Thirty-one plus twenty-eight do not make sixty, no matter how many rows ago you added them together.

In other words, kids, try this at home. I was diving into a new project while keeping one eye on the door for the nurse to call me back to the exam room; when you’re waiting for an appointment, it all becomes bistro mathematics.

A few minutes later, needles mid-row and set aside, the doctor’s phone buzzed while we were talking; she instantly hesitated and then quickly apologetically explained to me that her sister was between two fires in Texas, not evacuated yet…

Answer! Please!

She grabbed it and checked.

Nope. Not her, at least not yet.

I cannot sing the praises of that good doctor enough to begin to tell it. Given how wonderfully passionately she has taken care of me for twenty years, that was the least I could do to take care of her and her own back.

Y’all take care of yourselves out there, y’hear?

Triggered by Stephanie’s very kind post, this is how my baby alpaca fixation got started. (With a half-a-pie photo for Don that I took this morning.)

Years ago, a shop owner showed me some very soft yarn new to her stock that she was quite excited about.

“Baby alpaca” as one of the fiber components was something I had never heard of, but I definitely liked it: all the scratchiness and guard hairs I associated with the word alpaca, gone.

It was about time someone did this. I’d always wondered why there were alpaca rugs that were just the softest fur you could hope to snuggle your toes into, but somehow alpaca yarns and sweaters, alpaca for wearing, were always a weird combination of soft and ick, keep that away from me!

I later read an article by a man who helped change the market. He had flown to Peru to try to convince the local mill owners  that paying alpaca farmers by the pound was resulting in the worst quality fiber going to market, because coarser hairs weighed more, while (he didn’t quite put it this way) the softer-haired animals were being Darwin-ed out by being turned into rugs.

First World knitters would pay a premium to be able to have those softer fibers to work with.

Many didn’t believe him. One mill finally took the leap and gave the idea a chance and did so well that others followed their lead, and in the end, one man and the people who listened to him changed the fiber world.

I must have found some of the very earliest out there. I looked for more over the next year or two and didn’t find it. The one had been a baby alpaca/angora/merino blend; was it possible to find pure baby alpaca? And if I did, how would the fabric I made with it behave?

The younger knitters may not remember when we had a list of web searchers to choose from and had to guess which one would be best at answering a particular type of question. Ask Jeeves?

Google was still new, but we had switched over to it entirely. It didn’t have a lot of pages out there online to search from yet, but my techie husband was sure this one was going to beat the others out totally, he said they’d done their homework with their algorithm.

“Baby alpaca yarn”. Two results. Hard to imagine now. One was not helpful, but the other: a link to a wholesaler who had imported a lot of cones of the stuff in fingering weight and I guess since nobody had heard of it, nobody bought it, and they were selling it on sale, eventually down to at or near cost and closing down their shop altogether.

I bought, I was quite surprised to count up later, over month after month while they sold it at $20, then $15, and even $8 I think on one of the colors PER POUND, three dozen pounds. It was cheaper than any good wool I could find.

As I bought it while I knew I could get it I was also knitting as fast as my needles could fly. I had found the yarn of my dreams. My four tall (or eventually tall) children all got soft afghans knit triple-stranded, long enough to pull up to their chins and curl around their reclining toes and down to the floor, the way my mother says an afghan should be. I made dozens of shawls.

And the light blue baby alpaca, of which there was much and it was cheap, I overdyed into a number of other colors. There’s a picture in my book of a stack of balls of yarn, the original light blue those others all came from at front and center to encourage others to look at the yarns in the closeout bins in a new way: if it’s soft, if it’s animal or silk fiber, if you love the feel but the color, not so much, you can go play with watercolors and do something about it. You will make it all the more uniquely your own in the process.

I was quite surprised to find, while stash diving last week, that I still had a little of that light blue left after all this time. It grabbed my eyes and my memories. I cast on. I’m 2/3 of the way through a lace stole.

I had long forgotten I had gifted Stephanie with some.

Don wrote about having to wait from 3:00 to 4:20 for a doctor to show up for his appointment, which I imagine is a long wait when you don’t knit.

The one time I got stuck waiting for an hour and a half, years ago, I knew going in that I was going to be one of the last patients of the day; I imagined all those extra moments adding up throughout the shift as that good doctor would have been taking his time not so much by the clock but as each patient needed him. I knew from experience that he would do so for me, so I certainly didn’t mind if he did it for others. I came prepared.

