That blouse I ordered last year turned out to be a little bright for me but I never sent it back, and this morning, somehow that turquoise-blue seemed just the thing. I had reasons for wearing something else but it just announced it was it and it was just plain bossier about it than I was. Eh, okay, then, no biggy. (One of those moments you notice after the fact when it all comes together.)

A few days ago, an ad in the local paper caught Michelle’s eye when I was pointing something altogether different on that page to her: she saw not the planning commission story but the small-box notice from the city that the last of the free concerts in the park for the summer was going to be Tuck and Patti. She couldn’t go, but she definitely thought we should.

And we definitely agreed. It would start almost late enough for the UV not to be an issue, too.

And then I forgot all about it.

We got home from grocery shopping and Richard asked, What time does that start? Do you still want to go?

I would have missed it entirely. I’d forgotten. We should eat dinner…

No, said he, if we want to sit somewhere decent we should run.

Okay, good thing we had ice cream at Smitten on the way home, it would have to hold us.

It was going to be closer to the Bay than we are and it always cools down a lot at night in this area anyway–I delayed us a moment while I went searching for a cowl that matched that blouse. I was sure I had one.

I did, some hand-dyed Colinette silk bought at Purlescence. Pretty stuff, if a bit bright for me; one of those yarns that leaps out at you and says it will be the most perfect thing for…someone… I always thought it would look better on someone larger and darker than me, and pulling it out of its ziploc this evening I found I’d never even woven the ends in. It had never been worn. Richard waited patiently while I did a quick job of that. (Photo of one of the snipped-off pieces.) And then while I grabbed a heavy sweater. He’s a good one.

I always come away from listening to their music wanting to be a better person and we own I think all of their albums. I’d seen them once before, when they played on the plaza at City Hall to thank the town for getting their career started, and at the end that day, when the crowd had thinned and mostly gone, Tuck asked me, clearly sure he did, Where do I know you from?

Around town, is all we could guess.

But it left me feeling a bit of a connection to the both of them.

Loved loved loved hearing them tonight. They went off the stage setup to the back at the end and I was surprised that there were some people wanting to take their picture or say hi but the crowd wasn’t entirely swamping them yet.

I’d already been thinking I needed to say it in as few words as possible so as not to hog their time. The experimental med that could have killed me on the spot, having no real choice–and yet. I had.

Seeing that I wanted to say something, those closest to me gave way and nodded me forward.

I took off that long cowl and said to Patti: “I knitted this silk. I was in the hospital thirteen years ago trying really hard not to die. Your words, ‘I won’t give up, my path is clear’ were part of my soundtrack. Thirteen years!” as we hugged each other.

She took my hands in hers and asked me, her face full of emotion, “And what was your name?”

“Alison Hyde.”

And Patti? If you see this and that’s not your favorite color combination, tell me what color you’d most like and it will come to be.

I experimented in casting off in seed stitch. With all the lacework I do, I haven’t knitted gansey-type stuff much in the last ten years and was a little rusty. I knew exactly how the edge would look if it were straight stockinette and I purled vs knitted it but I was curious to see if the knit-purl-knit-purl back-and-forth might change that effect any.

So. I was on a wrong-side row on the afghan and tried knitting into each stitch to cast off. Didn’t love it. Undid it.

Thus the photos are of the finished right side (above) and wrong side (below) after purling-to-castoff from the wrong side at the top of the seed stitch edging. I like how it formed matching half loops over the purl bumps on the wrong side and how, on the right side, that straight line made a nice clean end there.

Knitting-to-castoff got me the opposite of that. Little jumpy hopscotches across the purl bumps in front were not going to do it for me–purling for the win.

Note that if I’d been working from a right side row, knitting it would have gotten me the same as these.

I figure I’ve put easily over sixty hours into that undyed afghan at this point and tonight I realized that Cat Stevens’ song “Into White” sings in my head when I’m knitting it. Like, All. The. Time. It wasn’t the knitting I was a little bored with, it was its soundtrack. The logical thing to do would be simply to turn on the stereo and drown it out with something else, but, I didn’t. Too busy getting to the end of this row. And the next. And the next.

So I tried to come up with songs I knew that had the relevant word “white” in them, just for kicks. And presto! New earworm!

“Knights in white satin,” (so far so good) “never reaching the end….”  Oh, mannnn….

Anyone?

