to rest the hands themselves.

In forty-eight years of knitting, I’ve never had it running through there before. After the three rows I did it even began to feel slightly rough. But that Madeline Tosh yarn was far from rough.

Is it possible (as I picture guitarists with their hands on the strings) that knitters’ callouses are a thing? On the insides of our fingers. So strange. I don’t know, I can’t get to mine to see.

Maybe 30, 40 minutes, no biggy.

I haven’t splurged on an oak skein winder and ballwinder set yet, even if I admire the handcrafted ones at Stitches every year; there’s a fellow who makes beautiful ones and I’m sure I’ll think hard about it again come February. I always do. (See? I’m still talking myself into it.) Think of all the time I could save, and all those nice flat cakes that don’t roll around all over the place while you’re trying to knit.

And yet.

I know I’ve said it before, but I do like these.

(Yarn: dk cashmere in what they call a set i.e. closeout, eight ounces from a larger cone, was a traffic-cone vivid orangey-red; I hanked, scoured, and overdyed it with a little black and got a deep brick with hints here and there of the rose that the camera favors. No nostepinne involved, just me.)

From the woman who likes to think that she never, ever starts a project without having enough to finish.

I did that. Inadvertently. Who knew I was going to make all the changes I did after I got going.

(Can you just see baby boy fingers yanking at those white tic-tac-toes on the back? Especially should he ever get a new sibling? As in, *remember this? I might have to make him another baby blanket after this one just to, y’know, make sure he stays toasty warm up north there.)

Knowing they stock Rios, I went to Uncommon Threads yesterday for the first time in years and was well rewarded by running into an old friend who was as thrilled to see me as I was to see her–we were in a knitting group together when our children were babies. Jamie!

So. I am now at the end of my first skein of the blue/green Solis and I don’t have enough to get the afghan as long as I want with it. So I thought I’d make wide stripes: a skein’s worth of Solis, done, one of somethingelse, Solis, somethingelse, ending with Solis. That I could easily do.

I know, I tried this at Cottage Yarns last week and came home with two and then decided they were too gray.

There were just two that could work at all at UT, too, but they were a lighter shade of my Teal Feather border and I was going to need this settled pronto.

Tonight I knit a tiny swatch of it, the best test of color. The light always plays off the surface differently in the stitch than in the skein. I held it against the solid teal border under the light.

Yet again I knew even if I didn’t want to know. But hey, it looked great as a contrast to the Cottage Yarn stuff–they can go and be too gray together.

Distance and parking and time in the sun vs inventory. Imagiknit is the American distributor for all things Malabrigo.

I sent them a note: not too yellow? No gray? No streaks of black? Just happy blues and greens shading in and out? Maybe I could do it all in Solis after all, alternating the dye lots.

—

*Ohmygoodness, there was a comment there from our late friend Don Meyer on that post. Wistful. It was like a wave hello across time.

And a day later, wait, are those flower buds on the new mango branch? In November?! The camera kept wanting to focus on everything but them, but clearly, this week’s unseasonal warmth has been good for the tree. Several growth buds that looked completely dormant yesterday swelled an inch today. 

Whatever this other plant is, its scented flowers always begin when the rains come and I love it.

And the afghan keeps coming slowly along.

Tonight was the annual Scout dinner and dessert auction.

There were a lot of really good home-baked desserts on that table and a lot of people bidding on them; it went on for awhile. I pulled out my knitting so my hands and my eyes would clearly be busy engaged in doing something else and not letting myself angle for Andrea’s chocolate caramel cake–it hit $110 and deserved it but there was no way. My own *two tortes together pulled down $95, less than last year but no small amount.

Someone across the room whom I didn’t know saw me and pulled out her own knitting. And so when it was over and I went and admired her work and introduced myself.

English was a bit of a struggle for her, although it seemed to me that she was better at it than she thought she was, and I explained that I’m hearing impaired–it wasn’t her.

She asked me where I was from.

“Washington, DC.”

“No–where are you from.”

I wasn’t sure what she was getting at.

She clarified. “What country?”

I laughed. “England, about 400 years ago. Oh, and Sweden, for my great great great (great?) grandfather.” (There were random other add-ons after the Mayflower but I wasn’t going to burden her with the whole spreadsheet.)

She laughed, “I’m from Hong Kong.” Then she proudly pointed out her grandsons, who were clearly, like me, a bit of everyone from everywhere.

We had cowls on our needles at about the same point in progress. Hers was a mobius. Mine laid flat.

——-

*And there were two more in the fridge, one not-good-enough-for-company slightly overbaked plain chocolate, one hazelnut chocolate left over from a party I **planned for but had to miss. We really didn’t need any more desserts around here for the moment.

