I chatted a little with the Cascade folks today, hoping there might be some hope of bringing the Epiphany back; they wished so too. They said they’re careful to test the fiber contents for quality control on the yarns they have milled for them–which is why the changed label on the last run of it. They loved that yarn, too.  But, along with the pricing issue, it’s got to be what it says it is.

Meantime, I was picking up a few things at Trader Joe’s this evening, and the clerk, well, he was having a good time. Chatting with the customer before me. Chatting with me. He clearly wasn’t on clean-up crew tonight because he grinned that in ten minutes he got to go home. All was well in his world.

“So! How was your day?” he added.

Oh it was fine, I smiled back.

“Nothing exciting? No adventure?”

(No long line of customers behind me, so hey, why not.)  So I told him about the friends visiting from out of state, the book, the huge surprise that totally blew me away and the exquisite yarn yesterday.

You should have seen the grin on his face as he took that all in. “Wow. That is so cool”–and so much more of a story than he’d expected for his question: adventure indeed. “That was AWESOME!”

I remember my Mom and my next-older sister planning a prom dress together. Would have been 1974. Mom had some beautiful fabric for it; I’m picturing that it was a red and black silk print my grandmother brought back from a trip, hand-batiked in Indonesia, but if I’m wrong I’m sure I’ll hear about it.

Before Mom messed with that treasure she decided to give the pattern a test-drive in muslin. I remember her explaining to me that this is what the pros do, they sew it twice, once for practice and fit and once for real after they see that their design works out the way they want (or what to change if it doesn’t.)

I remember arguing: you have to pay for the muslin in the fabric store so why not pay for some other fabric and get a second usable dress? Why just plain (muslin being in an oatmealy shade I didn’t like) when you could have something more colorful? And softer?

Mom just laughed me off and went on with what she was doing; I do remember my sister happily reporting afterwards that her date had admitted that when he’d heard that Mom was going to be sewing the dress, he had all kinds of worries about how homemade it was going to look–but wow, he said, she looked beautiful!

Practice makes perfect.

Mom later sewed my wedding dress. Those of you who sew who live in the Washington DC area, couture-house lace remnants at G Street Fabrics for the yoke and cuffs. My mom rocks.

I thought of all that as I put my qiviut aside, almost done but before I got any further, just just just to make sure (and yeah I should have done this first like Mom taught me), I went to go play with the same shawlette idea in different yarns: a strand of that so-soft Baruffa merino knitted with one of an alpaca with a bit of wiriness to it–okay, but not baby alpaca.

It’s done. I love how it looks, even if it’s not as soft (well, yeah) as that ohmygoodness qiviut. And Michelle approves.

When the next generation down says it looks good you know you’ve nailed it.

Cashmere Superior with Malabrigo Lace, shades of green. I wanted it supersoft. I knitted a lace scarf for the wife of a childhood friend after finding out they lived not too terribly far away and that his work brings him to my town once a week.

But then I had a bad attack of shy and it sat there. We hadn’t seen each other since we were 18; it’s easy to feel awkward barging in on someone’s attention like that.

The last two weeks put a lot of things in perspective, though, and it felt like it was time. I sent him a message after I got my biopsy report (I wanted to have that sense of relief first), explaining what I’d made, about the shyness thing and saying as how vanity concentrates the mind; given that I was about to lose some hair off my scalp permanently–while I still looked like me, would it be okay to schedule a get-together?

He was delighted. Today was the day. I drove over. After he got off work, we talked for awhile, and then his wife arrived and joined us and we were all old friends together as if it had always been so all around. She’s a peach, and I am so happy for both of them; they’re a great couple. The kind of people who, when you step into their presence, you are instantly home.

And come to find out, through the years we had forged connection after small-world connection with no idea till just then. And even just this week we were forging more.

When I answered his question about where Michelle’s internship was, his jaw hit the floor and he stared. He named her bosses. Close friends of theirs.

The person I’d mailed a shawl off to last week–dear, dear mentor to him and a  friend of his dad. Known her for years.

When his wife came, the twinkle in his eye as he just waited for her reaction–she’d been reading my blog, she’d read about that chocolate torte, yes–and then, listening to him, she turned to me and went, WAIT. *YOU* made HER birthday cake?! (And then she laughed, going, “Yes, she really did have a horrible rotten no–good I think I’ll move to Australia kind of day.”)

And Cheryl, I found out today, is a knitter. They now have a copy of my book, autographed with great delight. I am now a proud owner of “Feeding Baby Green,” autographed with great delight.

