No replacement cars yet.

Drove Richard to work for an early meeting. Drove home. Drove Michelle to work (a goodly commute). Drove home, a lot of stop-and-go. Answered email, a quick lunch, just enough time to get a load into the dryer. Drove to get Richard, then while he worked from his Ipad along the way, drove to the audiologist to discuss the newest-technology hearing aids that came out in the last few weeks, drove to Los Gatos Birdwatcher because it was right nearby and I was low on birdseed, drove home for long enough to grab a quick bite, drove to San Jose to pick up Michelle in go-but-mostly-stop traffic, put some gas in the car, drove home long enough to swig a glass of milk and dash back out, drove to Purlescence for the last hour of knit night–

–all of this in the rain–

–and man, did it feel good to stop. Sit. Knit and talk with old friends and get a hug from Juanita and a laugh with Rachel and actually get something done, yarnwise, the hat a portable project that made no demands on my attention, just slowly turned beautiful almost of its own (while unfolding to me what the next two iterations of it are going to be.  Cool. I can’t wait.)

Yesterday, re the baby blanket, I weighed and calculated yardage used so far and realized I was hosed. I emailed Colourmart:  they didn’t have another cone of that blue silk…? Thinking, of course not, I bought all they had and took the risk of it not being enough, and it wasn’t enough.

With the time zone difference to England, I didn’t hear back all day but wasn’t really expecting to; I checked my email one last time before bed. Nothing.

Woke up this morning to two messages: Yes we do. It’s on its way. Oh, and, (an hour later) here’s the invoice.

*deep sigh of grateful relief*

And tomorrow I will knit.

Routine doctor appointment this afternoon. Going out the front door to my car, there was a raven perched on the streetlight.

So that explained it! It hadn’t dared land in my back yard but it was near the redwood tree, which would not be allowed–and must have been why I had just seen Coopernicus swoop across my back yard to the redwood, then swoop around again in a loop, not in stealth but dominance. Here, here, over here, too. If I could see it out my back window, it was his.

He took a low pass over that black squirrel that was teasing him a few days ago.

I saw yet another swoop after I got home.

A limb was taken off the neighbor’s tall tree last summer, taking out the big nest that I’m sure was the Coopers’; there is a new one higher up there now, not quite as big–yet. (Someone captured video here of a Cooper’s pair building their nest and it looks just like it. That makes me all the more hopeful that Coopernicus may have found a new mate.)

I needed a portable project to take to that appointment, so, after way too much dithering, I found a forgotten start to a hat in the stash–one single row, hadn’t even joined it into a round yet. It would do.

Finished the ribbing during the wait; another patient was having an emergency, they apologized, I assured them I was fine and please take care of whoever it was–and I started into the pattern part, not a long wait after all.

I considered the thing.

It was a pretty small nestbuilding in my hands but it was merino and baby alpaca and cashmere goodness. Soon to be ready to hat-ch.

Tonight was the first time I’ve knitted since the hot water heater flooded, and the stitches burst out after becoming so pent up. I had to finally put the needles down for my aching shoulders.

Silk with a bit of lycra knits up doubled quite well, far better than the slipperiness of pure silk. The yarn arrived a week ago, but patternwise, I had too many ideas in too many directions and nothing quite…. Now I know exactly what it wants to be when it grows up. It is such a relief to finally dive in and see it starting to take shape–my daughter-in-law delivered three weeks early last time and I have to assume this little one will be in a hurry, too.

Peach tree #2, meantime. While the plum needs an umbrella against the coming rain even more.

Knitting is lightning fast compared to watching newly-begun trees grow. And yet these change every day. The first peach to bloom has shed nearly all its petals now and is all about the leaves and growth; it’s branching out.

And so am I. And if I stop typing I might get to go do another row before I go to bed. (Glancing at the clock, 180 stitches, hmm. Maybe not.)

Unearthed in the emptying of the closet, safely inside a ziploc bag that only got wet on the outside (I cannot tell you what a relief that was) was this shawl, the precursor to the Wanda’s Flowers one in my book. I had been saving it so well and so long that I’d forgotten it. My Rabbit Tracks pattern starts and ends it and goes up the sides (with an extra stitch or two added at the edges) and I remember now, I knitted a rectangular shawl of just the flowers part for a dear friend twelve, fifteen years ago or so and afterwards wished I’d jazzed it up a bit more, which got me to try again with the flower part framed by my little feather-and-fan variant.

Grignasco Merinosilk. In a 100g skein, all of it used up.

I haven’t knitted a big project in a fine laceweight like this in a long time. I’ve missed it.

Sam saved the day and picked me up again this morning. Go Sam!

Usually, when I go to Stitches, I zip around the whole place, chat, see who’s got what, avoid temptation for the first day and figure there’s less around to buy the second day so I’m safer that way, right?