And so I sat in the exam room in my paper gown, yarn in hand, and waited.  And waited and waited. And waited some more. You know, it was getting to be a bit much, though, especially since I hadn’t heard any voices going past in a goodly while.

Finally, I peeked out into the hall and all the lights were turned off! Except the emergency nighttime ones! (It was winter.)

I knew it had been awhile, but– ! I called out loudly into the dark, empty hallway, feeling foolish. No response. Finally, I ducked back in the room and pushed the emergency call-nurse button, figuring if anybody answered, great, if not, well, they’re sure not charging me for this appointment!

A nurse came rushing in about 15 seconds later, very apologetic. The doctor had been held up at the hospital, hadn’t they told me? No, but I could imagine a cardiologist could end up spending a lot more time with a patient there than he had planned on.

The doctor himself finally came in about two minutes after that, embarrassed as all get-out. I was just relieved that I hadn’t been entirely stupid sitting there alone unknowing as the building had emptied for the day, quietly knitting away, glad to have an excuse to get some progress made on the thing instead of anything else needing doing just then. I showed him the work in my hands, tiny needles and fine laceweight, and nodded to the pound cone of soft merino (a gift from Karin, thank you!) that I was working from: see? Thousands of yards left on that. I had a long, long way to go before I ran out of things to do.

You know that if I ever bring a cone to his office again he’s going to burst out laughing and start teasing me that I hadn’t had to wait *that* long this time!

Jury duty: still doing the check in at 11 am/check back at 5 pm thing. Almost done.

May I just say that, re the instructions on the summons, requiring people who need to ask for closed captions in the court to request it not online but rather to call for it is, um, kinda missing something there. Yo?

Meantime, my childhood friend corrected herself as new messages got through: her son’s house near the epicenter in Virginia is standing, it’s his neighbor’s around the corner that’s down. He’s waiting for a structural report to find out if his is safe to go in.

I needed something intense to work on. I printed out some lace instructions I’d worked out on paper a year ago but had never spent the hours to actually knit through it and make sure it worked.

Hey.  So I grabbed some baby alpaca that had been in the stash for quite awhile, not quite my shade of blue–and yet somehow the moment I saw it it was the most beautiful one ever to my eyes. Oooh, that one! Yes!

Curious. That has always come to mean that it’s needing to go somewhere in particular that I don’t know about yet. Every color is someone’s favorite.

And on a side note: when you have a complicated pattern you’re trying for the first time? A solid color helps the eyes read the stitches a whole lot easier. And so (having learned that, and ignoring that beseeching handpaint over there), this is.

My hands have needed me to take it a little easier than I would like, so I set myself a goal: knit one hour, stop. Knit one hour after dinner, stop. Knit in snatches in between but don’t overdo.

Somehow that created enough progress to keep me happy; I’m halfway through the skein so far, doing three repeats of the Constance lace from “Wrapped in Comfort” plus edging.

Meantime, I tried to identify a new bird: very white and long tail, medium gray covert, very nearly white wings and head in direct sunlight deepening to a very light gray in the shade. Feathers smooth, body and head very slender, eyes red, a lot smaller than any dove I’ve ever seen but looking like one and walking with bobbing head motions. It came right up to the window and turned around, so I got a good look. No spots, no ring to its neck, and (looking at Inca doves in Sibley afterwards) I didn’t see square feather ends but I wasn’t looking for them, either; it was sleek, not ruffled-up-looking. Maybe a very very light almost-albino morph of an Inca? Beautiful, petite bird, glowing in the sun.

I’ve never seen anything like it before. I love that it came right up to me.

(Note re the pattern: Martingale says they will be releasing their out-of-prints as e-books, available from them directly; some titles already are. Meantime, Purlescence has the real thing in stock.)

I don’t know whom to thank, so thank you to all of you out there.

I was at Purlescence tonight when Nathania got that sneaky grin thing happening again: she was clearly very very pleased at what was just about to happen and at the fact that I had no idea. And then she got to watch my face go: But, but—!

Totally nonpsychodegradeable. Wow.

Now, I just looked back through my posts–when I talked about that shawlette start that needed to be frogged? The one that the color had been so perfect, but the texture, not so much? That got me to grab the Whales Road Malabrigo for the softness? (That project’s now at the stage where I could either cast off the very next thing or maybe continue for one more repeat.)

Somebody… Nathania said, “I know nothing. I don’t know who, I don’t know how, I don’t know when it was put in this basket to wait for you.” (I would not be surprised if the other owners of Purlescence conspired to keep it that way till after she’d given it to me.)

