(It rained today and someone clearly got dumped on. Squirrels’ tails turn into mouse-laughingstocks when wet. This is after it was halfway dry again!)

Had a great idea. Found an old swatch.  Wait, that’s what I was going to–! And another.  Well now. Great mind thinks alike.

Some Grant Circle-colorway pink yarn had jumped out at me today, enough to get me to go look up the site of the lovely woman I bought it from at Stitches East a year and a half ago to make sure she was still around. Yes! Cool. (She will perhaps remember me as the woman who picked it up in my hands and guessed the base on the spot. I grinned, Hey, I’ve knitted a lot of lace.)

So many things I want to do, so many things in the queue.

Meantime, my Mother’s Day present finally snuck past that rude, belching lout of a volcano and jumped across the Pond today and eagerly rang my doorbell.  Cashmere/silk/merino (watch the yardage carefully on those, they sell a lot of yarn that is great for practicing plying on a spinning wheel) in the limestone colorway, which as far as I can tell is undyed or close to it; the grayishness in their original picture showed the mill oils more than anything and it pretty much washes out. I have some leftover from a previous project and took the picture with that ball on top vs the oiled cone as it arrived.

My daughters bought me the new stuff.  Coooooool.  This knitting thing–I think they’re on to me.

So it is now hanked, scoured, and I am impatient.  I’ll just go knit up this little bit of pink while it dries, oh, you know, about 900 yards’ worth or so…

You know, before I launch into finally doing that edging, I ought to go doublecheck that first shawl I knitted from this pattern idea just to make sure it’s exactly what I want…

Oh.

Huh.  Well, count that one a redesign for that bottom part.  Better I decide now, at least.  I remember now, I kind of squeezed the rows on that first one, writing down as I went what I was doing, because I never did find its last ball of yarn so I only had so much yardage–not a problem on the second shawl.  I made sure of that.

I never do this, but by golly I am so tired of wanting to get to the next project that I’m going to just go launch into it before I go to bed.  I mean, this is really pretty yarn but I am just so ready to look at other colors. (My get-well afghans have tons of colors, and hey, they certainly worked.  You all don’t know how grateful I am every day for those.)

And yes, that’s my Dancing Queen bud on its second day.  When it wants to come to be, it makes it happen!

Oh–wait…  Okay.  I’ll swatch.

It *is* nice, when I think about it, to be able to re-write the endings any way we want at any time when it comes to knitting. Just like you all helped re-write mine.

I’ve been hoping that that evidence of a successful hunt yesterday morning (hit it, little Garfunkel: Lalalalaaala lalaaala. Feelin’ gravy) wasn’t the vivid-headed parakeet that had spent most of the previous two days here and that you could spot easily in the trees–but it has not been seen since.   Although the hawk or a cat are the more likely cause, squirrels do eat eggs and small or baby birds in the spring when they need protein and their caches of nuts are rotting or sprouting.

What did I tell that flighty little thing?  Never harass an animal that would eat you or you risk a coo d’etat.

Random other item: I don’t know if this link will still be valid by morning, but as the daughter of a modern art dealer, let me say, there are easier ways to diss the artists of the last 100 years or so and this was not one of them. One might say the UPS driver was making a special delivery of performance art to the Hirschhorn.  And it was a bust.

Last year, my friend Nancy gave me an amaryllis plant that had been given to her as a bulb kit but that had never bloomed for her; she thought maybe I could get it to this year. It’s gorgeous, Nancy, thank you, and I’d give it back now if you hadn’t moved away.

The parakeet came back to feed many times today.  I wonder, if I were to put a bird cage with an open door out there, whether it would climb right in and make itself at home–but I’m perfectly happy watching it being perfectly happy.

And yet.  Not so much when it hit the window flying in a panic along with the finch flock–going not quite in the same direction as the others, being not quite one of them. It seemed okay afterwards, but it sure sharpened the caged life vs. longer life question about it for me. I tell you–personally, I’ve gone for longer and found it’s okay for it to be that way.

This picture is for Rachel: I’ve started in on the Malabrigo Silky she wound up for me.

