One of the things about being around old friends you haven’t seen in a long time is that you get to learn more about them–and you also tend to learn more about yourself.

When I drove down to Pacific Grove three weeks ago, it was right at the beginning of cooler weather and I knew  Monterey Bay is always a tad chilly anyway; I put my favorite silk jacket (picture if you scroll down here, under Karin‘s yarn) over my blouse on my way out the door.

I have short arms. Sleeves tend to ride down partway over my hands if a blouse otherwise fits.  Get the petite size, it’ll be too short elsewhere; I just plain have short arms.

And as a knitter, that bugs me: the cuff edges bump against my knitting, they catch on my stitches, they catch at my project when I go to turn it around at the end of a row–and there’s also the problem that, as a sun-sensitive lupus patient, I’m supposed to wear finely-woven long sleeves all the time. They’re part of my cage.

I’ve gotten in the habit of folding the cuffs back. Poof, end of problem. And a little bit of defiance of disease.

Visiting with the B’s, one layer of cuffs I could ignore. Two, and when not yet used to cold-weather clothes for the season–I kept absent-mindedly trying to fold both layers back off my wrists, the heavy jacket ones flopping back down repeatedly.

Looking back, it probably looked pretty silly. Unhand me, you silk you!

I thought of that today in a cold house with two layers of long sleeves on again, bugging me, and just too cold to roll them up. I finally realized it was keeping me from finishing that sweater. Well then. I went and did my treadmill time, got warmed up, got the cuffs properly out of my way, and voila. One baby sweater.

Except the button. I need me a good, round, safe for little fingers, dragon-looking button to top it off.

I know, I know, pictures. When it’s not so late.

For the record: Mondays are being a Good Thing around here:

The Crohn’s Lite is much improved. The yank-ees, ditto.

The carry-around lace scarf project of three weeks actually got finished and is blocking.

I wanted to say the baby sweater is done, but it’s a dozen 99-stitch rows shy; the wrist is carping, there’s a tunnel ahead, and I’m stopping the train under icy conditions.

And for anyone who didn’t see the looks-real knit skeleton yet, it is really, really cool.  Very Deb-bone-air.  The artist’s site for it is here; scroll down to see the intense level of detail he put into it. Happy almost-Halloween!

I don’t think Kathryn at Cottage Yarns was surprised when I called.  She recognized my voice.

She thought the edges and width were fine. She was quite happy to sell me more anyway. Her Rios had just come in, the Solis darker than mine but as usual, oh so pretty.  I’ve really wanted to make a baby sweater to go with the blanket and now I can.

After over three weeks, it’s hard to just stop and put the baby blanket down and call the thing done and not be working on it anymore. It’s also over a pound; enough already.

She mentioned that another woman had come in between when I called and when I got up there and was going through the Rios, leaving Kathryn going, uh, oh. But the woman had bought a whole bag of a different color and my Solis was safe after all.

And! She had one last skein from the same bag of undyed Malabrigo Sock I’d bought there awhile ago. I’d been thinking of making a formal christening blanket too and had been wishing I had more, and now I know I can go for it in that so-soft and washable wool.

You know, after 41 years of fighting the knitting grandmother stereotype…

It was after I got home that I finished the ribbing on the Rios, and I remembered wrong yesterday, having not done such a thing in years: if you pick up the stitches from the cast on and knit down, *then* it jogs sideways a half stitch’s worth. Which is what I got at first–but it was quickly clear it was going to feel like knots across that pick-up row. I could just picture the baby doing a faceplant into that and crying. Not our baby! Only one chance to do it right. Do it right.

So I ripped that and did what I’d tried to get out of: I carefully undid that first row, unthreading the yarn woven through each stitch going that direction. And then, hey look, the loops connected beautifully. A little loose-looped along some parts of the pattern, but. I decided loose loops don’t sink WIPs.

So. On the knitting front.

One skein of the Rios had a knot almost exactly midway as the scale measures, its presence highly unusual in my Malabrigo experience. I snipped it right there, not wanting a princess and the pea effect, and knitted the baby afghan with the other five skeins in the two different dyelots I had, alternating them. (Note that the left side in the picture looks lighter because it’s the right side of the blanket while on the right is the back side.)

I didn’t start it with ribbing because ribbing eats yardage and at the time I didn’t know if the Webs dyelot on the way would work at all. So the starting end curls. Which bugs me even though I told myself it wasn’t allowed to.

I’m now at the far end, out of yarn besides those two half balls, finished with the last pattern repeat, and thinking I’ll just finish it off with a half-ball’s worth of ribbing and then pick up the beginning stitches and add the other half a ball in ribbing over at that end. That would work. There, no curling.