And I on sudden impulse on my way out the door had stashed a copy of a book by, as it happens, that mentor in my knitting bag, having no idea.  They didn’t currently have a copy of it. They now have it. I apologized that I hadn’t had time to find a more pristine copy.

Too amazing. Too wonderful. To life!

Some knitting’s been getting done.

An appleblossom amaryllis spent the day opening in slow motion–almost there. In June!

Pain at the news: some of the peregrine falcons nesting towards the north end of the Bay had abruptly disappeared. And we finally knew.

Two had been shot. They are in a rescue center and there is some hope they may make it; whether they can ever be released again is in question, though.

When that word went out yesterday, word came in today that a third had been found shot as well.  Someone had found it, called his local wildlife rescue, got no answer, didn’t wait, put it in his car and headed for the bird rescue center at UC Davis over two hours away, trying to save it. That peregrine didn’t survive. He apparently didn’t know about the falcon groups tracking the birds nor whom else to call till he saw the fliers asking for information in the neighborhood they were all found in.

This was devastating, but especially to those who’d spent their lives bringing that species back from the edge of extinction and who so rejoiced at every successful fledging.

Thank goodness for people who step up and do the right thing.  That man in Oakland tried. I’m sure he didn’t know it would mean anything to anybody but him at the time he did it, but his good impulse offers comfort when it is needed by many.

I was brooding over the new senseless casualty when I decided to put down the computer and just go and sit and knit. The birds at the feeder scattered, as they often do when I stand up, and I barely noticed but for the wren checking over its shoulder before diving for cover; I reached my perch at the couch and was about to sit down when–

–there he was. He flew in to the back of the dolly, which is behind that couch through the window, right there from where I was. My moving around had not scared him away from landing.

My bird. My big wild bird is okay. As if he’d wanted me to know that.

I will never cease to catch my breath at the sight of that beautiful, living, curious, intelligent hawk.

(Edited days later: I am sorry to have to add that there has been some question about the veracity of the report to the peregrine group about a third one having been found and its attempted rescue. There is a third one missing and its fate unknown, although, not all the ones out there are banded and personally known to us.)

I bet you Sue knows what I’m going to write about tonight.

1. But before I get there, I knitted a little Camelspin on the side today in a sudden hurry to get that done yesterday.

2. Nope, no phone call today from the doctor, or at least not while I was home, and no messages were left while I was out foraging for chocolate.

3. My daughter had a co-worker who, last Friday, was having a horrible, rotten, no-good-I-think-I’ll-move-to-Australia kind of day. (That’s the refrain on most of the pages of a certain children’s book–just to make that clear since one person who’s going to be reading this has a loved one who *did* move to Australia and who clearly has turned out very nicely for it.)

4. So I offered to bake a chocolate torte for them. (Here’s the recipe.)

5. Tomorrow is that person’s birthday, it turns out.

6. Well then!

and, 7, since I always make two of them, and since today’s our anniversary, and since Michelle can’t eat dairy, I substituted hazelnut oil for the butter, coming about two tbl short out of two cups needed for two cakes–close enough. We’ll call it the low fat version. I can’t begin to tell you how heavenly it smells.

8. Richard and I are home now from going out to dinner so we might go cut into that second cake if I stop typing a moment.

9. We went to the restaurant where Sue works, hoping to see her; for those of you who’ve read “Wrapped in Comfort,” (still available at Purlescence) it’s the first story, and yes, that Sue. Nope, they said, wrong night, not here, sorry.

10. On our way out I explained to our waitress why I’d so hoped to see her: how, when we moved here we came here a lot while on a per diem the first month, and how 20 years later she still remembered what my then-small kids had liked to eat. She loved my kids and we all adored her.

11. At that point, a different waitress exclaimed, “She’s here now!” Sue and her husband had decided to beat the heat and go out for dinner too, coming to this really great place they happened to know really well.

12. Hugs, love, intro to her husband, and then Sue told him that our kids were the best ever. “Some kids in restaurants, you know, but yours were always perfectly behaved.”

13. They were just shy of 1, 3, and 5 at the time; I don’t remember them being perfectly behaved. But I do remember them as being perfectly loved around her. Every parent of a small child needs some other adult who feels their kids are adorable: it helps the children and it helps the parents, too, to all rise to the occasion.

Sue was there. Our occasion got even happier. She laughed to her husband about my four year old who liked lobster. (It was a moving-expense per diem, the corporation didn’t care in the least what she ordered as long as it was below $25. Come to think of it, four-year-olds ordering lobster several times a week because they miss New Hampshire would be memorable.)