But my name was written on a skein of Madeleine Tosh fingering weight she was lifting out of that basket to hand to me.

The same weight as the sock yarn I’d deemed too strong a twist, designed to withstand sockitude, not quiet shawlitude.

So soft.

The very same color.

I never blogged the color that was so perfect but that the yarn just hadn’t worked for what I’d wanted. But someone nailed it.

I’ve never in my life bought a skein of Madeline Tosh; I’ve picked up many of them, petted them, then put them regretfully back, thinking, next time maybe.

And now I have some MadTosh softness at last.  I love that their website has a little image of a bird up by their URL. I love the Cousteau name for the color. I love the yarn. I love the thoughtfulness and the generosity and the challenge to try to live up to that. Thank you whoever you are, thank you all of you, thank you Universe and thank you Purlescence for enabling the culprit, and with so much happiness.

Wow.

Let’s see if I can get myself to put this knitting down a moment. That Whales Road yarn demanded to be ended in the jellyfish motif from the Monterey shawl and I really really like how it’s coming out.

Meantime, (and I found I needed to work on a more mindless project during the process), the piano is tuned, ready for my son who minored in organ performance to come home to on Friday.

My friend who tuned it today, who volunteers doing wetlands restoration work, took the time first to stop and admire quite the flock going on just outside the window.  He told me about some of his and his wife’s birdwatching. He asked if I were trying to attract a specific kind with a specific seed; I told him not really, but I do avoid anything with millet because it’s the favorite of alien-species house sparrows, which actively kill off all other songbirds around them and their eggs during nesting season.

But what I didn’t say was: simply by hanging up some sunflower, I get to see so many species.  But what’s so cool is that others who would never touch the stuff simply drop by to see what the fuss is about.  Some of those have stayed: the nuttall’s woodpecker got joined this year by a mate and I got to watch their mating ritual, a dance between the trees and around each other up and down and around almost as if they were carrying yarn and knitting stitches into the air; today, one was pounding away at my neighbor’s clothesline right after Neil left.

The whole cycle of life, right up close at my window. As Kathy said, one could never get bored.

p.s. And if sunflower is too pricey, a small $2 wire cage with a $2.00 to $2.50 suet cake lasts several weeks to a month here. The squirrels tend to ignore the ones that don’t have peanuts mixed in.

Nope, didn’t rip yesterday’s yet, I just put it aside and glommed onto something else in my stash. (Just wait till I run out of needles.) My friend Nancy moved away! Nancy loves to frog other people’s projects: total angst-free  ripiteedoodahh, ripiteeyay, here you go, done.

I wish.

So. Whales Road colorway in Malabrigo Lace, bought from Diana‘s de-stashing, knitted with one strand of a very thin cashmere that when it arrived awhile back in such a vivid neon blue, I wondered what on earth I would ever do with it.

Well now. Put these two together in the playpen and look how well they get along.

I say that thinking of a picture we got recently via the other grandmother of Parker and his new cousin born in April in identical baby seats side by side, with Parker reaching out and holding her tiny hand in his, looking at her tenderly as if to let her know that it was okay, he was going to be looking out for her always.

I want to be like Parker when I grow up.

I plunked myself down next to my daughter Michelle. She is not a knitter. (I have not yet given up hope.)

“So I had this new yarn, and it sparked an idea I wanted to try, but I wanted to do a practice run first, so I grabbed a yarn that was what I wanted and I got started and. But. It’s tightly spun and it’s not soft enough against the neck, and I want soft enough against the neck, and I looked at it and I looked at this sock yarn by Creatively Dyed and I thought hey, those two knitted together would be really pretty and make a great baby blanket! Machine washable wool for a new mom. Practical!

But it would mean ripping out what I just did.” And I explained why I wanted that particular color, super soft or no super soft. “And you’re the closest thing here to a knitter to ask.”

Her face was getting more and more impish as she tried not to burst out laughing. We both knew what was coming next.

“Well, you either keep going or you rip it out.” With the unspoken, my Mom is asking ME for yarn advice.

We both laughed, I got up, I started to go back to my perch in the other room and turned and added, “And sometimes you throw it in a corner and look at it the next day.”

And then, she’s right, Eurypides. Because that baby blanket idea is just too good to pass up.