**Because no matter what that map program said, road A did not connect through to road B and there was no telling where it was and after much back-and-forth searching and mileage I gave up and went home (hey, hazelnut torte for us.) Next time.

Stripes. That’s all it is. That and some stitches dropped and picked back up just so.

The 3×1 ribbing around the sides, though? I’d have to block what I’ve done so far to be sure, but, it’s not compacting the way the white and green/blue variant yarns are, not being subject to the same process–so it’s getting longer faster. I think. Unless those others let go when they hit water and stretch out.

But yeah, I should have anticipated that.

The trick then would be to figure out in advance how often to short-row those edges, starting now.

The things you don’t learn from a small swatch. Every time I ever knit anything, I’m better at it the next time.

Got to Cottage Yarns but didn’t find Rios skeins that were quite, quite what I wanted. I bought two anyway and took them home and waited before knitting so as to be able to see them with my project in both natural light and after sundown, from near and from far.

There was an element of gray to them that I just could not talk myself into. The project is brighter than that. Well, they’ll make great hats for somebody, then, that’s fine.

Kathryn did, however, have eight skeins of Rios in Cerezas, a red deepened with a bit of black that was absolutely gorgeous. It will be the afghan after this one and it made it worth the trip.

Meantime, last night when the temperature dipped to where the Christmas lights auto-clicked on on the mango tree, half of them were out. Nada. One rainstorm last year, all I had to do was unplug and re-plug to reboot and that was that, but not this time. This had never happened before and I was horrified: the whole back of the tree, and on our coldest night yet, but at least that one strand was okay. I couldn’t take off the cover to work on the other without losing what heat I had under there, so I threw a third layer of frost cover over and hoped for the best.

I searched online for opaque blue C9 incandescent strands, knowing I didn’t have any more and kicking myself for not having bought backup. You want blue because it puts the least light into the night while you’re trying to sleep–although I do have some green replacement bulbs at random, and a few blues that half the paint has come off of. (See how much brighter those greens are? Glad they’re not white!)

Thirty bucks shipping would get them to me in two days (and nights!) and nobody had them in stock locally yet. Yow. I passed for the moment.

The remote read a little colder in the morning than I would have liked but it stayed above 50F and the tree looks okay. The growth-flush areas were near bulbs that were still working.

This evening I carefully unwound that second strand off the limbs and brought it inside. Plugged it in. Nope.

I had an old strand of clear lights handy and plugged that in. It worked fine.

I tested a few of the blue bulbs on it. Worked. So I took every blue or green bulb off the dead strand and every white bulb off the good strand and switched. Threw the bad strand in the recycling, plugged in the other: okay, that, that, that, and that one, more replacement bulbs. (Meaning green. Hey, it makes it match the afghan on the needles.) Test. None of these are new; I re-replaced a few.

At last I was able to go back out there and carefully rewind the new strand back into the tree, trying to aim the lightbulbs where they wouldn’t touch leaves or limbs directly, just the wires.

The whole process took nearly an hour that I tried not to think of as lost knitting time. But this is when this needed to be done, before the sun went down, and you do what you must do.

The tree is in a blue state now and it is protected from the harm the darkness had threatened it with.

Did not make it to Cottage Yarns before my appointment, and after, it was just too close to rush hour for that kind of distance.

So I started a new cowl project for the waiting room beforehand even though I’m usually a single-issue knitter.

My gastroenterologist had retired and this was the getting-to-know you with someone new and to get established as her patient before her practice gets full. So far I’ve had pretty good luck on the Crohn’s staying away post-op but you never know.

She spent a lot of time going over my chart with me and asked a lot of questions. She was thorough. (And, in a quick aside, she liked that yarn on my needles.)

Had I ever had a throat endoscopy done? I nodded. Who did it? she asked.

You, I grinned. In the hospital.

Oh wow! Oh so I did!

We totally hit it off. She mentioned that she loves and wears that shawl…and I thanked her but reminded her a friend of mine had knit it to thank her for her part in taking care of me when I’d been so ill in ’09. Ever since, I’d wanted her to have something from me, too–as I pulled a ziploc from my purse such that she could just see the colors inside. Pick one.

She chose the one I so much expected she would and that I had expressly knit for her. The Shibui Maai cowl. (The color is Imperial. Sorry I never took a better photo nor one of it finished.)

I told her that that was the last skein I bought at Purlescence before they closed.

Purlescence closed?

Yes, they did.

She’s a knitter. That flash of regret in her eyes at the news said it all. She stroked her new cowl and exclaimed over its intense softness and told me I didn’t have to do that.

May I, though?

She laughed and gave in and the way she loved that little bit of knitting and felt all that I’d hoped to convey with it was all that a knitter could ever hope for. I’m in good hands in her care–and she in mine.

She didn’t let me leave without a hug.

