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.

We found out this morning that there was to be a protest tonight at the plaza in front of City Hall. We both wanted to go. Neither of us felt up to it this evening.

But we were there in our hearts and to you who did show up, here or elsewhere, you have my profound gratitude.

I saw the guy ever so briefly past the window. I went outside.

It was a mailman I’ve never seen before–tis the season for extras–and he looked to be in his 80s, a stooped old guy. That was a surprise. I picked up the mail he’d just left and hearing me, he turned around to offer one more thing.

Because you cannot risk leaving a to-be-cherished Christmas present out where someone could just walk off with it, is all I can guess, and maybe those last steps to ring the doorbell at the end of the day at the end of the route felt like a bit too much? He was clearly relieved to be able to hand it directly. He loved my, Oh cool! when I saw who it was from.

It held a single skein of hand-dyed yarn from Karida Collins of Neighborhood Fiber Co in Baltimore. She had taken a break and dealt with health and when she re-opened her business I’d ordered that one little bit just to cheer her on.

Clearly, whatever was in there was too valuable in the old mailman’s eyes to be left unguarded. Neighborhood. Fiber. Good things!

Karida’s going to love that.

I haven’t opened it yet. That mailman’s smile convinced me it’s for Christmas.

My seat mate on the plane to Seattle was wearing a teal blue outfit. We got to talking towards the end of the flight; she’d been admiring the hat I was knitting for some time. (It had a specific recipient in mind.) She showed me pictures of her quilts and I found myself exclaiming over and over: the woman was a gifted artist. My stockinette beanie suddenly felt quite plain.

Before the trip, I had gone looking to see just how many things kicking around were FOs that just needed the ends run in so as to be ready to be gifted. I was a little horrified to find that the answer was eighteen.

That’s a lot of Zoom-meeting hats and cowls knit during non-hat-wearing months so they hadn’t gone anywhere and the incentive to spend those last two or three minutes on them just hadn’t been there.

I picked one at random and ran those silly yarn ends into the backs of the stitches and wondered what had taken me so long. And then felt done.

Why was I not feeling the need to do those other, y’know, seventeen, c’mon, hon…  shrug

I stuck the really truly finished one in my jacket pocket to make sure I would have easy access to it in case I didn’t finish the one on the needles. You never know… But also–that shuttle bus from the car rental place can be really cold up there.

The hat in my pocket was teal blue.

She was as thrilled as I would soon be by Heather’s socks.

And that is how you get those 17 other stragglers out of here and on their ways to where they were meant to go all along.

60×68″ unstretched. I finally got a satisfying picture that looks like what it looks like. The childhood peach orchard in the rolling West Virginia mountains, first version. I tried to take another with it all smoothed out about five minutes later so that you could see the raptor soaring where the clouds were parted, and maybe even the wild violets blooming, but it was too late, the sun angle wasn’t having it.

I finally made myself sit down and check every end–yes they were all run in, yes I always do as I go along, but what they’d needed was to all be trimmed just so, nice and neat. Done.

I finally feel comfortable post-op driving to the post office.

I finally sewed on the tag that personalizes it.

We’ll talk tomorrow about my finally actually getting to the post office because I considered the rush hour traffic and, no. But the requested muted-colors version is boxed and ready to go to my sister, where it will fit in with her paintings.

Let me just make sure first she isn’t traveling over Thanksgiving.

Such a cute baby gift idea. (Etsy link.) And not to take away from the crocheter’s sales, but I’m suddenly wondering: could you attach the squares with velcro? In such a way that you could attach them to each other in varying ways? Or maybe flaring out from a joined bottom like a hand of cards so as to be able to rearrange them into an impromptu small blanket on the go, like for tucking in in a carseat? Or not permanently joined at all except in little loops and buttons to make a solid surface across as needed?

Who’s the entrepreneur ready to run with that?

Thursday I got official post-op clearance to drive again.

Today I headed to Cottage Yarns. I was down to a single skein of Mecha, it’s cold and rainy and the season for making thick soft quick wool hats (read: no-looking no-brain knitting) and not being able to pick out colors in person had been bugging me.

I walked out with six skeins. That’s about six or seven weekly Zoom knitting-group meetings.

Meantime, on day 11 of the baby afghan in Rios worsted weight, I’m at 8.5 full repeats of fern lace so far out of the 15 I’m aiming for at the moment.

I need to go wind up that next skein.

Little goals that push the progress along: I want to split-splice the third skein on before I have to haul this to the retina surgeon’s waiting room tomorrow. Got less than an hour left on this one.

Huh. If you crop it enough you can get the HEIC photo to come out as a JPEG on the re-send and it comes through here.

For whatever it’s worth: I always knit the seed stitch at the sides more loosely when there are yarn overs in the main body, because the moment water touches them they’ll stretch out more than the seed stitch when knit at the same tension. So I give a little bit of extra over there.

Two conflicting thoughts:

I have a lot of Malabrigo Rios.

And two, I thought I had a lot more. (The greens, how could there not be more greens. Maybe because I keep using them all up.)

I do, actually, I have a couple of dyelot bags of ten and I have close to this many more individual balls that didn’t make the cut: I was sorting out the ones that had noticeable brown or black added to the dye bath. I wanted bright. (Which is why that lavender from an indie dyer.)