Except, in my dreams, I’d like to make that ribbing really big and go buy several more balls and add more ribbing to the sides too to match and to widen the blanket. Yes, it’s good enough as it is. But yes, I wish I could do that.

Fine. Go buy three or four more skeins, make this thing really big!  And hurry, the baby shower’s coming up.

All well and good–except one thing.

That means finding more Solis (that matches).

In Malabrigo Rios. Which has been on the market for a month or less.  The yarn stores have been standing in line, it’s like a first-year Toyota Prius, everybody wants it and with good reason. It is seriously nice, useful, supersoft, densely-spun machine-washable wool.

Imagiknit doesn’t even have the line on their website now, at least not for the moment. Not a single skein in a single color up there anymore.

On the mail order front, which I don’t have time for anyway, Webs is sold out of Solis. Jimmybeanz is sold out of Solis.

I’d rather shade-check in person anyway.

I could call Cottage Yarns in South San Francisco in the morning and Golden Fleece way down in Santa Cruz. Green Planet in Campbell, dunno if they ever got Rios in at all. Anyone got any other Bay Area leads?

Width, 32″ unstretched/42″ mildly stretched (the pattern tends to pull in on itself sideways) by about 46″ length, unstretched, before ribbing and definitely before water touches it.  I intend to wash it to get any (probably nonexistent) possibility of lingering dye away from the baby and knowing that laying it out to dry flat will give me a blocking effect, relaxing the pattern. That will give me a few more inches all around.

I think I should just be glad I’ve got those two half balls to go polish off those two ends (that knot actually turned out to be highly useful and in just the right place) and call it done.

I’m going to be a lazy blogger tonight and post here, with a touch of editing for clarity, what I put on Twinset Jan and Ellen’s blog.  Jan had made some baby socks and hat in a soft, soft angora yarn in a muted sunflower-yellow shade; scroll to the bottom of the post to see them.

I don’t usually comment at such length in someone else’s space, but her picture so grabbed me.

——

Oh. My. Goodness. That angora. That shade (you photographed it better than I did.) BOY, does that bring back memories!

My mom bought some pure angora that exact color on a trip to France before I was born, to knit for her little girls in anticipation of their being upstaged by the new one coming (me).

My oldest sister got a green sweater and she was highly allergic to it. The yellow…sat in a box for something like 45 years.

Until Mom and Dad packed up and moved out of the house they’d raised us in. I had coveted that angora all through my teens and beyond, the only one of the four girls to latch onto knitting like Mom, and Mom had always said, No, that’s not yours. I promised that to your big sister.

She out of the blue, just before the moving van came, mailed it to me after all, all these years later.

You see my blog header? That bit of yellow and those scarves?

That yarn was totally not protected, totally chewed up. I pieced it back together as best as humanly possible and then knitted it up: a scarf for my not-allergic older sister, one for my younger sister, and one each for my brothers’ wives. I dyed them partly on the grounds that no moth stages could survive the boiling water, partly on the grounds of felting together any slipping pieces beyond the splicing efforts.

And that is the story of how my blog top came to look like that. (Note that the ball of yarn has multiple ends.) After wanting that yarn for all those decades, I finally got to have it come to me–and after all that time, Mom was right: it wasn’t for me after all. It was for everybody else.

—–

(Wow. I’d totally forgotten I got seven scarves out of that box!)

News flash: our nephew and his wife, he being the son of Richard’s late sister, had twin baby girls yesterday, everyone healthy and well. Yay! I can just picture Cheryl giving her granddaughters one last hug before their trip down here.

The baby afghan fabric the Malabrigo Rios is turning into for our grandson, meantime, is solid, substantial and warm, exactly what I wanted. But my wrists can only do so many M1 twists at a time, so it tends to go slow.

Every now and then I stop and look at how much is actually nevertheless getting done with my one pattern repeat minimum per day and it surprises me–cool, look at that!  Getting there!

The blog has been photophobic lately but I’m hoping this old shot goes through. (It’s not a great one, but it’s better than what I’ve been able to get since.)

I brought the blanket with me Thursday to Purlescence to show it off there for the first time, and they all made my day with exclamations of Oh, that’s *pretty*!

I told Sandi, the pattern should be intuitive–but it’s not, and I pulled out a simple scarf to work on.

“Some knitting isn’t social knitting.”

True.  But oh, but that yarn and that pattern so much want to be. Just wait till they’re done.  Stitch by ongoing stitch, it’s gradually, beautifully, in spite of my impatience, all coming together.