The beautiful bride and groom and the reason for the trip East. My generous childhood friend Karen put us up and enjoyed our marveling at rain, real rain, real East Coast rain and oh that depth of green everywhere!

Meantime, our mutual close friend Kathleen’s brother, diagnosed with stage 4 brain cancer three months ago, rallied and somehow hung on yet a little longer.

We got to spend the time with her she’d needed, when she wasn’t caretaking, and his hanging on helped her feel permission to come unload on us; it’s hard and we knew it and we needed to comfort her as much as she needed that comfort.

It was a rare gift to be able to be there for her. My niece could never have known when she scheduled her wedding that her timing was exactly right for someone she’d never heard of.

And in possibly related news…

Friday, Richard and Karen and I picked up Mom from where she was staying and it having been ten years since the folks had moved away, we drove Mom around old haunts for the afternoon.

My old high school, where she had worked: it was gone and a completely new building was there now, still red brick (another familiar essence of I’m-home re the style–bricks crumble in quakes so there’s very little of it in California) but so very different.

The house I grew up in that Mom and Dad had had built for them: it looks like a single story at the front but opens into light and warmth at the back, built into the hillside dropping behind it with Californian floor-to-ceiling windows upstairs, and downstairs, windows nearly that big, taking in those beautiful woods.

It had been remodeled and looked very different–but I had seen it during that process and she hadn’t and I knew how much she would love what they’d done with it. Outside, those plants covering the side screens alongside the wheelchair ramp to the front door were new to my eyes.

I tried to talk Mom into knocking on the door with me. She just couldn’t quite.

It was to be a six-patient assisted-living facility, which the folks did not know when they sold the place. Turns out it never took off and now is simply rented to a man and his son.

Which we found out from Barbara when…

We pulled the rented navy Camry into a driveway on the side street up the hill. The lace curtains had not changed but Mrs. N. wasn’t home, so Richard backed back out and Mom directed him across the street and up just a bit.

Where Barbara was. She had seen us walking up to that first door and then pulling into her driveway and was wondering who and what on earth was going on.

And then I knocked on her door.

Her daughter Elaine opened it and staggered backward–and I think I did, too. “What are YOU doing here?!!!” she exclaimed in thrilled disbelief.

She lives in Tennessee and she knows I live in California and Mom in Salt Lake now. What I didn’t know was that this was the weekend of her high school reunion. With a December birthday I had just missed being in her class, but still we knew each other most of our growing up. We had reconnected on Facebook but hadn’t seen each other face-to-face in decades and I was absolutely the last person she expected to show up right there at her mom’s door. Or my mom either for that matter but there we were.

We had a great time. Richard and Karen got included in it, and Kathleen’s brother in the conversation; no, Elaine didn’t quite remember that name, but she wished him well in his current journey forward.

And Susan, I have to tell you: I have particularly enjoyed how perfectly placed each pointillist dot is on a cowl I made out of your yarn, Burnside Bridges colorway, evenly balanced everywhere. Elaine admired that cowl, too, and as the conversation and our time there was winding down she mentioned again how very pretty it was.

“I have another one, this is yours,” as I took it off my neck and offered it for hers.

A gasp, “NO!”

Again, “I have another one,” I grinned persistently.

She was grateful, she was disbelieving, she loved it, she was thrilled–and she made me want to go knit for everybody everywhere right now. I had needed that, which she couldn’t have known, and that was her gift back to me. And it was no small thing.

I do have another. In Koi Pond, not quite the same colorway but close. And, because I didn’t find where it had fallen out of the suitcase while I was packing till after the trip, it’s, uh, not quite actually finished yet. Close enough to claim it, though, right?

And I think that’s why Kathleen’s brother was, and as far as I know, is, still with us: it was his reunion, too. There was a chance to see his old friends one last time who might be coming into town, if they came to him. I so hope they did.

Something was wrong towards the end of the spring–it wouldn’t turn off automatically anymore. I unplugged it and called it done for the season.

A little troubleshooting and reprogamming (thank you Richard) and the automatic mango warming lights are now back in business.

Meantime, I started this with a recipient in mind but as I worked I found myself thinking of someone else. Incessantly. How much she would enjoy it. It kind of annoyed me at first because I really was making it for–

–wait what. Am I supposed to be getting something here and is it just going right past me.

So I stopped and said a prayer and let myself just feel whom it was supposed to be for: person A or person B? (Or anyone else, for that matter.) There’s no point in offering them ones they wouldn’t love as much. Or made of a fiber they can’t wear, maybe?

Person B.

Why it makes a difference, I have not a clue, and they’re both getting something from my needles. Switched, is all. And that’s fine.

“A friend is getting into knitting,” my son texted. “Got any surplus fluff you wouldn’t mind passing along?”

Fluff being kid code around here for yarn, roving, raw fibers, the works. So I asked what colors they wear.