Meantime, I got the perfect Mother’s Day present from my daughter-in-law and older son: “Outwitting Squirrels.” Okay, you already know it’s going to be good!  And then the author quotes the owners of bird stores in Cabin John and Potomac, Maryland–I bet his kids went to the same schools I did.  The guy had great fun writing this.

My favorite part? His tale of a woman in Massachusetts who found some old LPs in her attic. She strung them on a rope separated by knots with her birdfeeder below: no squirrel could climb that stair-eo.

Then she got to watch them trying to jump down onto the top LP to hang downwards towards the feeder.  Here came the first: it got spun off into the snow.  Hey…! Cool! Do it again!

She described it as a line at Disneyland, waiting their turn. No food but almost as good.

I mentioned it to Richard and his reaction was, “Like the buffalo.”

Wait, the what?

And then he reminded me.  After the musk ox got reintroduced to Alaska, the buffalo did.  “Where the deer and the antelope play” had nothing on these guys.

Okay, so if I ever seriously think about parakeet cages I’m going to have to provide it a lot of toys. They’re members of the parrot family and can talk; I wonder if I could teach it to knit.  Or at least recite my line-by-line lace instructions so I don’t lose my place.

Two days ago, Clara flew into the nest and her children waited for her to come bring them dinner in their corner. She just stood there in the center. The message was clear: I don’t care if you do beakplants, you are old enough now to come over here and get it.

They grow and change so fast.  Today, she flew in with Pigeon Deplume’ and an eyas bounded over, grabbed it from her, and twirled away. Clara went right after it: gimme that! No! Yes! No! Yes! The two of them danced in circles three times, and on the fourth time ’round Clara succeeded in grabbing it back.

Now children. You will take turns being properly fed by me!

ME dooz it!

CHILDREN.

As one peregrine watcher put it a few days ago, (and I wish I could remember who so I could give them credit) “Mo-o-o-om, I ate all my pigeon; can I have some songbird for dessert?”

Their new dark feathers are growing in by the day.  Before you know it they’ll be ready for the Jerry Flew-us Fledge-a-thon.

(p.s. I took the qiviut scarf to Purlescence tonight. Universal swooning did happily occur. And today, for the first time, a spotted towhee showed up, identified after emailing with Sally, my expert.  It took a red-eye flight to get here.  Gorgeous!)

A new amaryllis opened today, a double white, one of my dad’s bulbs from a year and a half ago. Gorgeous. Thank you, Dad!

I decided the best way to thank Rachel for the gift of her time and her wrists Saturday was to pay it forward: by knitting up and giving away the qiviut fiber she’d spun up and then had insisted on giving back to me. That had been on my good-intentions list for awhile.

Procrastination, however, had not cured me of being a little afraid of touching it. One must experiment, one must frog a little, when playing with a new yarn of a very definite length and no more.  One must see what kind of width vs length vs pattern I could get out of it.

Well, now I really owed her, so today I’m here to say that Rachel’s superfine handspinning of dryer-lint-fine qiviut is something that will stand up to being (oh so very gently) ripped out. It did fuzz a bit when I did. Just those first few rows–umm, wrong needle size. Didn’t like.  Try again. Um, wrong stitch count, won’t have enough.

I thought.

I expected to just whiz through that small ball in no time.  It has been thwarting my expectations in wonderful ways.  Out of 24 g, I really have 16 still left?  Really?  Unblocked, I’ve got 20.5″ already–I was expecting to get a cowl’s worth but instead it’s going to come out an actual scarf. (I didn’t knit it in the round out of sheer optimism.  Definitely paid off.)

Details: the lace pattern of the main body of the Michelle shawl from “Wrapped in Comfort,” plus an extra stitch each edge for a solid selvedge. I cast on 27 stitches on size 4.5mm.

I bought the fiber hand-dehaired from the owner of the animal.  This yarn is so exquisitely soft, the best qiviut can be, and oh, it is so warm. Can you just picture having your own Alaskan Musk Ox to comb the undercoat from?  Or even making socks out of this stuff to keep your feet really really warm on the ice? (But the idea of wearing holes in it! No thank you–I’ll knit my own holes in and call it lace.)

Because–Frankly, my dear, I don’t qiviut a darn.

They’re so cute when they’re little.

