(I have no idea why it’s cropping this, click to see the whole thing. It’ll go sideways, though. Go figure.)

I wound up the last hank of Matisse Blue of that dye lot and then I’m out and we’re done. The seed stitch border will take a chunk of it.

I started a fish over here, some seaweed over there, and (where’s the purple. Found the purple) that should also start about there, and then those will probably be the last of the fish, unless (let’s see how much blue there is left at that point) I start one over there….

Three rows in, suddenly I felt like, nope. Put it all away. Picked up a hat and added a few more inches to it, wanting something where I didn’t have to plan and I didn’t have to envision and I didn’t have to make any decisions, just sit there and knit and think how someone was really going to like a gray hat after this was done and it will be fun to find out who and wouldn’t it be great to actually *finish* something.

I did not finish it.

And I baked snacks. Because tomorrow Nina and I are off doing the Bay Area Yarn Crawl thing again.

Another day, another ocean creature. (Let me go tighten that woven-in end a bit there.)

If I spend too long looking at the colors at hand to decide which would go best for the next ones to fit in with the others, does that mean I’m fishing for complements?

Yesterday’s yarn purchases. I don’t usually buy chunky, but when you have a granddaughter whose favorite outfit is, to quote her mother, “rainbow leopard sparkle” and you find some Urth yarn like the one on the left, well there you go.

Just got back from celebrating the anniversary of old friends of ours. Their kids flew into town, we got to catch up with them all–I went to college with one of them–and I took the youngest aside and told him,

You changed everything.

I what?

I told him, I argued with that feeling that I should knit for you, going, I can’t knit for everybody who ever compliments my stuff, there’s only one of me and there would be no end of it, I mean, c’mon!

The feeling was so insistent (and he knew the end of that story. It was a vest. A Kaffe Fassett vest, with him at 15 picking out all the colors for it in disbelief as I egged him on to choose more because I knew he wanted to) and his reaction had been so intensely grateful that I’d wanted to be a part of that again. I wanted to knit for other people again. You did that, I said. I’d kept a running list for awhile of the people I had knit for after that and at 182 went, That’s not what it’s about–ditch this. And that had been about 20 years ago.

I thanked him again for changing my life.

His foster/adoptive parents were celebrating their 70th anniversary. Good folks.

This is Before on that leg. (Wait, maybe I did miss a stitch.)

After hasn’t happened yet, I guess because I generally avoid doing fixes while the project is still on the needles. Could use a diagonal add-on(s?) above the eye, too. And that’s really one row too many at the bottom of the shell, but now I’m just being picky, and part of that is a bit of camera distortion from the angle.

The basic turtle, back markings aside, was the most variegated yarn in any of the critters. I’d probably go with more strands and more control over the individual colors next time, but I think I lucked out in how it came out and I like it.

That background is Malabrigo’s Whales Road colorway. The turtle is set against Matisse Blue.

The Bay Area Yarn Crawl starts this Friday. If we can’t have Stitches West anymore, we can make our own, said whoever pulled this idea together and got it started last year. Can’t wait.

Meantime, I took this picture this afternoon, with the needles curling over and hiding the third jellyfish and the first half of a turtle.

Then I kept at it till I’d finished the rest of its eighteen rows (head, shell top, back legs, upper front leg) because I wanted to see it!

Oh. It looks like I missed a stitch yesterday connecting the lower front leg to the body; I didn’t, but it looks like I did. I think I’ll embroider maybe just half a stitch there, maybe a whole, let me think about it overnight, we’ll see.

But the next row is definitely going to start a new fish to the left of that orange trio.

I did not plan on placing them all in diagonal lines; they just swam to where they wanted to go and waited over a month for me to notice.

Did two rows on the coral reef afghan this morning and then spent a whole lot of time hemming and hawing over the turtle that was going to come next. Went looking for sea turtle pictures just to be sure, and the green sea turtle had the markings I liked best. Modified the shape I’d made on my graph a little bit. Went through my yarns. I swatched one I really liked but thought that yes, it did, it had a little too much that was too light–it wasn’t variegated a lot but it was a lot for it.

I said I might have to go to the LYS.

Richard said, basically, If you do, you do.

I appreciated the support greatly–but I didn’t go.

And there it sat for eight hours. No progress.

I finally decided this is ridiculous, just pick it up and get started.

I picked it up.

I stared at it some more.

And finally the truth that had been trying to find room to squeeze into my brain all day got through and got my attention: I couldn’t start the turtle because that’s not where it’s supposed to go, and just because I want to do that next doesn’t mean it does.

Finally! I got back to work, and the yellow tail on that fish I just started was just the thing.

The turtle needs to be headed towards the uppermost jellyfish (hello lunch!), which doesn’t exist yet. Well then.

A Wallace the Brave strip just for us. And then this one. (Someone may have been laughing her way through the archives. )

Our phones came today and I spent way too long trying to learn my way around a sometimes very different system before I go out into the wild with it. Still needs a protective cover.

But look at all those options for the hearing impaired!

Little by little….

You can’t get a great deal of detail into little fish compared to the ones in my first Ocean afghan what with the limitations of drawing in wide V shapes. But that just means it’s a new way of exploring what my needles can do.