I’m torn between guilt, minor innocence, and being really glad I bought the yarns I did my first day this time, which were not a lot but which I really love and can’t wait to knit–because I didn’t know and the car transmission was bad enough, but today…!

We woke up to no hot water. None.

Richard was wondering whether the pilot (is there a pilot on that thing?) had gone out and was about to get to it to check at the time Sam came.

I had a grand day at Stitches all over again. It was Saturday, lots of people were there, friends I’d been looking forward to seeing. Got a few texts from Richard–we’re working hard here. Hot water heater blew. Plumber wants $1400–and I bought not one single ball of yarn.

And all the while I was reassuring myself that the last time this happened, it flooded out the master closet and the laundry room that it sits between, so the whoever-he-was plumber had charged us extra to set it up so that should it go out again, it would drain to outside. Far easier to deal with.

Towards closing time, I was chatting with Rod and Lisa Souza again and a friend of theirs they introduced me to, Heatherly Walker. Heatherly got to asking me about my pattern writing; did I use any software?

No, I just hash it out on my own.

Was I interested?

Did she know of any good ones?

Sure! and she told me about how she and her husband had come up with what she’d wished were out there so that now it was, and she told me a bit about it as she reached for a copy in her backpack.

I had visions of transmission and plumber estimates dancing in my head as I asked her how much I owed her.

A direct quote: “Nothing! I LOVE your book!”

(Jaw. On. Ground.) Wow. Thank you!!!

I talked to Melinda and Tess at Tess’ Designer Yarns, and I apologized for my lack of buying this year; I so love their yarns. Next year, as I explained why.

They offered me to just have a skein of yarn, whatever yarn. Everybody at some point has a week like mine had been; they wanted to make it easier. I thanked them but told them hey, they have to make a living. (And there will be more customers who might want it tomorrow, so.) But I very much appreciated their generosity, and I love the softness and the colors in their yarns and I wanted to give them a shout-out here. Good folks.

Time to go. Richard was stuck with the plumber. Sam had something else going on but still offered to come get me, good man that he is. I told some of my Purlescence friends and they conferred: when Dannette’s husband arrived, Kevin and other-Richard lifted the scooter into her minivan. Dannette had been about to go out to dinner with the others but they all decided to work around taking care of me (they invited me too but I was just too tired and too broke) and Dannette, her husband, and adorable baby drove me the ten miles home.

The plumber who had set the water heater in a pan with tall sides and an overflow pipe to outside? Balderdash. That pipe was spraying all over the inside of the heater enclosure nonstop as more water pumped in, which is why Richard sloshed through standing water going past the closet after I left. Michelle helped him try to rescue our things.

At some moment of stupidity in my life I had put some of our older family photos back in there. He thinks they’re dryable.

There was a zipped cotton bag on the floor full of handknit sweaters: the infamous 86″ wingspan Aran I made him when I was newly back into knitting 23 years ago, the cabled Kaffe Fassett in llama where every half of every cable is a different color against a background of navy (wet, and next to that white aran, and I haven’t been able to bring myself to inspect the aran quite closely quite yet), the handspun handknit baby alpaca/silk cardigan with the wooden buttons, five other handknit ones…

A pound of 90/10 cashmere/nylon cobweb weight that I’d bought at $15/lb years ago, pounds and pounds, and had plied a lot of it up into thicker yarns; nope, still had a cone back there. The bag was wet but the yarn seems okay.

And on and on. We are running the washer nonstop. If it was near the floor, it’s wet.

I wonder if homeowners will replace that wall?

(Edited to add in the morning: the white aran seems to be okay. Phew.)

Correction, Monday morning: I got the details wrong. It was the *top* of the water heater, somehow, that rusted out and was spewing at the wall. The plumber’s setup was good for your much more typical failure, and the new guy made good use of it.

I edited last night’s post to say I thought I’d found the problem.

Partly, it turns out; the battery still just doesn’t hold a charge as long as it used to and I had to stop and plug it in awhile and wait three times, but hey. Thanks to Sam, I got to go!

Disneyland for knitters: we get to see friends we only get ever to see there and to catch up on each other’s lives while surrounded by all the best yarns any of us could ever hope for.

Four and a half years ago I was at Stitches East and met Karida Collins, the dyer who runs Neighborhood Fiber Company, her color inspiration being various neighborhoods around Washington, DC–back home for me–and Baltimore, where my daughter now lives. Karida decided to do the Stitches West show for the first time. And so there she was! Cool! And she recognized me!

She had exactly THE fiber with the perfect amount of yardage and twist, the exquisite softness, and the perfect color (Charles Village) all wrapped up in one sublime skein of silk yarn. She had come all this way to make it possible; there you go.