Eyasses, ie baby falcons, grow from their hatching weight by about 23oo% in their first month, according to the peregrine group.  I saw one today, now an adorable vaguely-birdlike white fluff ball with those round black eyes, picking up its foot and looking at it like, wow, what’s this? before plonking straight down on its beak.

Banding will be bright and early Monday morning.  Glenn Stewart from UCSC will rappel down the cliff-face of City Hall in San Jose two stories down to the nestbox ledge.  The babies will be too young to get away from him but already their full size, thus he’ll be able to put the correct and comfortable size bands on their legs. (With a hard helmet on as the parents whizzz by on the fly.)

And then the cameras will start chasing the little ones for ankle zooms as they waddle around their enclosed ledge.

The correct size in my hands has been 4.5 mm this past week.  I think, after that shawl I wanted so badly to get done and get given away but that took three weeks to do–even though that turned out to be the most right thing and the most right timing–I had a pent-up desire to Get Stuff Done.  402 stitches a row? I did 15 rows yesterday.  Nineteen more to finish the knitting part? Break out the icepacks again, it’s done. The cast-off’s tomorrow.

Bright and early, because my other yarns are ball-banding together and calling out, Knit me!  Me!

Next thing you know, some of them will be flying off to someone else, too.  Who and which and when, I’ll just have to listen and find out.

I think it is safe to say I am not a computer person.  (Hey you Hydes, hush!) I have stuck to my nice safe Firefox PC.

But I have been pushed around lately by the fact that a) I’ve got the falcon cam on the big monitor attached to the husband’s Mac, because b) that site crashes my Firefox Ubuntu absolutely every time. Completely. Gone to lunch, ‘bye. (Which is why this year I haven’t posted the link. Don’t worry, that’s the link to the link.)

So tonight Richard was teaching me basic stuff on his machine, like how to open a new window and why it wasn’t working when I tried to. How to change the size of the window (so help me, that was designed by someone with sharper eyes than mine.)

It’s like knitting lace: it used to be, I didn’t know how, I didn’t (I told myself) particularly want to know how, but it bugged me that it was something I couldn’t do–but it was knitting!  I eventually tried to teach myself, but at the time there was just really nothing out there and certainly nothing that told exactly how one was supposed to, say, purl, much less knit, into a yarnover of the previous row and which way one was to wrap the yarn, much less that it changed depending on what came before and what after.

Now, of course, it’s all as automatic to me as breathing, you just sit down with the needles and go:  the Barbara Walker books from the last big knitting craze of the 70’s were finally reprinted, and I made myself slog through row after row with one eye on her first Treasury of Knitting Patterns directions and the other on the work in my hands.

A swatch. Then an afghan in a simple pattern, trying to drill it into my brain while learning to read my stitches, trying to learn not to panic and what to do if I dropped a stitch, how to put it all back together when it’s not simple knit and purl but with direction and–well, you know. One dropped stitch can unravel two or three below it and then that many more again each from there, and, yeah.

And then a second afghan.  Trying to practice at it enough for long enough to make it worth the time spent learning how.

And how!, now.

So eventually I put my own book out there that prefaced with the laceknitting directions, verbal but also pictorial, that were exactly what I’d gone looking for and could not find all those years ago.

I think it’s a pretty good book. (They’re almost gone.)

But I don’t think that means I’ll ever, ever write one on my new-found expertise on using a Mac.  Trust me on this one. Truly.

It had been two years since Nina and I had done a yarn crawl.  Last year’s medicalnoise simply, neverendingly got in the way.  We were long overdue for some time together, so today we threw our things in her car and headed north.

I introduced her to Cottage Yarns in South San Francisco and snagged the last hank of Malabrigo Sock Botticelli Red in that dyelot, just to make absolute sure I had enough for my project–you know, the one I ripped out four times in my perfectionism before I got it right.  Having a lot of yarn left over, just in case, so much beats the alternative, and  I want to be able to be more generous on that shawl’s length that I would be for me, personally, if that’s what feels right when I get to that point. (I will add, the yarn held up just fine to all that ripping. Makes me more willing to buy more.)

The owner grinned to see me right back and right back in that Malabrigo basket, and she welcomed us warmly.

And then we went to Imagiknit in San Francisco, a marvelous shop full of light, both in the people and in the shop itself.  As we drove closer to it, looking around and at our map, (hey, I know that park!) I mentioned to Nina that my cousin Dan lived in this general neighborhood.