One of my sisters wants a black cowl, and I figured that if my eyes were going to be working in black it was going to be a yarn that of itself made me want to work with it despite the difficulty in seeing the stitches. Plus, this was my sister; I wanted to make her something really nice.

And so I bought the last two skeins of black Woolfolk that Purlescence likely will ever sell.

I finished all but the cast-off as the plane landed Friday–if I were going to stop at one skein, and it would have been a very nice if smallish cowl. Given the iffy lighting on the plane and the splittiness of the yarn, this was very tempting.

Tonight, though, I finished it the way I wanted it done, after using up as much of the second skein as possible. My father-in-law was in the middle of Facetime talking to our niece and I showed it off for her briefly–I was really proud of myself for persevering and doing it right: generously sized, thickly knit, and warm as well as soft against the northeastern chill.

And that yarn really, really is soft. A cousin got an earlier one-skein wonder out of Woolfolk and couldn’t believe it wasn’t cashmere? Nope, merino, plain and simple. Matter of fact, Deborah’s ecstatic reaction was why I bought more.

So.

I put it away, Dad continued his chat, and afterwards he asked me, What did you call that?

A cowl. Or sometimes, an infinity scarf because of its being round.

He grinned: Looks like a bib!

When we laughed, he added, Or a hoodie. (But not wanting to waste the opportunity for a good tease, he went back to) A bib! Like, y’know, you eat lobster with!

Me, laughing: Can I quote you?

Him: Sure!

Actually? Lobster would be a dish worthy of such a thing.

The tech took about nineteen minutes, and I know that because I was just shy of finishing a second row when he came back with my ears.

I was at the audiologist’s, having my hearing aids cleaned, and apologized to the two women who came in and wanted to start a conversation about what I was knitting: I leaned way forward and watched their faces and still didn’t quite catch what they were saying. That though at least is one place where people get it when you can’t hear.

But I did get the question as to what the name of the pattern was.

Ostrich Plumes.

They were delighted, and one turned to the other and as she spoke her hands mimed wrapping a shawl tightly around her shoulders in great happiness at what clearly was a fond memory.

Which made me happy, and motivated to knit more.

She wanted to touch the yarn, and yes, sure!

Size 5 needles, 49″ wide by 21″ long so far–or so–you know how stretchy things lie at measuring–not bad for the first week.

(Ed. to add: unblocked, it looks right now like a knitted version of the cushy thing in the peach boxes to keep the fruit from bruising. I like that.)

Bigfoot came back tonight.

Now, in hindsight, there are a whole lot of better names I could have picked for that pattern, even if it amused me enough at the time to think it was actually a good idea. It was when someone told me, “Well, I can tell *you* have small feet” (and I do…) It’s been out there that way for nine years now and, um, oops. Sorry.

The longtime owner of the original brushed-kid-mohair shawl, the yarn dyed by Lisa Souza, told her sister (who delivered it since she lived closer) to tell me she loved it, she treasured it, but in our warm climate she simply never wore it–it made her too hot. She’d decided she was just finally going to ask would I mind? Was this okay? She was sure I could find the right person to re-gift it to and she really really loved it but it was a shame to have it just sit there.

(I couldn’t for the life of me have told you what I’d given her.)

Oh! Right! That one, the one that was actually in the book, dyed in Shade Garden colorway! Sure, I said, stroking its softness, although I might, y’know, actually keep it and wear it myself. Or not. We’ll see. Was it okay if I wore it?

That got me a laugh.

I’ll add a picture in the morning; we had a great visit and it’s late. (Ed. to add, there you go. And I would have given it to the sister who brought it back to me and let it stay in their family but she’s a redhead who does not wear purple.)

This was going to be the last skein. See all that purple? The afghan needed to end in mostly-purple.

Amazing how much of this didn’t come out looking that way at all, including a ladder alternating in black and bright lime. The colors all along have been like kids at recess, spreading out across the playground.

Eh, the blanket could stand to be a little longer anyway.

So tomorrow I wind up a mostly-dark but variegated purple, a +1 to the dye lot bag and originally intended towards a border anyway, and finish the thing.

By the time I figured out the needle size was really a bit big for the yarn (much better picture of it here) I was not where I could grab a different circular so I just kept on going.

The yarn saves it. It will definitely do.

Today I had an appointment at 2:30 but I had it in my calendar for 1:30. Going back home and coming back would have taken way too much of that hour, so, hey.