“Darker colors normally? Never seen him wear anything in a light shade, thinking about it.”

Yeah I was a little surprised and shouldn’t have been, but mostly I was just delighted, knowing just how much fun and even joy that person could be bringing into his life and others’ in the years to come; sure, I’d be glad to enable that a bit, here, just let me stash dive here a moment (don’t think he’d want that laceweight silk…)

Meantime: I read a week or two ago someone’s story of his squash climbing out of his raised bed, the plant within that bed dying, but where it had grown out to it had rooted to the ground and was still merrily producing new squashes. He wrote it to tell people who like to grow on trellises what they might be missing out on, but for me, it was a hey, you, water that new area that the plant had sprawled to, chasing the sun as it edged away from summertime.

So I started to.

And suddenly, after not producing a single new squash since July, there was a new one, and two days after that another new one and maybe they’ll even have time to mature before a frost (especially since they’re near the mango tree.)

And I found this description of parthenocarpy and maybe it explains how that second one has that huge flower still going while the new squash is already that big: as a seedless decoy, which would take less energy out of the plant to produce, to keep feeding the critters it needs to disperse its seeds while luring them away from some of the seeded squash so the plant has some chance of actually being reproduced next year.

We’ll see when we eventually cut into the thing.

Alright. So. Stash. Time to get to it more than that first quick glancing-over. There’s a definite dearth of manly superwash worsted around here, hmm.

Finished a quick little project from the cobweb cashmere and silk that I 9-plied on my wheel recently to a fairly thick yarn. The splittiness was a pain but it was worth every minute now, now that it’s warm and so soft and pretty and–this is important–done. (Note to self: US 7 needles.)

Interesting stuff, meantime: an art-quilt wallhanging made for a museum exhibit in Australia pieced from handknit swatches and bits. I particularly like the digitalis flowers. So graceful.

And for those who haven’t seen this article yet, a bit of Viking history, starting with a 600-year-old reused sail found insulating an old church in Norway.

And so we know they were woven not of linen but of wool, shrunken and fuzzed out to a solid surface that was then coated against the water.  They would have needed 700 sheep per sail, and their entire fleet, two million animals. There is speculating that the Vikings set forth in search not of treasure of gold so much but of pastures for their flocks.

There are lines like this one: “Not long ago, researchers found that laundering synthetic fleece floods aquatic ecosystems with tiny plastic microfibers, which made wool look even better in comparison.”

I’d never heard that before. I imagine it’s surely better if you stay away from the fluffier types that tend to shed a bit? But all the more reason to buy wool to keep warm in.

Which you will need while reading a description of sailing in a replica Viking ship in those icy waters. Enjoy.

The promised picture: Burnside Bridges colorway by Abstract Fibers. Easy four-row lace pattern used in my Water Turtles shawl.

I saw something black in the back and white in front this afternoon that made no sense, so I stood up and walked to the window for a closer look. Meantime, it ran not away from my movement but down the fenceline towards me, continuing my way in a great hurry even as I stepped outside trying to fathom just what on earth that was. Too small and movements too short and jerky to be the neighbor’s Maine Coon cat.

It was a squirrel, and in its mouth was a furry bright white object bigger than it was. Was it raiding a hawk’s stashed kill? A wide strip of pelt and an ear? But–white?

It was dashing for the safety of the redwood and the understory tree below it as fast as tripping over that thing would let it run and it was so intent on stashing and not dropping nor stopping that even a human coming in between couldn’t give it pause. It had its prize and no threat could make it give it up. (But the thought that one might could make it run all the faster.)

And so it ran right past me. Definitely not feathers, that was fur. To line a baby nest? Squirrels do produce kits in August as well as the spring, it’s a little late for that, but. But it was white. There is certainly not a whole lot of wild bright white anything around here, if any, mammal-wise; could it have been someone’s torn stuffed toy?

I knew that color would stand out and I stepped back and looked at the understory it had leaped to but they were gone.

I may see it again, like the weirdly coveted bubblewrap that took a similar route a year ago. Or maybe not.

Knitted, finished my project, forgot to blog till bedtime. Pictures tomorrow, then!

The slant of the light and the earlying of the evening: it feels sudden and it’s taking me by surprise every day as if this were new to me.

Last week the littlest peach tree, in full glow of the light sunrise to nearly sunset for months, was shaded by 3:00 pm; now it is by a little after 1:00, and since this is the Baby Crawford’s first year all I can do is hope its six and a half hours (today’s count) were enough. And again I debate whether this is the year the camphor tree comes down to make more room and light for the fruit trees to grow into.

Tree service or airfare to two more weddings coming up. Well that answers that.

It’s cooler, too, and there is this sudden need to knit All The Warmth that is waiting in the skeins of patient yarn.