My hands have needed me to take it a little easier than I would like, so I set myself a goal: knit one hour, stop. Knit one hour after dinner, stop. Knit in snatches in between but don’t overdo.

Somehow that created enough progress to keep me happy; I’m halfway through the skein so far, doing three repeats of the Constance lace from “Wrapped in Comfort” plus edging.

Meantime, I tried to identify a new bird: very white and long tail, medium gray covert, very nearly white wings and head in direct sunlight deepening to a very light gray in the shade. Feathers smooth, body and head very slender, eyes red, a lot smaller than any dove I’ve ever seen but looking like one and walking with bobbing head motions. It came right up to the window and turned around, so I got a good look. No spots, no ring to its neck, and (looking at Inca doves in Sibley afterwards) I didn’t see square feather ends but I wasn’t looking for them, either; it was sleek, not ruffled-up-looking. Maybe a very very light almost-albino morph of an Inca? Beautiful, petite bird, glowing in the sun.

I’ve never seen anything like it before. I love that it came right up to me.

(Note re the pattern: Martingale says they will be releasing their out-of-prints as e-books, available from them directly; some titles already are. Meantime, Purlescence has the real thing in stock.)

I don’t know whom to thank, so thank you to all of you out there.

I was at Purlescence tonight when Nathania got that sneaky grin thing happening again: she was clearly very very pleased at what was just about to happen and at the fact that I had no idea. And then she got to watch my face go: But, but—!

Totally nonpsychodegradeable. Wow.

Now, I just looked back through my posts–when I talked about that shawlette start that needed to be frogged? The one that the color had been so perfect, but the texture, not so much? That got me to grab the Whales Road Malabrigo for the softness? (That project’s now at the stage where I could either cast off the very next thing or maybe continue for one more repeat.)

Somebody… Nathania said, “I know nothing. I don’t know who, I don’t know how, I don’t know when it was put in this basket to wait for you.” (I would not be surprised if the other owners of Purlescence conspired to keep it that way till after she’d given it to me.)

But my name was written on a skein of Madeleine Tosh fingering weight she was lifting out of that basket to hand to me.

The same weight as the sock yarn I’d deemed too strong a twist, designed to withstand sockitude, not quiet shawlitude.

So soft.

The very same color.

I never blogged the color that was so perfect but that the yarn just hadn’t worked for what I’d wanted. But someone nailed it.

I’ve never in my life bought a skein of Madeline Tosh; I’ve picked up many of them, petted them, then put them regretfully back, thinking, next time maybe.

And now I have some MadTosh softness at last.  I love that their website has a little image of a bird up by their URL. I love the Cousteau name for the color. I love the yarn. I love the thoughtfulness and the generosity and the challenge to try to live up to that. Thank you whoever you are, thank you all of you, thank you Universe and thank you Purlescence for enabling the culprit, and with so much happiness.

Wow.

Let’s see if I can get myself to put this knitting down a moment. That Whales Road yarn demanded to be ended in the jellyfish motif from the Monterey shawl and I really really like how it’s coming out.

Meantime, (and I found I needed to work on a more mindless project during the process), the piano is tuned, ready for my son who minored in organ performance to come home to on Friday.

My friend who tuned it today, who volunteers doing wetlands restoration work, took the time first to stop and admire quite the flock going on just outside the window.  He told me about some of his and his wife’s birdwatching. He asked if I were trying to attract a specific kind with a specific seed; I told him not really, but I do avoid anything with millet because it’s the favorite of alien-species house sparrows, which actively kill off all other songbirds around them and their eggs during nesting season.

But what I didn’t say was: simply by hanging up some sunflower, I get to see so many species.  But what’s so cool is that others who would never touch the stuff simply drop by to see what the fuss is about.  Some of those have stayed: the nuttall’s woodpecker got joined this year by a mate and I got to watch their mating ritual, a dance between the trees and around each other up and down and around almost as if they were carrying yarn and knitting stitches into the air; today, one was pounding away at my neighbor’s clothesline right after Neil left.

The whole cycle of life, right up close at my window. As Kathy said, one could never get bored.

p.s. And if sunflower is too pricey, a small $2 wire cage with a $2.00 to $2.50 suet cake lasts several weeks to a month here. The squirrels tend to ignore the ones that don’t have peanuts mixed in.