She dropped me off and went hunting for that most endangered species, a parking spot in The City.

I had only seen Imagiknit in the wild, at Stitches.  The store itself has two big rooms: the animal fibers in here as you walk in, the plant fibers over there in that one.  I imagine that would make it easy for the vegans or for the allergic. (I appreciated that the angora rabbit yarn was on a table by itself in the center, thereby far less likely to accidentally intermingle fibers with the wools.)

I bought a little Malabrigo here, too, some laceweight in exactly THE shades of rosy reds, and the gorgeous many-shaded skein less than perfectly pictured here, a colorway not quite like anything else around; it had a tag that said “test” on it.

Test? I asked. Am I allowed to buy this?  Did you dye this? Did Malabrigo?

The lady laughed and said yes, Malabrigo dyed it, and then explained it was a line that wasn’t out on the general market yet.

It’s a two-ply superwash merino worsted, super-soft.  They’d put in just the right amount of twist–not too tight, that would add too much friction to the hand, not too loose, that would let the fiber ends pop out. They’d done this exactly perfectly right.  Bravo! (Okay, Malabrigo, so let me buy more, okay?  Could you like, maybe, shear your sheep a little faster or something down there in Uruguay?  While those little lambs are just, you know, milling around like that, waiting impatiently for my needles. Whatever it takes.)

I told them I hadn’t been much of a hat knitter, but there was a family that had lost a child whom I’d knitted hats for and their little boy still doesn’t want to take his off ever.  His attachment to that hat had sold me on knitting them, so this worsted skein would be the next one I make, for…whomever.

I now know what I want to make the next piano hat out of, too, once there is more than the one skein in my world.  Can you Imagiknit?

The kicker? As I waited for Nina to swing back afterwards to pick me up, the guy who stopped at the stop sign across the street from the shop as I opened the door:  I could not believe it.  “DAN!” I mean, c’mon, what are the chances?! But it was him.  He looked slightly around but not all the way to where I was standing, shrugged ever so slightly, must be just city background noise, and drove off and away.

Leading me to thinking, you know?  There are others I love that I also need to go spend more time with, now that I can.  I’m so glad Nina got me to stretch my boundaries and go farther than my usual path and to see that I could. I’d needed that.

You know the cliche of that galloping horse image? How, if you couldn’t see your knitting mistake from one, don’t sweat it?

My horse could have won the Kentucky Derby and that yoke would still have had to go.  Sometimes, the visual difference in a knitting pattern between slip two stitches as if to knit, knit the next stitch after that, pass the two slipped stitches over the knitted one, ie, sl2-k1-p2sso, vs. the faster slipping just one stitch, knitting two together, then passing the first one over, ie, sl1-k2tog-psso, is striking.  The first gives you the middle stitch pretty much going straight up with the other two leaning in towards it from the sides, the second gives you two stitches leaning sideways against the third.

I have leapfrogged over that little problem: that yoke is ripped, reknit, and on beyond.  I find it always feels better to get past where I’d been the first time, if possible, before I put a frogged project back down again.

And now it’s blooming again on my needles and I totally love it. It was well worth the rip.

Three weeks!  I started this three weeks ago.  That’s way slow for me.  I told one friend yesterday I just needed two more hours to finish it, and today I took that time.  Taxes were over.  I could finally do what I wanted to do. What a relief!

One skein of Plymouth Dye4Me merino/silk/cashmere, down to the last 4g.  This was one of these times when I was glad I had a second skein in reserve, just in case, and when I was glad I had a  scale that measures in grams so I could safely judge whether I had enough yarn left to do one more pattern repeat or not.  Made it by the skein of my teeth.

It is sprawled out in the other room, off the needles, taken a break from being all wound up.

I wrote that post last night, then put down the computer in determination and went back to that big swatch.  I no longer cared how late it was.

Knit that last part again.

Nope, not that; do it again.

No, not that is not it; do it again. C’mon.