I’m sure my daughter-in-law knows that feeling right now way more than I do.

It’s amazing how much good a little wool on one’s head can do.

A year and a half ago a big and much appreciated get-well basket was left on our doorstep, full of scrumptious yarns and handknits like the cashmere fingerless gloves from Jasmin–who, when Purlescence was having a sale on that cashmere awhile earlier, had let me have the black that she’d already picked out for herself when I oohed and aahed over it. Just because she’s nice like that.

That black cashmere became my first surgeon’s shawl.

She kept the light aqua blue for herself, and then gave that to me too, in that basket, all knitted up. I was blown away.

But there was one thing in there that came with no name, no tag, no way of knowing who it was from for me to say thank you.

Stephanie was blogging today about it being cold and her daughter putting on a hat and Stephanie’s sudden need to start knitting one.

It’s cold here too this evening. I was reading that and thought, that’s what I need! A hat! And I reached over for that gray and purple one and felt warmed all over again by the thoughtfulness of someone out there. Thank you…

It has been a very useful hat. Last winter, did I steal all the blankets at night? No, I reached over my head into the headboard and fumbled that thing on in my half-sleep.

Although, you can tell I’m married to a computer nerd. He has been working on a long stubborn software problem, working on the laptop right up till bedtime the last few evenings.

Tuesday morning I was startled abruptly awake at a cold something and looked over–my snoozing husband was running his wireless mouse on my arm in his sleep, I guess because to his subconscious I can solve all his problems because I love him.

If you give a mouse a cookie…

The mouse (which, to be fair, he didn’t know was there) has been banished. Even though, theoretically, I could put Jasmin’s long gloves on to ward off its chill.

Uh no. Let’s keep it at hat.

(Hubs wants it mentioned that I still steal the blankets.)

It’s a cold, tool world.

——-

Ed. to add: okay, just picture it–he’s solved the problem, the patent attorneys have gotten involved, and now they’ve billed a better mouse traipse.

How to get lots of knitting done:

The phone rings, giving you a time estimate so you can’t leave. Then the workers show near the end of that period, with no idea how long it will take them, so you can’t leave. Knitting kept me from constantly getting in their way and asking questions. (At that hourly rate, this is a good thing.)

It was the plumbers.   Having come here often enough by now, this time they sent a camera down the line to figure out just what was going on in there.

The guy who put in our addition put in a bend that ought not to be bent, and didn’t put in an outtake but it ought to have had an outtake. He also installed the water heater in such a way as to cause carbon monoxide poisoning, if not for the wallboard between it and our bedroom.

The inspector caught none of that. We got that water heater taken care of on our own. The pipes, well, they’re being taken care of.  Frequently.  Expensively.

Well, hey, I had some knitting I really wanted to get done.  I got in five hours straight. Ice my hands, the thing is blocking now, my shawl is done!

I’ve been scarfing down the Malabrigo Sock.

Now, I’ve often said that if you have a project you’re stalled out on and want to get going, put on an outfit that matches it: it’s really hard to stare for long periods at clashing colors. Happy combinations on the other hand practically knit themselves.

I got some work done on the baby blanket but found myself feeling restless and putting it down. I looked around my stash, and my Malabrigo Sock in Archangel (which matched the shirt I was wearing a lot better) leaped onto my needles and refused to leave.

Several hours’ worth of work later, it suddenly hit me: it wasn’t just the shirt.  I’d been knitting dinner. The very last homegrown tomato, a diced purple onion, the small bits of late-season peach, the dash of olive oil that I’d simmered together before throwing in a splash of good balsamic vinegar and the leftover chicken–those vegetables, right there, in that project, preserving that so-long-tended tomato on into the winter season.

Well, that’s a first!

What a cool way to use books rescued from a fire–just don’t check out the ones at the bottom of the librarian’s desk there. (I’m noticing the titles are turned in out of sight just in case.)

I wonder who first thought that books would make not only great bricks, but a mushroom farm–there’s this one in Quebec.

Creativity rocks!

I ordered more Rios. I have to wait a week to find out if it matches well so the baby blanket can get bigger than 43×40″ (I will knit in alternating dyelots if they’re really close) or if not, the two new skeins will become a mostly-matching outfit while I go buy a contrasting color to put in ribbing all around the thing: I like my baby blankets generous. I’d bought all that Golden Fleece had in that lot, hoping 840 yards worsted would do it. It won’t.

My son told me tonight that my daughter-in-law had been secretly hoping I would knit something for the baby.  I just might.

So. Back to Lisa’s Blackbewwie.