14. Happy anniversary, Richard! With no skunks this time.

(If that one of the three budding amaryllises turns out to be white, I’ll know it was the one Sue dropped off at Purlescence for me back when I was sick. Thank you, Sue!)

Love you, Richard!

The qiviut is humming along nicely now. It’s hard to put it down.

Meantime, there’s been a lack of Parker pictures because I nearly killed off my aging computer trying to take on a lot of them, so this is a cell phone shot: Parker, six months now, and his two-month-old cousin, Kim’s sister’s daughter. It tickles me no end: every kid should have a cousin their own age, and these two are going to grow up close by each other.

On the wildlife front, two days ago there was a sudden flipping the lights off and on behind me and then again in front of me, all in a near-instant as I looked out at the backyard–only, it was bright midday: it was the sun, the windows blocked as wide wings flew over the house. Wow.

The headline in the paper the next morning was all about five juvenile California Condors, the oldest being five, maturation at six, seen partying together on Mount Hamilton in San Jose the day before; the story talked about how they can fly 150 miles in a day, etc.

I’m assuming the shadow was from my Zone-tailed hawk I’ve seen before, which is certainly big enough, given that it can reach the entire keyboard on my piano and then a bit. But it’s so cool knowing there were five (!) Condors so close by, where none had been in a hundred years, shooting the breeze, swapping eagle stories and those parental puppets?–nah, never fooled me a second, you? Nah… Well yeah, I thought he was condor funny looking, myself.

A male Nuttall’s woodpecker–I’ve seen a pair dancing around each other on the tree trunks of late, I’m hoping they set up housekeeping here–landed on the birdfeeder this morning, something I’ve never seen before. The quarreling house finches tried to play their games with him while he was trying to figure out how to stand on this perch here and get food out of that port there, being taller than they, and he would have none of their harassment–he would turn to them with that sharp beak of his and stand them quickly down and go back to his efforts: there is food here. Clearly. The trunk of this thing doesn’t do diddly, how do they all do it, okay (Go away chirpface!), and at last he leaned over just so and snatched himself a seed.

I said to somebody yesterday that knitting is therapeutic: if it doesn’t come out just the way you want, you can relive the hours you spent on it and by golly make it come out exactly right.

I got called on that today.

I knitted a lace repeat on my qiviut project, looked at it and there was no way around it. Out. As I reknit it I thought, well, at least I learned something useful that I can apply to the design. I was gratified  at how well such a fragile-looking yarn stood up to being ripped out yet again.

Except there was more to learn. When I was in my Kaffe Fassett colorwork phase years ago, back when I knit  a coat with 68 shades of wool and mohair and then a second in 86 shades just to beat his after my husband happily claimed the first for his own, I learned that a color will look different if you put it next to this one vs that one.

Lace patterns do the same thing. Who knew.  (Well, I did, but we’re talking particular details here.) After five hours of knitting… I get to go see exactly how this many stitches at this gauge will fit after it’s off the needles, no guessing anymore, because everything I did this afternoon is again frog-centric.

I have hopped around enough perches by now.  I have sown enough seeds. Now I’ll be able to get this design to come out exactly how I want.

(A little later, frogging finished, a fair amount knitted up again: the yarn is just ever so slightly fuzzier, almost imperceptibly so from any distance–but the hands know, and the neck will. Soft soft soft.)

I found a new amaryllis bud today, a Dancing Queen, one of my favorites. How did I miss seeing that coming up earlier! I brought it inside next to the first one just to make sure nothing out there develops a taste for the flowers, giving it a good watering.

The male Cooper’s showed up this evening and this time we all got to see him together.

Michelle: “That’s a big bird!”

Richard, appreciatively: “Just wait till he spreads his tail.”

Me, after we all watched him fly away at last: “There’s a flock of finches and endless doves but only one hawk pair. They’re individuals.”

Meantime, this is what the qiviut looked like this afternoon. I lay in bed last night, sleepless, wondering why on earth the C word should seem any worse in the dark than anything else when it probably wasn’t even a bad version, and thought about what I most wanted to do next–and this was it. It won’t take me very long to work on but it is exactly what I need right now: the pure qiviut is soft (well *yeah*), it is lovely, and I am knitting with the confidence I was lacking on the first try that I have the pattern worked out exactly the way it should be done. I know more now. It feels good.

