Just need to run the ends in on the baby blanket–tomorrow. But the knitting part, it is done.

The cashmere-blend Epiphany yarn on the next project is down 28 grams and going fast.

And for a little fun: someone among the ironworkers repairing the old Bay Bridge after the Loma Prieta quake  of ’89 had an artistic side. Permission was not asked, and good thing, because state officials said it would not have been granted–but a troll was created and the workers welded it in place underneath the roadway. A little public art to brace against natural disasters. To stand guard. Ships passing below could see him and apparently the traffic news helicopters could zoom their lenses to him but I’d never heard of the thing till now, when the current ironworkers refused to let him be gone with the old span that was just relegated to history this past weekend.

This time Caltrans got it right. The little troll, our local man of steel, is to be saved for a museum still bolted to his piece of his bridge and according to the LA Times, officialdom has now asked that, given how trolls traditionally go with one bridge and one bridge only, and that ours has done such a marvelous job of protecting all from natural harm, that a new one be created for the new bridge. Of steel, in a place protected from the sun (a troll after my own heart), and they offered that it might be made by the ironworkers, or someone in a non-profit industrial arts class in Oakland, or…

On the sly. Don’t tell them. Just go for it.

Cue the Habu Textiles folks! That steel laceweight yarn I could never see a reason to buy at Stitches–it’s windy on that bridge and you know a little someone will need a good scarf.

The dark navy, almost black stripe? That one went really slowly as my hands recovered. But now the new green yarn is coming along nicely. I’m second-guessing myself, I always do, on whether the green really meshes so well with the others, but it’s very clear that once the denim blue is in after that it will be perfect in there. Colors have conversations amongst themselves, and those two will huddle at the end of the room, catching up.

And the green is already making the navy less black and more blue around it.

Re this morning, we all drove to the airport so that there would be someone in the car with the driver coming back to make sure he didn’t fall asleep. Not to mention that with the bridge closed, we actually had to use the carpool lane from San Jose, even before 6:00 am.

And I just poured myself a glass of milk partway down the outside of the glass. I think maybe I won’t get up at 5:15 tomorrow morning.

Meantime, our daughter Sam got her second paper from her PhD published here, making her Mom and Dad burst with pride all over again. (And if you’re waiting for a medical breakthrough for any disease, go bug your Congressperson hard. The sequester is ending careers for researchers as years of work are abruptly coming to a stop, and knowledge is being lost along with the jobs.)

Okay, enough kvetching, back to the happy anticipation. I can’t wait to see that baby blanket finished!

Took it easy today, knit just a few rows, and the hands are much better off.

But I did get to show Rachel at knit night the colors of her yarn coming together in that baby blankie, all but the last one in there. She loved how it was coming out. Made my day.

Meantime, if you didn’t see the story, I highly recommend scrolling down near the bottom of this page to see the longer version of the interview with Antoinette Tuff.

A mentally ill young man with an AK-47 and 500 rounds of ammo in his pockets got through the locked doors at an elementary school as a parent walked in and Ms. Tuff found herself face to face with him. His face showed his intent.

She felt the fate of hundreds of children and teachers on her, that one wrong word and they and she and the gunman and who knows how many cops would all be dead. She started talking to the guy while silently praying–not just for all the innocents but for him, too. “I put it all to God.”

She found an opening when he told her his name: that was her mother’s maiden name. “We could be family!” He was cool with that.

She told him some of the things she’d gone through to show that one could come out okay even after really bad experiences, that she wanted him to go forward and experience the parts of life that were to come for him, that the good to come would prove it was worth it, and she eventually talked him into emptying his pockets onto her desk, all the ammo, the gun, everything, and into lying down on the floor with his hands behind him while she sat at the desk so that the cops could know she was okay. So he would be too.

And thus it ended peacefully. He’d shot some shots earlier, but nobody was hurt.

I have never wanted so badly for someone to be awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom. I want Antoinette Tuff to get to see the whole country cheering her for who she is and for what she did. I was the tenth signer of the petition; will you join me?

This photo shows the colors a lot better than last night’s. I’ve now gone on to stripe five.

Question: it’s about 48″ wide and the length looks like it will be anywhere from 34″ snapped back together to easily 46″ and more, given the elasticity of the pattern. That should be enough, right? (An example of the Pythagorean pattern knitted up can be seen here. Lots of patterns-within-patterns and textures for a baby to explore.)

But I just read the reviews on Cascade 220 superwash on Ravelry, and there are a lot of warnings that after the third or fourth time through the washer and dryer it suddenly shrinks up quite a bit.