More Anya apricot seeds went out in the mail, with a few left.

It is going to be cold and (finally!) rainy the next five days here, which feels fitting: the skies themselves mourning those lives lost in the air crash in DC.

James Fallows, pilot and reporter, says helicopters are forbidden above 200′ in that airspace. The New York Times says they were at 300′ and a half mile off the course directed by the controller–and that the helicopter pilot had flown that route before and knew those restrictions before they hit that plane.

It took me straight back to my mom’s close friend’s agony waiting to hear whether the father of her children during his commute home had been on the 14th Street bridge that another plane from National (now Reagan Airport) hit 40 years ago after not de-icing. He was not heard from for hours–but he was safe.

All those rescuers on those cold waters, hoping to be able to deliver that same news to other families but seeing only wreckage and worse.

Knitting. I tell you. Six rows again today. Needed to. Bright colors, fishy fish, creation-ing.

That second octopus’s last arm is just going to be too short if I don’t add another strand and put up with weaving its ends in, too. (Appraising look.) Nope. I’ll never be satisfied with it if I don’t. First thing tomorrow.

Remind me to break off a longer piece next time.

Slowly, slowly getting there.

Judging, wrote Carolyn Hax recently, is carbs for the ego: so satisfying at first but so easy to overdo.

And yet.

It is unfathomable that the day we remember and celebrate all that was good and noble and idealistic about Martin Luther King and his appeal to the best in our natures was the day we let the felon-in-chief back into the White House.

I do not want to see that face again. I do not ever want to hear that voice again. And yet, he’s managed to guarantee himself endless hourly media attention–again.

Any time he says something outlandish, the latest being wanting to steal the Panama Canal or invading Greenland–pay attention to what he doesn’t want you to see that he’s actually doing. It’s a tell, and it always was.

So to avoid all that I put in hours on the afghan. Six rows is the most I’ve done in a day, given that it’s such slow going. But in between I had to rest my hands, and would find email notifications; some, I just had to go look.

The richest oligarchs across the front row and the average joe left outside in the cold weather, no surprise there. Elon Musk, South African son of apartheid who came here illegally on a student visa because he never showed up at Stanford but stayed anyway, raising a Nazi salute–twice–not only in public but on camera in celebration of our newly sworn in racist-in-chief: that is staggering to the daughter of a man who put his life on the line to save the world from Hitler.

And it is so deeply sad to see those two in particular who have forsaken not just all those wives but the sense that we must all matter to each other in their zeal for power and money. If they had been in that Pacific Palisades fire like my sister, would they have cared what color the firemen who rescued them were? What *their* immigration status was?

In the end, which will come for them, too, everything they’re grasping at will become utterly nothing, and what on earth will they have then?

(Picture taken most of a shark ago.)

Phyl, an experienced diver, looked at this and started naming the striped orange fish.

I looked at her and declared, G_d makes His creations, I make mine.

Well alright then! as we both laughed.

Nina threw herself a birthday party and invited her friends. She told me to bring my knitting so she could work on hers. So I did.

I pulled mine out first, a white lace cowl in Malabrigo Rios at about the 2/3 mark, and then she showed off her much more elaborate project. Gorgeous. Another friend there was also a knitter. And one said with some regret that it had skipped a generation and she didn’t–but she took a picture of what I was working on to send to her (daughter I think? It was loud in there) because she so admired it.

Turns out she was the woman who had translated all those letters Nina had found in her mother’s closet that had been sent back and forth between relatives in concentration camps during the Holocaust.

Pattern repeat #12, done. (Checking the time) it really needs at least one more after that, all I can hope for is she doesn’t leave early. She and someone else got quite into a conversation–good, good, keep talking, guys.

Repeat #13 got done. That’s shorter than I normally  prefer but it was just long enough to look okay to my eyes. I cast off.

Sitting next to me looking the other way as they talked, she didn’t notice at all.

I retrieved my purse, where there’s always a yarn needle in the change pocket of the wallet. I sat down on the floor in the kitchen where I knew her view of me would be blocked and wove those ends in. I should have some folding scissors in there somewhere… No sign of them. I asked Nina. She got hers and snipped those two little umbilical cords to its beginnings off and the thing was born.

The interpreter of those letters was dumbfounded. And ecstatic.

I explained that its nubbly texture would disappear and the lace lie flat and stretch out the moment it touched water, it’s the nature of the thing.

Totally fine by her, and she put it on and hugged me.

She took it off again to stroke the softness of the Rios.

And at last she did leave a little early, like I’d had a feeling she might.

I was a little wistful that I didn’t have one to give to any of the other friends but they all said that for all those hours she’d put into doing that great gift for our Nina and her family she had earned every stitch of it. And she had.

Nina said as we were leaving, That was the right person for that. That was perfect.

Thumper’s Admonition, I’ve been reminding myself the last few days.

But oh man this is such a howler of a mansplainer.

A cotton and ramie sweater from the ’80’s is good quality because it doesn’t pill much.

I can’t think of any cotton sweater I’ve ever had pilling.