And that is how I very nearly finished this. I could have cast off and handed it over on the spot to the dental assistant who exclaimed over it and told me she’d tried to knit but had gotten discouraged at not being immediately good at it. She said this as she reached to touch the project and exclaimed over its softness and the colors in the yarn, and I thought, You really are a knitter, you just don’t know it yet.

But the other two assistants would have wanted one, too, and I’m not quite there yet. So I let it go back in my bag for a few more rows.

The philodendron (The Man Eating Plant as it’s always been fondly referred to around here) will from time to time produce a tiny leafy bit that encloses an actual new leaf and then that green outer covering dies away. The plant grows a little faster than geologic time, but not by much, so I’m sure we get a new leaf in the summer but I’m not sure we get much more than that in a year.

The latest new leafing out seemed…different this time. I noticed that just enough to remember today and go oh, that’s why!

Because that abnormally swollen not-actually-a-leaf-cover finally opened up.

We’ve lived here for 29 years and we have never seen the thing bloom before.

Hiding in there was this weird blob that instantly reminded me of Margaret’s wool.

Years ago, this elderly friend at church gave me some wool yarn she’d had since the ’60’s or so, when natural scratchy wool with the lanolin mixed in was the fad. Over all those years, the lanolin had splotched and dyed it randomly yellow and I knew from my handspinning classes that there was no washing that out. It just was.

I didn’t love the stuff but I was determined to try to at least do something with it, for her sake. And so I stuffed the whole two pounds’ worth in my dyepot to make the coloring a little more deliberately random. The bad part is, I did it without tying enough ties around the hanks because I didn’t want to bother and I told myself it wouldn’t matter even though I knew I knew better.

It. Felted.

I mean, it felted! Like crazy. Random parts of random balls, all in one big hopeless tangle. I threw the whole mess in a closet and didn’t want to deal with it and was grateful Margaret never asked.

My folks came to visit awhile after and Mom discovered that wad. She insisted on pulling it gently apart and untangling it. I tried to say it wasn’t worth her time, but she wanted to do this for me and so she did.

It took her two days.

Only a mother… A mother who knits, that part helps, too, but still, only a mother loves us enough to take on such a task.

So yeah. Looking at that blossom? I had to look it up to find out I should be calling it a spadix. But to me there’s really only one description for that thing. Yarn barf.

I’ve loved these three shades of blue together ever since that surprise box arrived from Melinda at Tess Designer Yarns. Her Merino Lace is exceptionally soft. I had been waiting for them to tell me what they wanted to be, and today suddenly there was no other yarn that would do.

I opened the hanks and put them on the back of the chair one at a time and wound up those long-awaited three balls.

They were single ply and very fine and maybe too fragile for carrying around and pulling the project in and out of my purse with that many strands tangling.

The wheel.

Dark blue with the middle blue. The middle blue with the light blue. Ply those together, all the spinning done loosely so as not to interfere with the hand of that fabulous merino–we would have four strands not three, but also one single sturdier ball to carry around and it would definitely knit up fast. Speed is good right now.

And then I worked at felting the resulting yarn a bit to melt the strands together. Loved loved loved how it came out.

But I wanted to knit it NOW and it was wet.

Well hey…there was enough middle blue left for one bobbin. So. Middle with light till middle runs out, dark with light till the light runs out, then together. Wind into a ball straight from the wheel do not pass go do not collect water–I can do that part later.

Just a bit of the dark blue left–one bobbin’s worth, put with–well, yeah, that would be cool if I…

Just let me finish this project I started out of that second go-round.

Finished this one up, done in my old Rabbit Tracks pattern, and thought I’d be diving right into the next.

Instead I found myself back at the wheel mixing shades of cashmere. That light brown cobweb weight has been in my stash for years and I’ve used a whole lot of it, and yet, loaves and fishes, there always seems to be more.

(At $10/lb I bought the vendor out, at least twenty pounds. She’d gotten a shipment with a moth fluttering out and it was cheaper to hand it to me at her cost than to ship it back to China. Hey, for cashmere? I can kill moths. Turns out I’ve never seen any sign of a single one.)

So yeah. I plied it with some ecru 70/30 cashmere/merino from, again, Colourmart. My drive band started stretching out midway so that it wasn’t quite propelling the wheel the same and adjustments were needed; makes the yarn artsy, right?

Gloriously soft, and that’s the part that matters.