Michelle exclaimed yesterday over the Epiphany project when I twirled it around my shoulders off the blocking to see; she agreed with me that it was one of my prettiest ever (the way one should always feel at the end of a project)–and now it is ready to be mailed. From Epiphany to Lorraine’s qiviut: I’m glad I have had these to soothe my fingers and my eyes and my soul. That, and the presence by whatever means possible of my family and friends. You have helped so much, and I am so grateful.

Friends from church came over today and scrubbed my car for me just because I can’t, I can’t be in the sunlight where I would be able to see what I was doing and it has a crack in the windshield so I can’t do a drive-through. They stepped in and took care of all that, borrowing my vacuum and an extension cord too and cheerfully working away till it was perfect. Wow.

One day down, the rest of a week to go…

The weatherman predicted a goodly warmth for today. We got up to 67. I got to feel, as I did the first day I worked with this, how a yarn so fine I could barely tell it was against my right hand nevertheless warmed my hand noticeably, in a way no other fiber has ever done while I knit.

I learned something this evening: qiviut can indeed be frogged. Even when you carefully wound the longtail end around each purl bump of the first row. I debated letting the curvy lengths pile up fetchingly on each other for a photoshoot as I undid, but common sense kicked in–let’s not push my luck.

Sometimes when there’s a nagging feeling as you go along, the only good thing to do is to hold it up in the mirror as if trying it on. There’s something about putting it in the context of the human body that clarifies things.

The mixture of laces wasn’t perfect. Too wide to too tight. I finally saw it. Normally I might rinse the project on the needles to set overnight to get a good idea of its post-blocking state, because that usually makes everything look better, but, again, I wasn’t about to risk any degree of felting it together.

It wasn’t by any means a waste of stitches, but rather a good bit of learning achieved in a short amount of time that I can’t wait to put to good use now. I even have an idea of how many individual stitches I can get out of my yardage–so, yes, today the ‘I’m counting’ thing was on steroids.

It all counts for good towards the end result. It’s going to be so gorgeous.

My friend Robin, a fellow knitter, flew in from my hometown and I got to spend part of today with her. We tried to figure out how long it had been; must have been three years now, way too long. We were catching up, we had no particular agenda–till she said she’d realized she’d packed no chocolate.

Hey!

I had her sample some of mine: Valrhona 71%, some Endangered Species dark with hazelnut toffee, and then we were off to the local Whole Foods, which has more choices than anywhere.

She passed on the Vosges chocolate/bacon bar. So far.

She went to her brother’s after that (I don’t get to keep her all the time) and I to KnitNight.

Where I got six carefully-knitted rows of lace done at Purlescence. Qiviut is like the finest cup of hot chocolate: you savor it slowly, a sipped stitch at a time.

Lorraine, owner of Cottage Craft Angora, a small mill, wanted to know what I thought of her qiviut. No, she really wanted to know what I thought of her qiviut. Her 100%. (Picture of a Musk Ox here.)

Now, I’ve bought her Arctic Blend; one 2-ply skein, just to try it out, a 30/30/20/20 qiviut/baby alpaca/silk/merino mix, and dyed it myself, exploring.

It was exquisite. I could be satisfied with this soft stuff oh yes most definitely forever. It made a lot more of a lace scarf than I’d expected to get out of it–for, are you ready for this, ten bucks. Ten. And shipping.

My Mom and my sister Carolyn both wanted that one, out of all the rollaboard-suitcase’s-worth of knitted items I brought to the family reunion. Actually, all the women in the family who saw it did. Anyone would.

I lamented when the website said awhile ago that that blend was sold out; when more appeared just a few days ago, I selfishly ordered some quick before mentioning it to the blog now. Note that I am being very nice in telling you all about it when I can’t afford to stock up more than one color and weight to work with for right now, and I really really like the 2-ply. Haven’t tried the 3-ply. Yet. (Don’t take all the navy, okay, guys?)

Just one more skein… How’s that for a variant on the classic knitter line.

And then. The mailman rang the doorbell this afternoon. There was a skein of that Strawberry Red 100% qiviut from Canada, 44 grams’ worth, for me to go play with. Christmas!

I just happened to be wearing a blouse that matched the yarn as I opened the package; yes, I might like that color. Like, a lot. In the 100%, I would call it more a burgundy, myself.

She’d told me it was coming, actually, and I had just the pattern in mind for when it might arrive.

Ever planned on a name for a baby and when it was born it just wasn’t it? Yeah, I once had our family’s doctor stop by the hospital in New Hampshire to check on my newborn and then he stepped into my room to say, very pleased, that Michelle was doing well now–and I’ve always wondered if he just thought I was an exhausted new mom as I did a moment’s doubletake of an unspoken (Who? Oh right, right, we did change it), “Thanks!” (Duh.)