That would effect the length the most. I don’t really want to do more than the planned seven stripes. The eye is much more pleased with odd numbers than even, and going all the way to nine is looking really unlikely tonight: as it gets bigger it’s heavier on my hands, and they are not happy. (Maybe, ice or no ice, I shouldn’t knit six+ hours a day three days in a row?)

If anyone has any experience with this yarn’s behavior in the laundry, though, I’d love to hear it. (It’s the 220 from the Peruvian mill, not the more recent Chinese version; this was a gift from my friends Rachel and Kathy’s stashes.) Because I’m going to tell the parents not to baby the blankie, just their sweet baby Hayes. And if that means I need to add an eighth stripe, I need to add an eighth stripe.

Thoughts?

I was at Purlescence tonight, knit night, and admired what the person next to me was working on. It was a very soft variegated purple, I think she said a handdyed merino/kid mohair blend, a nice chevron pattern, densely knit and warm, very pretty.

I’d followed her pictures on Facebook on her trip to Europe she’d just gotten back from.

She’d had a great time, she told me.

“Did you buy any yarn over there?”

“No,” she answered, hesitating– “but I lost some. One skein. One irreplaceable skein.”  She paused, then said it again: “Irreplaceable,” shaking her head slightly, still grieving the loss in spite of herself.

It was for the project she was working on. She’d bought the yarn ten years ago, long since closed out now. She had started a scarf but now it was going to have to be a cowl and oh well. “Cowls are nice,” we both agreed. She had tried Ravelry, she had tried asking every likely yarn store she could find anywhere but it was long gone.

I told her my story, which wasn’t anywhere near hers, of trying to match a dye lot, leaving messages–and not thinking to mention that I was on Pacific time. One helpful shop owner, working through emails before she opened the doors for the day, called me rather than emailing back, the more personal touch. Very nice of her, actually.

And so my husband woke up to the sound of the phone in the dark of the winter night, California time, handed it to me, and growled, “It’s your boiler-room New York City yarn pushers. They want you to know: they don’t have your dye lot!”

Oops.

During those last couple of sentences, the friend’s phone started buzzing and she apologized a bit and picked it up (oh it did? sorry I didn’t hear it) when I finished.

It was a message from someone on Ravelry who’d made a project out of that yarn. Ten years ago. She had three skeins left. “They’re yours.”

Overwhelmed to the point of tears, the shop cheering, hugs and huzzahs all around. Wow, what were the odds! And what timing! We all got to celebrate with her! For both of them! I tell you, that place was full of really happy people all the sudden.

What that generous knitter whoever they are could never know was that our friend had toured a World War II concentration camp in Germany, and I can only imagine the emotions and the losses it represented. I have seen and felt Gettysburg, a place beyond words, and that–

But…this….

Her yarn. Somewhere on that trip. It was gone.

Someone stepped forward tonight for a complete stranger simply because she knew what it was like not to be able to finish the project as she’d dreamed it and she could well imagine what it would mean to her to now be able to. Because she empathized with her fellow human being. What a gift, what a deeply meaningful gift, and may it come back to this good person again and again in her life.

“Knitters are the BEST!” our friend exclaimed.

Parker and Hudson in their matching dinosaur jammies.

Meantime, yesterday I finished a silk shawl, counting grams per row every row but I made it.  Close! For two weeks it had needed just a few more hours (and getting past that fear of running out early)  but now I was needing the sense of accomplishment at finishing, and so I sat down and got to it. Done.

Back to the hat and Hayes’s blanket.

Parker and his beloved blankie. (And I hope by linking, the very kind Antonio at Malabrigo gets to see how treasured his Rios is. He told me at Stitches how rare it is to be granted a glimpse: all that yarn they send out into the world, what becomes of it?) One very happy little boy.

And every year at Stitches, there’s a vendor who does custom fitting and then creates and mails you a pair of shoes made in America, your choice color, style, leather and that are guaranteed to fit your feet at a Birkenstock-range price.

As a 6.5 EE, choice and fit are a rare and wonderful thing, and a few years ago I ordered navy sandals from them. I didn’t buy into the reflexology idea behind the funky knobby bottoms on the things (scroll down just a bit), but they were designed for you to be able to be comfortably on your feet all day.

There’s only one problem.

Ever since a speeder totaled my car, my sense of balance has been purely visual and tactile, and it’s a good thing I like Birkenstocks because they steady me with a lot of feedback as to just where and how far away the floor is and whether I’m tilting overly.

But those, not so much. I wore them  once and decided I risked breaking bones–they’re great shoes, just not for me.