The owner of Wild Orchid Knits was there with her daughter: camel/silk, cashmere, mink; she uses only natural dyes. I had met the mom two years ago, been unable to find her work online since, didn’t see her there last year and wished for two years I’d bought a particular yarn from her to cheer her on in her good work. Well now.

A note from Jan helped me pay more attention than I might have to the softness and inherent baby-friendliness in some  James C. Brett Marble Chunky acrylic from Yarn Barn for Parker’s little brother to drag around the backyard and playground someday, and so now I can get to work on his first afghan.

Years ago, when Signature was just starting to make needles and they came in straights only, they brought their new product to Stitches West and I wasn’t interested. Now they have circulars but they weren’t coming–but my friend Anne just happened to email me to say she would be working at Southern Yarns’ booth and there would be Signature needles there, just in case I wanted her to reserve me a pair.

I read that just dumbfounded. How did she know?! I have a particularly well-loved pair of rosewoods 3.75mm that had somehow gotten a divot clipped out of the tip. I needed a new pair, and I’d wanted to try out the Signatures. They are green.

And then. There was my dear friend Lisa Souza and her husband Rod, reason alone to come. I was wearing the Julia shawl in her Pacific colorway from the book and I had people stop me constantly, all day, wanting to touch it, telling me how gorgeous it was, to ask where I’d gotten that yarn. Lisa!

A friend kept me company while Sam and I waited for each other in different places at the end of the day till we finally texted–oh there you are! Just because she wanted to, and when I apologized over the cold outside there by the drive-around, she laughed it off, telling me about the snow she’d traveled in from and that this was warm. Ah. Okay. So you know Real Weather, that’s right. We watched a flock of geese fly overhead against the darkening sky.

And a fabulous day was had by all.

I can’t believe I had the energy to type all that out.

Oh and: a bar of good Valrhona chocolate, other than the length of it, feels just like an Iphone when you’re groping blindly through your purse. Reception is ec static.

Our beautiful spring weather–it was 72F on Saturday–is gone. Alaska who pushed it away and it’ll get back to us later.

I woke up this morning and refused to believe it and put on two layers of 3/4 sleeves, the second a fairly warm sweater and only because I had to.

That should do it.

But no.  I got out the wool knee-highs.  It’s not winter! Stop it! Do you see the green on that plum tree? (Embiggen photo. Squint hard.) Does that not insist spring? I did not pull my get-well afghans over me, although I should have.

A few hours later, still unwilling to concede but being just too chilled to knit and finding that motivation to get up and do something about it, I went and got a handknit hat and that helped too for awhile. But.

And then at last I put on my fingerless gloves, but it was a little hard to maneuver silk around wood in them–ergo, I took my thumb out and pushed them back onto my wrists. Full length sleeves now! There you go!

This particular pair of the several I’ve been gifted with has thumb gussets and they did look odd dangling off my wrists like the back of a raptor’s claw, but hey–not only was I visually reminded with every stitch of my own of all the people who have knitted to make me happy, by golly I was finally warm at last.

Richard worked from home today, still under the weather; it was clear we weren’t going out tonight. He encouraged me to go to knit night, get me some Purlescence time in.

I took the Manos Allegria project with me, made from the new yarn the shop had just gotten in the last time I went four weeks ago, and time after time it got a sharp intake of breath and “Oh, that’s GORGEOUS!” Two knitters asked, “Is the pattern out yet?”

“Not yet!”

“Hurry!”

Did my little ego great good, I tell ya. (Thank you, guys, I needed that–I frogged today’s new project five, count’em five times trying to get it just so, killed my whole afternoon.)

“You’ve been missing awhile, haven’t you?” asked Juanita.

The funeral, the cold from the guy on the plane, yes…

And I won’t be there next Thursday either because neither will any of them: one more week till Stitches!

Finally cast off and blocked that project tonight. I think I’d been putting it off because after all that intense knitting, it was hard to give it up–not the project but the sense of anticipation and discovery in it.

It went into the water with, well, this is nice enough, I guess, to, after it came out, WOW, this is one of the prettiest things I’ve ever knit!

The only difference was the soaking and then the setting it out to dry in its now-finished form.

Some things you just have to take on faith. The back side of unblocked lace always amuses me by how it seems to have no possible relation to what the thing will be.

The pattern is a mishmash of doodle and old notes finally coming together. I thought I’d be out of yarn by now (Manos Allegria from Purlescence) but I’ve got 40 more grams out of the 100. So I’m knitting more and writing more and finding out more and I’m liking it more and more. (And this time it will be repeatable.)

It was the most colors I could think of to pack on the plane in one skein last week. It’s hard to put down.