An Indian Free peach, the one peach tree I’ve got covered in birdnetting. Never used the stuff before other than in pre-netted cages and tents. The new branches, of course, start tiny and grow right through the stuff or curve around in a balled-up wad of leaves while trying to, making for a weird shaping to come–and harvest isn’t till September. Any voices of experience, feel free to chime in here because I’m only pretending I’m knowing what I’m doing.

The Fuji is far too big to cover. I just do my plastic-clamshell thing to fruit as high up as I can reach and call it good.

There was a small squirrel sitting on the fence today eating one of those very unripe apples. He flicked aside the first of the peel, but other than that he ate and ate till that entire small fruit was gone. Then he took an Olympian leap to nearly the top of the tree for another.

This is a far cry from that apple tree’s early days where the squirrels would pick one take one bite ick no toss pick bite repeat till they’d stripped the entire thing in a day. I guess the long drought has impressed on them that food is not something you ruin. This is the first year of plenty in their lifetimes.

Meantime, I hanked up eight cones of yarn today. Scoured two but reluctantly decided to wait on the others till I had more space for them to dry in, but I got the chore part done. I wound up three that had already been scoured.

That, and I knitted.

Because last night I was at the wheel and the drive band broke. Really broke. Well that one’s done. I asked Richard, “Do we have any string in this house…?”

Unscoured tightly twisted merino? You bet I considered it, but no. No spinning today. And so I put my Kromski niddy-noddy (nope, not seeing it on their site but trust me, it’s a gorgeous piece of wood and well engineered) to good use and felt a great sense of accomplishment.

Two plies each medium, light, and dark brown from the cones: I’m up to 504 yards, apart from the small skein I knitted up today. Not very often do I get cobweb yarn in the mail one day and a finished project with it the next.

The pictures are right off the needles and after rinsing in preparation for blocking.

So. After I six-plied as much of last night’s two bobbins together as I could squeeze onto the third bobbin, I still had a bit of yarn left on the first two–I’d filled them too full. Happens. So I started to spin those to make a smaller skein, ran out of just the one, found a bobbin over thataway with a bit of that leftover light brown cashmere in the same state of anticipation and just added it on to where the one had run out to see what I would get.

Just about perfectly half and half.

I tried it on and loved how the lighter top rolled down to the darker bottom, rewarding my randomness.

A $12 mill-end merino cone arrived from Colourmart today and it sparked one of those sudden bursts of creativity: hey! Spinning on my wheel, not even really spinning, just plying, that would be a very gentle exercise for my stomach and back and arm muscles while not being enough to raise my blood pressure like the doctor wants me to avoid. It would be just enough to strengthen and not too much. Right?

I had to test this hypothesis.

Take three cones of cobweb/laceweight, two of cashmere, one an extra fine merino in a dark cordovan brown. Ply. Ply a second bobbin. Ply the two together with the wheel going the opposite direction to balance out the twist.

It. Was. So. Soft. as it ran through my fingers. Even with the mill oils not yet washed out, and that part surprised me, just SO soft. There are cashmeres and then there are cashmeres that just melt in your hands and that merino did nothing to take away from them.

Hot hot hot soapy water. Rinsing, same.

After looking at this last picture I had to go back to check, a little concerned, and hung the hank from my hands: did I ply it evenly? Did it hang straight down with no twisting?

It did. And I get to make quite a bit more of this before I empty those cones. It’s extra work but it’s extra nice stuff and it gives me more ways to use this time well.

Doctor: Saturday a week ago? So we’re nine days out. Okay, you need to let your brain heal. No exercising. Be a slug. While the muscle mass diminishes (she shrugged regretfully). Wait on the driving till you feel better. Let’s see, what can you do while you’re lying around when you don’t want to lie around…

Me, helpfully: I could knit!

That got me questions about brainpower vs knitting and I said some knitting requires full attention and some is absolutely brainless (and my current project is in between. I left that detail out.)

Doctor: Definitely brainless. Rest it.

Me: (Crud.)

So yeah, it’s been like that and will continue like that for a little while. The motivation though is that after this, my seventh concussion, not to let how things are right now become the new normal.

Later… The mailman delivered a stack of catalogs and for no real reason I always feel like I have to at least leaf through them. Or in the case of some, a fast flipflipflipflipokaydonetoss.

This one page stopped me. Blink. I looked it up online to see if what was there matched. It did.

That model’s legs and my brain: they are both a little bit inside out. (Or at least till that company figures out what everybody’s looking at.)