Birkenstock had an outlet shop years ago in Gilroy till the company closed all their American outlets. But in the meantime, while my friends Mel and Kris were doing a show in the area, we found out later she and I bought the exact same clog in the exact same size and same color at about the same time. 37R. Twins. Cool!

Hey–I know someone who has to be on her feet all day at art shows who would fit those not-Birks…

And so, with her permission, I sent the navy pair off to where they would actually be worn.

And today she got me back for it. She found out I’d broken my favorite hot cocoa mug and asked for a picture.

I know the Kunihiros generally don’t mail their pottery; I was expecting to buy more at the show coming up at the end of the month and looking forward to seeing them.

She and her family made four castings of mugs, the letter in the box said, set them in a row, and together they picked out the one that best matched the photo.

The mental image of that just makes me very happy. The family gathered together, the row of mugs, the winner, and most of all the love.

My hot cocoa and I are going to do some serious celebrating with that mug in the morning! And I can’t wait to thank them in person!

Row upon row and here I go! It feels great.

And then to have something small and portable to work on at Purlescence, I grabbed some soft Colinette wool that I’d gotten at their yarn swap meet. Monet colorway: how cool is that for the daughter of a modern-art dealer? My dad, my little sister and I spent the summer I was 16 with one of Monet’s proteges and his family, driving around the country museum-hopping. (Mom was helping my oldest sister with her first baby.)

I figured returning the gift of the yarn as a hat to go in the shop’s Halos of Hope box seemed just the thing.

Housework in its mindlessness (I do after all have houseguests coming in a week) is a way to let ideas sift through for the creative side: okay, if we add to the seed stitch in blue here and change the cables here and here to go over, not under, it will look like water flowing around the pier near that park… And don’t forget to add stitches to make up for the tightness the cabling causes.

But how much of that will be offset by the seed stitch? Okay, so add fewer than the typical third more. Right?

I sat down to actually start making all this visualizing come to pass and found myself remembering how much my son Richard in particular, uncle to the baby getting this blankie, liked to fit things into things. A hole where a plastic screw was missing on his Smurf ride-on toy? Bobby pins fit into it nicely. So did straws, twisties, our missing pens, anything he could get in there. We took up the air vent covers all over the old house before we moved and retrieved some of our missing silverware. Don’t let that kid near the dashboard again–we don’t know where he found the coins but we eventually found out what he did with them while I was buckling his new sister in first. Gave new meaning to the term baby rattle.

And I thought of Bashie’s story and the penny in her dad’s back. Yeah, I think a little one would have fun figuring out how to get a coin wedged into the curves of the cables.

Discovering. It’s all good.

I almost deleted most of yesterday’s post. I came thisclose. I didn’t want to make the yarn anybody else’s problem nor even to remotely seem like I might think it should be.

I have very generous friends. Thank you, Kathy, thank you, Rachel, and everybody else who got beaten to the punch. I offered Rachel to swap her some silk for her blue Cascade, sure that that basil green in my stash would be just the color on her, or maybe the brick red, and she half-waved me off telling me she knew I needed to give back but it certainly wasn’t necessary.

Yeah well.

So we’re still working out schedules to get together.

Meantime, Hayes’ MRI results came back: absolutely. Normal. (Standing on a chair and cheering  to the skies!)

See? Just the threat of being knitted for helped him get better! (I’m still waiting to hear when he’s off the cooling bed, but hey. We’ll take every good step along the way.)

Oh, and the photo? Someone brought this flower arrangement to church last week. One young man got up to give his talk and as he started, he couldn’t help but turn back to it and he marveled to his audience, wanting to share his close-up view, There are *fish* in that vase!

Okay, I’m slow–it wasn’t till I typed that just now, a week later, that I realized, oh, wait, it IS a Christian church, and as a visual poem that’s pretty cool.

The best part was the little children who came up after the meeting to see the fish swimming quietly under the flowers where you would never expect to see such a thing.

Years ago, someone from my then-knitting group (which would gradually dissolve as people moved away), a staff member at Packard Children’s Hospital, was diagnosed with cancer. It was when they started her chemo that they found she had an autoimmune liver disease and could not take the treatments.

Lenore faded pretty quickly.

Near the end, she offered our group her yarn, having no family of her own to pass it down to, and I looked her in the eyes in a quiet moment and promised her I would make something beautiful from it to remember her by; she was grateful, with tears.

And then I was not in town, I don’t remember why, for the yarn get-together: people chose, and there was a bit saved for me for when I got back.

None of which, to be honest, had the remotest appeal. Just, none. I wanted it to but it adamantly refused to comply.