So. One look at that yarn and I threw out my plans and rewrote and re-mathed.

I doodled a bit to get a feel for gauge. I cast on. I kept the longtail long enough (and it came out exactly to the 1/2 inch) so that I could wrap it across the back of every bump as I purled the first row, an extra strand of yarn to strengthen that edge. Not my usual double-the-cast-on neck edge, though; this way left me the possibility of running a bit shy without having to start over and without risking wasting any.

A few minutes later I knit the first three stitches of a 126-stitch row wrong.

I thought about it a moment and realized, wait. Extra time with pure qiviut. This is a privilege. And not only that, after tinking I can weigh and measure exactly how much yarn that row took up to try to get a better idea of how far I can go with my 320 yards.

Zero grams. It came up zero grams. I can knit this stuff forever.

I saw two of these, one in faded tones, yellows rather than vivid oranges, and the one shown on the left with the sunspot its apparent mate: Black-Headed Grosbeaks. Breathtaking up close. It’s been a year since I’ve seen any. The little house finches (like the little female on the right) were annoyed that they didn’t play the ‘fight and fall up or off and let me grab your perch’ game; just couldn’t get a rise out of them.

Dude. Let me eat my lunch while I ignore you. How else do you think this place gets its yumminess: I am the sun to the seed.

The squirrel flicked its tail side to side like a cat. Another un-intimidate-able bird: Not. Cool.

Oh yes it was.

Meantime, Michelle was trying to buy walking shoes for her trip and at the store I realized I’d been right when I’d grabbed yarn on my way out the door. I pulled my needles out of my overstuffed purse, eyeballed out the length I would need for longtailing it, and cast on.

Not something she’ll need in DC’s summer blaze, though.

p.s. Just for fun? There is someone who made a really loved Bug: those are all tiny seed beads. I’d be afraid to drive it, I mean, think what a fender bender would do, but, wow!

Wow, that was fast.

The last few days I’ve felt like I really needed to be working on that white fluff project in case something happened and I found myself wishing it were done yesterday. But I was busy doing a lot of back-home-again things other than sitting down and holding still and brushed away the thought with, it only needs about three more hours of work to be long enough; if something comes up, I can do that pretty fast. Right?

I did talk myself into starting something else today, putting a hank on the back of a chair and standing there winding it up–but my hands could not be convinced. I wound up that ball, telling myself I’d leave the cloud for when I needed brainless knitting for carrying around. I saw no hurry.

But I felt one. I just could not make myself actually cast on with the new ball. The cloud was demanding to be done. Now.

I had no idea why.

We were talking to the kids tonight and I found myself asking them, Is there anything you need knit?

After a moment’s hesitation, they said, well, actually… if…

Turns out someone they know well and we all love, someone fairly young, was diagnosed just a day or two ago with metastasized cancer. They were wishing… But they wanted somehow for something to go out quickly: for immediate reassurance, for love, for the hope that it would represent coming from all of us.

And here, right here in my hands…

Some of that lace will have been knit just because, just the very first few inches of it (that stayed, because kid mohair is too hard to frog and I knew that since I’d wanted to work on it once, someday I’d want to work on it again.)  A lot of it was knit because something somehow prompted me a week ago to go find it and grab it while packing for my trip, after all its years of ziploc exile. (It was the needles that stopped it. Never knit snaggy-fibered kid mohair with very blunt tips.)

And some of that lace, now, will have been knit expressly for the loved one it’s going to. Which is why I’m glad now that I didn’t think to grab the finer-tipped needles before the trip, which would have sped up the knitting and gotten it finished before I got home.

One hug of soft airy fluff, coming up. Phyllis, this is from the leftover yarn from your shawl.

Fingertip to fingertip, arms outstretched…

I turned to Rachel at KnitNight tonight and asked her if it should go way longer.

For a cloud of fluff like that? “Oh yes, definitely.”

For anyone who has my book (the usual note here of, it’s OOP but Purlescence has copies) this is five repeats of the lace in the main body of the Water Turtles pattern: cast on 51 and off you go.

Happy Anniversary to my son Richard and his wife Kim! More Parker pictures when I can get them to load.

Running in a few loose ends before my trip. I should have saved some of the other snips before I took the picture so the colors could be more representative, in case anyone at my destination is embiggening that and wondering which is going to be theirs.

That done, it finally feels like I can pack and be going.  I have no idea what yarn to take with me or any plan in mind other than to just get on the airplane by myself and go. I can’t wait.