This wool sweater (picture on left) has been worn by two generations!

Yeah, your mom wore that till one of her kids put it through the wash and now the body’s shrunk with the arms gone gorilla by comparison and your little sister wears it now. AmIright? Wool sweaters and high belly button exposures don’t normally go in the same season.

Manufacturers wash sweaters again and again like distressed jeans to soften them but it makes them wear out faster!

What manufacturer? Where? Has anyone ever heard of that? Yes a few bespoke ones will wash the mill oils out of the animal fiber yarns so that the customer will get the full effect of the softness they’re paying for. That coating is for keeping stray fibers from blowing all over the mill, but it feels like dried hair mousse (or whatever they call glop-for-hair now) so that’s something you want them to do. Again, that’s to remove part of the manufacturing process from the natural fiber and I can assure him they only do it once.

Then he goes on to say that the older the wool sweater, the softer. See this old Norwegian one? It’s soft because it’s old.

Absolute horsefeathers. If we dig a wooly mammoth out of the permafrost we should be able to just about melt into its butteriness, right?

Age has nothing to do with it. You cannot make it softer by wearing it more.

Wool’s softness depends on the micron count of the fibers, with much varying between sheep breeds and on how tightly it’s spun. I once made a bit of angora rabbit feel like the roughest burlap on my wheel. Putting twist into fibers is how you make yarn in the first place: you add friction to hold them together. The more twist, the rougher feel but also the less pilling, the harder it will wear and the less soft it will be. It is a direct tradeoff that every cashmere manufacturer in particular has to make on how they want to present their wares to their customers. Longevity? Or immediate swooning at first touch? With good hand washing either one should be fine.

He mentions sending it to the dry cleaner to keep it clean. I have a number of $5-10 thrifted cashmere sweaters that came my way because someone did exactly that and lost what they’d paid all that money for.

Dry cleaning wrecks the softness of cashmere. A very careful hand washing restores it. Like magic. A second hand washing even more so. Water+temperature change+agitation=felting. That means use lukewarm water, NOT cold despite anything anyone ever told you. Lower it into the soapy, still water, let it soak, raise it back out, fill the sink with rinse water without letting the water pour over the sweater–that counts as agitation–and lower it back into the now-full sink again. Lukewarm lukewarm lukewarm, I can’t stress it enough. Roll it in a white towel to get the water out.

You can spin it out in the washer *if* the water won’t spray on it, but the force of the twirl will encourage any fiber ends to fluff out of the yarn. A friend of mine who went with the washer kind of half-bemoaned that her cashmere looked like angora rabbit now and to her eye less professional wear when she wanted to be taken seriously as a lawyer.

Etc. Most of you all know all that, I know.

He recommends merino or (blink) shetland wool as a substitute for cashmere if you want something soft.

Now, historically one of the reasons for raising Shetlands was the variability within individual fleeces and their dual coat, rare in domesticated sheep. The neck hair was for the finest, softest fit-for-a-queen (literally, historically) lace shawl that you could pull through a wedding ring with the fiber as fine as 10 microns, and I’m sure that’s where the notion that shetland is soft comes from. Cashmere is under 19 microns, often 12-15. The rest of the Shetland is in the mid-20’s on up to as much as 35.

That scratchiness and the guard hairs help keep you warm when it’s really really cold. I never knew that scratchy wool was a plus till I lived in New Hampshire, but one -27F day taught me things I’d never known. Anything to keep your blood flowing near the surface. So go stab your skin a little.

I moved to California instead.

Anyway, so you have a male writer quoting a male blogger and trying to explain how to pick out a quality sweater, and his editor was surely male, too.

Because it clearly never occurred to them to run his piece past Robin Givhan there. Who wrote about fashion and style so well that she got promoted to more general commentary. She might be able to tell them something about choosing clothes well.

But she is female. And she is black.

And so the guy wrote this absolutely ridiculous piece full of misinformation that he was sure was true because what could she or any other woman who’s ever bought a sweater ever have told him?

And they not only put it on the front page, they put it in their Optimist newsletter to get it a bigger audience.

At that point it was, I’m sorry, Thumper. But I’m sure you understand.

The microphone wasn’t working and I couldn’t hear a thing and the Zoom seemed to be turned off during the second meeting because the mic wasn’t working and there was a borrowed temporary setup and the program’s attempts at captions earlier had been utter gobbledygook.

I got pulled away a moment and on coming back in at the rear found myself sitting in the way back so as not to interrupt.

Not at first, but eventually, I pulled out my carry-around project and hoped I wouldn’t bother anybody but there was no reason to waste the time and just sit there. I don’t usually knit in church. I knit in church.  Just not the main meeting.

Later I put in my two rows on the afghan and then played with colors to see what should come next. The sun sneaked off with their intensities though and I put the project on hold till it brings them back tomorrow and apologizes for the theft. Sunsets are like that. You’ve got to watch them.

I did my knitting group Zoom with my carry-around project in hand till my wrists needed a rest.

I sat at my computer awhile thinking, but nothing happened today. I didn’t do anything.

And half a merino cowl sitting there eyed me with a wry, And what am I? Chopped sliver?