I measured and was sure I had enough to do just one more pattern repeat. It’s always nice to see how far a yarn will go, right?  I know my electronic scale gets a little wonky the closer you get to zero, but it looked like I would have two grams left over, maybe three. That’s cutting it far closer than I like, but the results held steady.

I decided to give it a try.  I confess to knitting perhaps less loosely than usual–I had visions of having only a yard to spare.

It took me three hours to finally cast off, not because it took three hours to cast off, not because I couldn’t bear to see, if, if…  but simply because I could.  No worries.  Clearly, looking at that ball at the very end, I had enough. Alright! Six grams left over! That would be about 30 yards.

Then I threw the shawl in the bag. Done! At last! Two weeks to knit that. I never take that long, but it was 1090 yards of light fingering weight and 72 rows of 439 stitches on smaller needles than I often use and it simply took a lot of time. (Not to mention there was this other project…)

Go do something else!

Like that lasted. Out with you. I was curious.

In the crumpled tinfoil stage, I got 12.5″.  It is now drying in the other room at 26″: add a little water and it’s like Wile E. Coyote after the steamroller went through.

And here I am bouncing back up again and off to the next.

After much trial and error on the baby blanket that did the sturdy Malabrigo Rios not the slightest harm, I ripped to the beginning yet again today and went back to the pattern I’d started out with in the first place.  (After going up three needle sizes on this fifth attempt; I’ve been out of worsted-weight practice.)

This is what I’d wanted all along:  Barbara Walker’s “Dragonskins” pattern. Good and solid, and what it needed to be.  Because every little boy deserves to be dressed in dragons.

I wanted to go back to reading one of the most important books I have in a long time–Greg Mortenson’s Stones Into Schools about his work setting up a school for girls as well as boys in one of the least accessible areas of Afghanistan. He is one of those rare people who changes everything.

It’s up there (only at distinctly higher elevations) with Mountains Beyond Mountains about Dr. Paul Farmer, the Harvard doctor who set up a medical clinic in Haiti. And then a school. And then decent housing. And so on.

Still, I had a deadline I wanted to meet. I kept going at that Lisa-yarn shawl till I finished the third repeat, the end point I was going for, but found I have enough yardage to do an edging after all. Well, cool!  So much for being done tonight.

Wonder if I’m too old for sneaking a flashlight under the covers.

So: January baby. Cold climate. Needs warmth. Right? I keep thinking of the Afghans for Afghans campaign, where they specifically say, We need animal fibers for warmth and we need the patterns solid, no yarnover holes.

Nice and solid first baby blanket attempt: I think you could have arranged it in a circle and had it stand upright like a box.  A little too earnest in the endeavor–not to mention, using 20g to get less than an inch, um, we’re not trying to create bulletproof here and there isn’t *that* much Rios Solis. R i i i p that hour and a half’s work.

Then, frog four rows because I changed my mind again.

Now it’s back to about 45×4″ so far, and I keep dithering. It’s the background pattern to this blog, with the M1s turned into YOs.

It’s lace. Not a very open lace, but still, there are holes. And after 23 years of living in California, having fled 75″ of snow in 17 days, my memories of Cold with a capital C might be a tad warped. Should I start over again? Should I go up one needle size even more to let the fabric relax a bit more (the yarn would say oh thank you thank you very much) and just think of it as an indoor blanket?  I’d get a bigger blanket if I did.

I keep thinking, oh just wind another ball and start again on the 9s and don’t tell the 8s you’re doing that till it’s too late and the 9s are going hahatoldjaso and the 8s are screaming noFAIR but they lose.

Or something.

You know, if I’d actually swatched *any* of these ideas…

Hey! How about that Lisa yarn over there?

I finally put the Rios down to just let ideas simmer a bit while I went and read. I needed to relax about this and not try to knit thirty things at once. This is a baby blanket.  This is not (name your favorite major political crisis.)  This is just a few skeins of good wool. And when it’s all knitted up, honest, there will be more.

I know, because the more is sitting there drumming its fingers over there wondering why it didn’t get to go first and trying to tell me shhhh, Lisa’s!

And then they grow! (Our older son, the father, being 6’9″.)

Okay, so, just to distract you from the rant below: I made great headway on a new shawl today but at one point put it down, picked up the tiny hat on the tiny needles that make my hands tingle to work on, and simply did those last few rows. I needed the satisfaction of having it done. The bluegreens are deeper (and I think prettier) in person.

Just looking at that tinyness makes the idea of our coming grandson more real. Richard looked at it and was reminiscing over newborns, holding his arms as if to cradle the little one right then and there.

We can’t wait!