Nope, didn’t rip yesterday’s yet, I just put it aside and glommed onto something else in my stash. (Just wait till I run out of needles.) My friend Nancy moved away! Nancy loves to frog other people’s projects: total angst-free  ripiteedoodahh, ripiteeyay, here you go, done.

I wish.

So. Whales Road colorway in Malabrigo Lace, bought from Diana‘s de-stashing, knitted with one strand of a very thin cashmere that when it arrived awhile back in such a vivid neon blue, I wondered what on earth I would ever do with it.

Well now. Put these two together in the playpen and look how well they get along.

I say that thinking of a picture we got recently via the other grandmother of Parker and his new cousin born in April in identical baby seats side by side, with Parker reaching out and holding her tiny hand in his, looking at her tenderly as if to let her know that it was okay, he was going to be looking out for her always.

I want to be like Parker when I grow up.

I plunked myself down next to my daughter Michelle. She is not a knitter. (I have not yet given up hope.)

“So I had this new yarn, and it sparked an idea I wanted to try, but I wanted to do a practice run first, so I grabbed a yarn that was what I wanted and I got started and. But. It’s tightly spun and it’s not soft enough against the neck, and I want soft enough against the neck, and I looked at it and I looked at this sock yarn by Creatively Dyed and I thought hey, those two knitted together would be really pretty and make a great baby blanket! Machine washable wool for a new mom. Practical!

But it would mean ripping out what I just did.” And I explained why I wanted that particular color, super soft or no super soft. “And you’re the closest thing here to a knitter to ask.”

Her face was getting more and more impish as she tried not to burst out laughing. We both knew what was coming next.

“Well, you either keep going or you rip it out.” With the unspoken, my Mom is asking ME for yarn advice.

We both laughed, I got up, I started to go back to my perch in the other room and turned and added, “And sometimes you throw it in a corner and look at it the next day.”

And then, she’s right, Eurypides. Because that baby blanket idea is just too good to pass up.

While I was pureeing strawberries today some beautiful, soft strawberry yarn appeared at my doorstep. With my thanks to Deb: a hank of Floating, from A Verb For Keeping Warm, a local dyer who uses only natural dyes; I’m curious to know if this was done in madder or cochineal, the two red sources they list. You can see how fast it got all wound up about it! (That’s an 11″ serving bowl, by the way.)

Sesame Street: “Do you know what’s going to happen next?” I am, sings Cat Stevens, on the road to find out. Follow the mellow brick, row’ed (or will be).

A whole new reason for why, when I buy coned yarns, I scour the mill oils out, soaking the newly-made hanks in hot soapy water rather than knitting them as they come.

You know you live in a knitter’s house when you open the freezer and find some yarn plunked on the door for a quick chill-out just in case after a moth was seen in its general vicinity while it was out having some unprotected fresh air.

You know you live in a crazy-knitter-level knitter’s house (watch my husband’s and children’s heads nod in vigorous unison) when you go to get an ice cube out of the front dispenser on the fridge and it delivers a dangly soft strand of merino with your square of cold. Wait, whaaaaa..?

Purlescence closed for a week to move to their new digs–a few doorways to the left from the old, a bigger space. They put in new wood floors. They puzzled over how to get the tall yarn cubes out of the old shop, those having been assembled inside for the original Carolea’s Knitsch decades ago.

Today was the grand reopening celebration, but they just didn’t need my nagging bit of sore throat.

So I decided to celebrate in spirit: I found some Kid Seta I’d bought from them and thought about starting something with it. But I have some knuckle inflammation going on, it was a bit hard for my hands to hold that fine a strand.

I pulled out a skein of very thin cashmere that had stumped me when it had arrived from an online purchase.  The color. Brilliant red on the orange side? Not so much here. That fine a laceweight would take a lot of time to use up a color that didn’t do it for me.

The Kid Seta was a muted red with the silk shimmering lighter, rather pinkish against the fuzzies.