I’m not sure all these will still make the cut and there are a few that are so screamingly loud that they risk being that stuck key on a piano that demands the hands hit that one note again and again, visually speaking.

Most of these are leftovers from the ocean afghans so they’re not full skeins.

But what I do know is that sometimes you have to stare at something awhile and sleep on it a night or two while it seeps through the brain before you really get going on making something you’ve never seen before.

Which is why the plain-and-fast Mecha hat I started last night is almost finished.

Every day that eye is noticeably just a little better than the day before. The weird little pale volcano erupting in plumes of fast pale smoke that then fall into its center as it collapses and vanishes, haven’t seen that one today. As one friend memorably told me ages ago when I was describing a head injury, Alison: most of us have to use illicit substances for that! (To Marshall in Singapore, that line stayed behind when you moved away.)

Come to think of it, the fake fruit fly–it’s too black and too solid and way too fast and too jerky to be any floater I ever had and besides, they cleaned out the floaters–that’s gone, too. What a relief. I’d been thinking that one was surely permanent.

I hadn’t even noticed its absence till I started typing this. Double-checked. Yeah. It’s gone. Oh that is so good.

It is amazing how instantly one can take normal for granted the moment normal returns.

Now to finish that 1×1 ribbing hat. Twice the hand motions, twice the stretch, twice the time to do, but I can knit one of those with my eyes closed. Two inches to go.

An antique of a UFO unearthed in the dig, started before I’d ever even heard of Kaffe Fassett, that’s how old it is.

For cabling, it’s kind of…plain.

I slid it halfway off the needle to get an idea of how wide it was in real life. 48″unstretched. I remembered it only vaguely: I had stopped because it was using up yarn faster than newbie me had anticipated and what I’d wanted, it could never be. There were a few skeins tucked away with it.

Whichever baby missed out on a blankie probably has a kid in high school of their own by now.

It was fascinating listening to my daughter instantly knowing who it had to be for and how I could finish it off so as to be usable for them. It was washable wool, it was soft enough, you know she’ll love that you made it, do it, Mom!.

How then could I not?

There are shelves to either side and there used to be a high stack of bins up the center blocking one’s access to right or left or any of the yarn without wrangling each bin sideways one by one to get it entirely out the door there and over the furniture and into the room. And then the next. And the next.

Now you can just pull the one you want straight onto or above the middle of the open closet floor.

She did the lifting, I did the sorting, and two friends have made initial claims on the better of the old yarns.

So much space had been taken up by half-empty ziplock bags inside the bins. On the other hand, the only sign of moth damage after all these years was to two skeins that inexplicably were not in one; they went straight to the trash outside.

I found that I did in fact have leftovers of possibly all the colors from making a llama/wool (remember Classic Elite?) baby-cabled sweater in the 90’s in which each half of each cable was a different color, a la Kaffe Fassette. I’d long wished I’d made it a cardigan. There is one untouched skein in the background color and all those accents; I could actually cut it open and do that now.

Naaahhhh… It’s not soft enough to put in the time, but it’s good to know I could.

I found the front of a more elaborately cabled handspun sweater in two colors (should have taken that picture) from my very earliest spinning and dyeing days. It’s fabulous. But I knew halfway through that it would never be finished: the teacher I was taking classes from had us try dyeing with unsweetened Koolaid, more or less on a lark and because she knew we would hear of other people doing that.

I got some pretty nice colors! And I used them in that sweater.

So then I tried dyeing small batches in lots of flavors to see what range I could get.

Which led to my calling my neighbor and apologizing if she found any pink hairs on her cat because it kept insisting on lying on my wet wool–and I knew my teacher’s light gray cat had dyed itself green by climbing into the actual dyepot she’d set out on her porch to cool.

I have long chuckled at the idea of the neighbors doing the dishes and looking out the window to see a green cat waiting for its hair to grow out!

Next, I wanted to see how colorfast this stuff was. Using commercial dyes that are meant to be dyes made more sense to me, but on the other hand, any summer grocery run will net you some of this when you need it. So I left little bits of it outside in direct sun for two weeks, the neighbor’s cat notwithstanding.

Three things happened: some of it changed very little or not at all. One color blanched at the thought and faded fast into the palest of grays before the time was up.

And the rest (or what I could find of it)?

Our kindergarten teacher found the nest when it blew off the roof of the school: it was made of bright pink koolaided wool woven with twigs and leaves and a downy feather or two. But the pink! The wool! She knew I’d be interested and waited to show it to me and I instantly knew exactly where that had come from–and we’re a quarter mile away!

I wondered how many others there were out there. Clearly it wasn’t just the wind picking the stuff up.

So, yeah. All that colored cabling work, cherry I think was the darker one, that one… Well, at least it held up in a dark closet for 31 years.

But I’ve had an inherited half of a cotton sweater front serving time as my favorite dish towel for a long time. I can rip this thing back to the start of the armscye (or just leave it as is) and shrink it into a trivet. Or a dust mitt. Or a dishtowel. It deserves to be used and enjoyed; it’s waited long enough.

Let me go read the new inscriptions on those bins so I can figure out which one it went back into.

Out of the eleven, there are four empty bins now.