No, let’s try–it shouldn’t, I don’t think it will but let’s–wait–okay, get a little further to make sure the effect holds with other stitches pulling from their own directions–that DOES work! That’s exactly the effect I was trying to get!  That’s IT!!! I was so excited I could hardly stand it. I DID it, I DID it! After all this time, I DID IT!!! No knitting software, just me and my needles and yarn, hard at work trying and raveling and trying again. I did it!

A lace pattern I haven’t seen anywhere else. An edging pattern that, likewise, I haven’t seen anything quite like it anywhere else.  Together they create exactly the effect I’d wanted.  Shel Silverstein with his “Put something new in the world that hasn’t been there before,” definitely knew the feeling: it’s like being a little kid opening the best presents.

The two patterns flow into each other and complete each other utterly perfectly.  As an art dealer’s daughter, my stitches are the paint I draw with.  It dawned on me then, that if I wanted so many of these to represent so many of those, let’s see, how many stitches in the main body would I need on the next shawl for it to work out that way… I sat down with pen and paper and did the math.

It was already there.  It. Is. Perfect.  My first attempt was a year ago, and I’ve been stewing over ideas for how to improve it for some time.

I’ve nailed it.  I was just dancing, jabbering, insufferably gleeful.

That gleefulness was downright contagious around here; it’s a good feeling.

And now, after I finish the taxes I’m still plodding through (almost done!) and actually knit that edging onto this shawl I’m working on, I have to start from the very beginning.

And make real the next pattern that’s been bouncing around in my head.

Richard was up quite early and puttering around and told me later what he’d seen. Unlike me, the squirrels didn’t recognize him as an enforcer and they weren’t afraid of him catching them at it at all:  he said there was the funniest cascade of catapulting furries throwing themselves at the birdfeeder, each one so sure they could show that dimwit who just got off how it’s really done–gimme that thing!

When I appeared awhile later, they were all either not to be found or on their very best aren’t-I-well-behaved demeanor.  My favorite did a reenactment of yesterday’s prim begging.

Cashew?

Bless you!

Meantime, I’m glad I went for the 48-stitch edging swatch on the side rather than diving straight into it on all 400ish stitches on the project: it worked okay on paper. In real life? I wanted to be impressed. I was not.

I briefly considered how it might be more entertaining to frog a project by tying a walnut to the end of it and throwing it outside, with a good foot stomp or handclap added for effect… (It must be admitted here: some yarns and some projects thoroughly deserve being squirreled away like that.)

Today was–well, tomorrow is a do-over. I’m looking forward to that.  There were a lot of surprises piled onto one day that I could have done without, although, nothing that can’t be fixed (with a careful attention to old paperwork.)  Just dumb stuff, really.  Richard came home from work and I basically told him, Please give me a hug before I burst into tears.

He did. He’s a peach.

I finally took the time after dinner and made myself sit down with my knitting project.  Yes, it takes a longer wait to see progress on 4mm needles than my usuals. Tough. Do it anyway.

Actually, there’s more progress showing now than I’d expected–and it Stays. Done.  With each row, I never have to knit it again: the thing is accomplished.  My I-wishes became I-dids.

That helped more than I thought it would.

Twelve rows x 398 stitches so far this evening.

1. So…if you browse through some yarns at some of your favorite dyers on your PC for a few minutes, idling the needles to give your hands a needed break, is it then Windows shopping?

2. Michelle took a whiff at the lemons in the bowl to see if they’d gone off yet, and asked me about their ages?  I’d picked them Sunday? Well then!

Which is how we found ourselves eating the first lemon bars out of the oven before they’d even set yet, necessitating forks.  Setting the bar high, temperature-wise.

3. The towhees didn’t fly off in a fright like they used to when the brash bully of the yard swooped in: I guess they’d gotten jay-ded by now.  The bluejay ate a few sunflowers and then chased them just enough to show them who still thinks he’s boss, but clearly, they’re on to him: even if he presents a big bill at this fancy restaurant, he’s into fast food.  Eat and run.

4. Those towhees got downy to business right after being left alone again, courting by quivering their wings and bopping around with their tails held high, and then the one that had to have been the male emphasizing his studliness by, Look at me!  I’m a poofball!

She was all, eh.   Don’t bother me.

So he gathered some tiny twigs in his beak for helping with the nest building.

Hey! Now you’re talking!

Last I saw them, they were bouncing together across the yard towards the trees.