Put those two balls side by side (the nighttime photo doesn’t capture it), and my first thought was, Nah, they fight…

But wait. Colors affect how the one next to them is perceived, they’re like humans that way, maybe they just need to be closer together. I cast on. I knitted. It lagged and got interrupted at first as I wasn’t sure, and then the further along it got the more I liked it till it was hard to put down and suddenly I was 26″ into the thing.

And it is gorgeous! Who knew?

Quick, tell Congress: the differences blending together are what make it come out so pretty.

(Pattern: Rabbit Tracks with an extra stitch each side as there should be.)

Network no worky. I am typing blindly and then walking away for five minutes to see if this sentence will appear. Later!

I guess a birdfeeder has become a safe place to perch. Guess who came for a visit just before the light was gone tonight? (Click to clarify.) She let me come outside and get a good long look at her. This time, though, I got to watch her fly away, as if to tell me, See? I really can do it now, it’s okay.

Meantime, my new Lisa Souza yarn has been hard to put down today, like any good soft fiber worth the hours should be. And the color! Although I did set it aside long enough to go stock up at Los Gatos Birdwatcher, my favorite seedy place.

Tomorrow I get my stitches out and hopefully get to stop putting goop in my hair. Working away on my project, wondering if I wanted to haul that complicated a pattern with that long a row to the waiting room with me or not, I was remembering the moment I’d given the doctor her silk scarf and had wished I had something for her nurse watching her getting it. I still wished I had something–when suddenly it hit me–you goof, who do you think Saturday night’s sudden impulse of a soft Meriboo hat was for? It was just sitting there waiting to be figured out.

Oh wait, did I mention that? I grabbed a random ball of Frog Tree yarn that night and didn’t go to bed till I’d finished a quick hat with a sideways-cabled brim and twirly-decreased top, quite pretty. Then I put it aside and simply forgot all about it.

Well now. My fingers don’t have to fly quite so fast.

Just wait till I come back there.

Friday’s DrGreene.com post is here, the story of the young dad with the screaming toddler. I’ve always loved how that one played out; I wonder how they are now. That would have been back when I was dyeing my hair, the only reason I shopped there, which would make her maybe ten by now.

Give her a few years and maybe she’ll go for the purple dye over thataway. The most harmless thing a kid can do to rebel is with their hair, and whatever they may look like for awhile, it grows patiently naturally back on its own time.

Speaking of which, with this vasoline in the scar thing going on, the Spaceman Spiff look? Totally nailed it.

(Eleven rows of 448 stitches today, an ice session in the middle, and I finished it! The shawl is blocking.)

My DrGreene.com post for Thursday is here.

A quiet day of knit, write, knit, write, knit, erase/write over again, with the occasional glance out the window (and a happy dose of Purlescence time near the end and some atrocious puns at Lene’s.)

A finch saw it. There it was. I was holding out on her, and look, no other finches in there to argue over it. Hey! She eyed me and hopped up from the doorway to the outer ledge of the window, exploring the glass oh-so-tentatively with her beak, hopping awkwardly down the narrow length of it and back, checking out that measuring cup just inside the window–clearly, her Pyrex was half full.

Well, nuts. She hopped back down to the sliding door as if waiting for me to open it. It’s there, the sunflowers are right there, why can’t I have it all to myself all that lovely lovely seed and not have to share it with that horde behind me? Let me in! We’ll be friends!

Two chickadees, meantime, birdwatched her at their favorite restaurant.

And a lace shawl slowly worked its way towards reality.

My DrGreene.com post for today is one that was here previously: Got Milk?

Today: putting your glasses on top of your head  when it’s full of vasoline and stitches to try to see that dark yarn on the needles from up close is, well, kind of a boneheaded thing to do.

So is adding 2+2+the rest across the repeats and finding, 800 stitches later, that they added up to zero increases. Someone wasn’t paying enough attention to the swatch, a little scattered there… t i n k t i n k t i n k t i n k t i n k t i n k t i n k t i n k t i n k.

It feels good to be past where I was when I had to start the undoing. It feels good to be one more day past Monday and closer to being able to get my hair wet.

A bit of scrutiny in the mirror after a joking moment between my friend Marguerite and me–

–I’ll be darned. Look at that. It’s not just that it feels a little funny, that cancer surgery really did give me a slight facelift.  The surgeon played Fifty-two Pickup!

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.