A cowl for the cold should be long enough that you can pull it over your head from the back and still have the bottom of it puddle around your shoulders in a warm scarf, right?

Didn’t have quite enough of the sheared-mink yarn for that–close, though, and it is done and like so many other projects, once it actually touched water and then was laid flat, the small bit of lace in it blossomed beautifully. The pattern was something untried and new…. It’s perfect. (Phew!)

Next up: a warm soft scarf for my  husband, who, after 26 years of not needing one, does not seem to actually own one.  Or rather–there was one from scratchy cheap dimestore acrylic I made him nearly 30 years ago when we lived in New Hampshire, in a rather gaudy stage-prop green (you could see it clear to the last row) because it was the best that store could do. It was in no way warm, and ugly as all get-out (the stockinette with poofs of purl rows curled in a lovely seasick poodle effect) and the very memory of the thing makes me cringe: it made me not want to be a knitter.

There are good acrylics out there now, but not then and not this. (Dear, tell me we don’t still have that thing around!?)

Time to make it up to the man worth far more than his weight in qiviut.

It was okay to dither over what to make next because I had a project in my hands. Dithering was what I could do to give my hands a break from time to time–go through that bag, no, what about this, how does this yarn look in sunlight vs artificial and is it the effect I want.

I put the first row of a hat over my head and on down to see if it could be the start of a cowl. It could. But it won’t be.

Finished the one project. Blocked it. Ran out of excuses.

I reminded myself that sometimes you just have to plow through the unknown re pattern vs style vs yarn vs color and just go find out what it’s going to turn into. Maybe not even what it wants to be when it grows up, but what it’s going to be anyway. And hey, if it turns out as a (euphemism alert) learning experience, you go make the next version.

I grabbed the sheared-mink strands that had been yelling the loudest and got started, and gradually as the rows grew I relearned something I already knew: if you use multiple strands of this stuff with tiny needles and knit it tightly with lots of double decreases, it decreases the perception of softness in those spots–it’s not bad at all but it doesn’t quite quite live up to the fiber. Try to stick with knit-two-togethers and slip-slip-knits.

Not that anyone would ever be going to complain when they touch this.

Meantime, I wanted really warm and really warm it will be.

I am told that my father-in-law, who has ever been quick with a witticism, was at the funeral home Friday when he asked the person in feigned seriousness, “Do you offer senior discounts?”

Wait for it…

Dad laughs, letting them know it’s okay to, too.

So with his good example setting the standard, I’m seriously debating making myself a warm hat for when I see him, maybe out of undyed baby alpaca or merino (and maybe not quite so bulky) so that it doesn’t quite compute till you get closer up. Go see what you think.

Hawk yoga. Every pose you could think of, including one I hadn’t seen before: wings raised in sharp inverted Vs with a tight lean forward as if ready for takeoff, then relaxing again on the fence, a foot slowly rising up and disappearing into the poofy feathers against the chill of the day. This is the life, he sang into the wind.

Half an hour. I considered walking a few steps over and back to pick up the hat project as I watched the hawk show, live!, but nah, why disturb him.

I suddenly wondered if, had I done so, what a small ball of yarn in blues/greens/purples would look like to him, with its long tail constantly jerking around my hands.  Caught me a live one!

After he left, anyway.

Lynn, here, the post where I got to meet her in person in Texas the day after she got engaged, her happiness lighting up the whole church. I got to see her again last month when we came back to see my in-laws, and Lynn and I spent an evening at her old knitting group in the Madeline Tosh ship in Ft Worth where she’d been a regular before she’d married and moved a few towns away.

I twirl a small forkful of Lynn’s late mother-in-law’s orange honey that she gifted me with about every other day, savoring it, trying not to run out too fast, thinking of her and how grateful I am for her friendship every time I look at that jar. How glad I am that she and her Beloved found each other in their lives.

Yesterday was their first anniversary.

Today her beloved, one of the very best, slipped away before hospice could even finish setting up at their house.

I’ve wanted to grab the next flight. I can’t afford it. What I did do was go searching in my house, for–something, I didn’t know what, and found a shawl project that I’d long ago stalled out on: it had been put aside while I’d debated how to finish it and while I had had people needing the love from something hand knit Right Now, and so the shawl had become abandoned altogether and at last pretty much forgotten other than the occasional guilt twinge in its direction.

I didn’t even remember which pattern it was; I was surprised when I pulled it out to see it was Y not Z. Huh. I always did like that yarn.

I sat down with it. I decided, seventeen months after I’d started, at long last what to do: a few rows there, that’s all it had needed all this time, that and a decision, and I cast it off, blocked it, and with that I tied up one loose end in my own life. It is done. And after its submersion in the water, it feels like one of the most beautiful things I have ever knit.

And it’s not at all Lynn’s color, darnit.