And I felt guilty about that. I had promised. It had meant so much to her.

I was cleaning out some old stuff today and came across a stitch sampler that had been among those itchy scratchy hideous s0-not-my-color yarns. It was knitted very tightly, like a good solid old Irish sweater. Way too short to be a scarf, way too funky shaped to be, say, a hotpad, way too much work to just toss aside; she’d put a lot of time into it when time had been the one thing she had had so little of left.

This time I put it around my neck and imagined it sewn shut at the ends as a small cowl.

You’d want a thick turtleneck under it to protect from the itch, but, yes! At last. She herself had made the pretty thing to remember her by.

And I do.

Thank you, everybody. The giddy intensity of accomplishment yesterday gave way to a quieter, I did it! that’s had me smiling all day. Chan called me the Blanket Doctor, and I told her I gave it a dose of anti- boy antics.

And back to the soft cream dk silk project at hand.

You’ve seen the first picture, right? What you can’t see on that first one is a whole bunch of other loops besides the ones that show there, pulled way, way out.

Sometimes when you have to go to the blankie hospital, you have to get stitches.

I spent several hours again on the thing today, using Friday as my inner absolute, past-due deadline.

All worked back in now. Kitchenered across the break.

I kept laying it out on that rocking chair, done at long last–and finding two more places where Parker had worked more loops loose. Fixed those, laid it out–two more. Flip it over–oh wait. And there’s this whole pattern-repeat area where he’d pulled row after row in a row, open wide and say ahhh…

Five o’clock was running in my direction fast and I so wanted to be able to tell them that Parker’s blankie was finally on its way back home.

Four thirty-five I pulled back out of the parking lot.  Tuesday they get to open the door and the box will be there.

It’s been really bugging me for a week now that two-and-a-half-year-old Parker didn’t have his blankie back right away. I wanted it right out the door the next day and it just didn’t happen–I kept wrestling endlessly with how to find the most perfect way  to bring it back to its former glory. Overthinking. Using the shawl-knitting time to chill out about it, hoping that would get me back to it.

Rip it and knit it again, was one friend’s take.

I considered. It’s near the cast on.

So to take the easy out with that I would need to cut it off at the end of the tear and carefully undo two rows’ worth: if you’re frogging knitting from backwards, you have to pull the entire undone length carefully through the last loop of each row, it doesn’t just keep coming freely at those points like it does going the other way. Then I would use that two rows’ worth to cast off above the break, the blanket much shortened. Then I’d undo the original cast off at the other end and continue knitting on with the cut-off yarn.

That way I’d be ripping out a third+ rather than nearly the whole thing.

I kept picturing myself driving easily a hundred miles to get to all the local Bay Area stores that carry Malabrigo in hopes of finding a close-enough match to replace whatever might be too broken to work with.

And maybe I should have. But I decided to at least see first how it would look if I went for a simple repair. I spread the much-loved blankie out on the floor with the former loops now crossing the gap side-t0-side pulled a bit to straighten them out, and with a crochet hook caught each one on up, loop by careful loop in stockinette mode: plain, no dragonskin pattern.

Got all done, turned it over to the back to check–and there was a whole group of strands that had been caught sideways and upwards about ten rows’ worth. How on earth did THAT happen?

So I partially undid and tried again.

Well, it’s better…

Tomorrow, with a little more light again and a little more energy again, I hope to close the gaps, fix the last errant loops, and get it off to the post office.

Or maybe I just needed a break from it for a little while before trying to finish it tonight. So I came over to the computer and typed this.

Oh and. My Cooper’s hawk flew in while I was fussing over the whole thing and there it was!  A U-turn just past the birdfeeder, wings and tail spread wide, maybe a dozen feet away. Wow!

Just can’t growl at wool when the feathers fly by like that.

The doorbell rang. Cliff! And Don, sitting over in the car pulled in front of the house. Hi!

Cliff handed me a bag full of clamshells they’d been carefully saving for me, for which I am very grateful. It was so good to see them.

The raccoons, meantime, had been clambering for more last night, partying and carrying on.

Occu-pie! In spite of their best efforts as they wall streaked, we made light of their raids on the sus-pension system and held a clambake in the sun all day to celebrate; Apple’s shares tanked on the news, being all caught up in white tape, while Fuji’s stalkholders held out hopes of  a crisp increase in dividends.

Apple felt boxed in by the French regulators on their case, protesting proudly, Mais je m’apple…

Fuji raked in the green, adding last week’s fallout to this in hopes of their own sweet success.

I think I’ll clam up now.