While I was pureeing strawberries today some beautiful, soft strawberry yarn appeared at my doorstep. With my thanks to Deb: a hank of Floating, from A Verb For Keeping Warm, a local dyer who uses only natural dyes; I’m curious to know if this was done in madder or cochineal, the two red sources they list. You can see how fast it got all wound up about it! (That’s an 11″ serving bowl, by the way.)

Sesame Street: “Do you know what’s going to happen next?” I am, sings Cat Stevens, on the road to find out. Follow the mellow brick, row’ed (or will be).

A whole new reason for why, when I buy coned yarns, I scour the mill oils out, soaking the newly-made hanks in hot soapy water rather than knitting them as they come.

You know you live in a knitter’s house when you open the freezer and find some yarn plunked on the door for a quick chill-out just in case after a moth was seen in its general vicinity while it was out having some unprotected fresh air.

You know you live in a crazy-knitter-level knitter’s house (watch my husband’s and children’s heads nod in vigorous unison) when you go to get an ice cube out of the front dispenser on the fridge and it delivers a dangly soft strand of merino with your square of cold. Wait, whaaaaa..?

Purlescence closed for a week to move to their new digs–a few doorways to the left from the old, a bigger space. They put in new wood floors. They puzzled over how to get the tall yarn cubes out of the old shop, those having been assembled inside for the original Carolea’s Knitsch decades ago.

Today was the grand reopening celebration, but they just didn’t need my nagging bit of sore throat.

So I decided to celebrate in spirit: I found some Kid Seta I’d bought from them and thought about starting something with it. But I have some knuckle inflammation going on, it was a bit hard for my hands to hold that fine a strand.

I pulled out a skein of very thin cashmere that had stumped me when it had arrived from an online purchase.  The color. Brilliant red on the orange side? Not so much here. That fine a laceweight would take a lot of time to use up a color that didn’t do it for me.

The Kid Seta was a muted red with the silk shimmering lighter, rather pinkish against the fuzzies.

Put those two balls side by side (the nighttime photo doesn’t capture it), and my first thought was, Nah, they fight…

But wait. Colors affect how the one next to them is perceived, they’re like humans that way, maybe they just need to be closer together. I cast on. I knitted. It lagged and got interrupted at first as I wasn’t sure, and then the further along it got the more I liked it till it was hard to put down and suddenly I was 26″ into the thing.

And it is gorgeous! Who knew?

Quick, tell Congress: the differences blending together are what make it come out so pretty.

(Pattern: Rabbit Tracks with an extra stitch each side as there should be.)

Network no worky. I am typing blindly and then walking away for five minutes to see if this sentence will appear. Later!

I guess a birdfeeder has become a safe place to perch. Guess who came for a visit just before the light was gone tonight? (Click to clarify.) She let me come outside and get a good long look at her. This time, though, I got to watch her fly away, as if to tell me, See? I really can do it now, it’s okay.

Meantime, my new Lisa Souza yarn has been hard to put down today, like any good soft fiber worth the hours should be. And the color! Although I did set it aside long enough to go stock up at Los Gatos Birdwatcher, my favorite seedy place.

Tomorrow I get my stitches out and hopefully get to stop putting goop in my hair. Working away on my project, wondering if I wanted to haul that complicated a pattern with that long a row to the waiting room with me or not, I was remembering the moment I’d given the doctor her silk scarf and had wished I had something for her nurse watching her getting it. I still wished I had something–when suddenly it hit me–you goof, who do you think Saturday night’s sudden impulse of a soft Meriboo hat was for? It was just sitting there waiting to be figured out.

Oh wait, did I mention that? I grabbed a random ball of Frog Tree yarn that night and didn’t go to bed till I’d finished a quick hat with a sideways-cabled brim and twirly-decreased top, quite pretty. Then I put it aside and simply forgot all about it.

Well now. My fingers don’t have to fly quite so fast.

Just wait till I come back there.

Friday’s DrGreene.com post is here, the story of the young dad with the screaming toddler. I’ve always loved how that one played out; I wonder how they are now. That would have been back when I was dyeing my hair, the only reason I shopped there, which would make her maybe ten by now.

Give her a few years and maybe she’ll go for the purple dye over thataway. The most harmless thing a kid can do to rebel is with their hair, and whatever they may look like for awhile, it grows patiently naturally back on its own time.

Speaking of which, with this vasoline in the scar thing going on, the Spaceman Spiff look? Totally nailed it.

(Eleven rows of 448 stitches today, an ice session in the middle, and I finished it! The shawl is blocking.)