I noticed this morning that the birdfeeder, which had been a bit low last night, was down to the bottom portholes; time to refill.  Got my measuring cup for scooping, filled it and put it down on the picnic bench, moved a chair under the feeder, and got up to untwist the feeder top.  Picked up the cup, poured the seed/minced peanut mixture in…

…And before I could finish twisting the thing back together, there was a tiny finch perched on the twig right next to my face: canIcanIhuhhuhisbreakfastreadyyet?

Chirp thing, friend.

Later, I went back to Purlescence with the smallest scrap of Manos, pulling it out of my pocket saying, “You know that yarn Kevin wound up for me yesterday? It’s” (sniffing ever so woefully) “all *gonnnne*…”

They cracked up. Okay, show us!  I did. I’d decided the scarf was long enough as it was.

But Kathy of yesterday’s comment had come too and she still insisted on handing me the three beautiful Manos balls she was coming to my rescue with.  I promised her I would put them to good use–I have some serious lace-scarf knitting to do.

Something compelled me to drop everything and go off to Purlescence this afternoon, even though I was there last night and had other plans for just then.  I did, and there were three friends in the store who’d walked in just ahead of me whom I hadn’t seen in ages–the timing was exactly right.  Serendipity!

Not a major event to anybody else, and it probably doesn’t make for much of a blog post except that it just so much felt like I should go; I did; and I’m so glad I did!

And on that note, one small ball of Manos silk blend followed me home. I don’t know why; the orange and sage green mixed in with the raspberry are not my colors; I don’t know who it’s for; but it needed to be knitted up on my needles, so here it is. It elbowed its way past all the pretty blues and greens and yelled, Me, me!

Okay, yarn. You and the needles you’re in cahoots with: now tell me the rest of your story.

The trajectory of a simple act of kindness goes beyond what its giver can ever know.

I was debating leaving the cast-off row here as a bit of mindless work to do at Purlescence’s Knit Night tonight, and laid the project out a moment to look at it and decide.

And laughed at the tune from my childhood that instantly popped into my head as I noticed the outline I hadn’t been trying to set up but did: M-I-C, K-E-Y, M-O-U-S-E. Mouse ears, dimples, and a goofy smile via the cast-on row!

It’s all Robin’s fault. Remember when she surprised me with those dishcloths in cream and gradations of earthy reds?  Knowing that I love such things but hate to knit cotton, myself? Those extra bits of unexpected friendly color in my day helped propel Karin’s shawl into getting finished, and then, with that not feeling like quite enough, now this one in Lisa Souza’s baby alpaca/silk in Ruby.  The blue I’d planned to work with next suddenly wasn’t doing it for me; it had to be this yarn for this shawl after Karin’s.  Something in me needed to respond to Robin’s gift with colors in kind in celebration.

I wonder what the rest of its story will come to be.

(Falcon photos owned by SCPBRG.  I love the kids-home-from-college-together shot.)

Karin’s yarn: I love how the darker/lighter patterns match the fledgling’s. In adulthood, the stripes effect on the juveniles will change from going up and down to side to side with the chest going white.

You know you’ve really been caught up in this whole peregrine thing when you pull up behind a car at a red light and read the nameplate on its back as saying it’s a Toyota Tiercel.  Well, and it was little, too, and the males are smaller!

(Falcon image property of SCPBRG, a marvelous organization that has brought peregrines back from the brink.  Look how those babies are growing up!)

Stephanie wrote awhile back about the black hole effect in handknitting. I’ve put hours and rows into this shawl today, trying to wrap it up, and it still stretches out to, roughly…18″.  Huh. (Probably because I’m not trying quite so eagerly to prove to myself it’s farther along than it is.)

The yarn is 40% silk, and silk yarns knitted up, especially when they aren’t spun tightly, have a tendency to stretch out over time.  (A side note: I once knitted a 50/50 kid mohair/silk vest, with much cabling work in the front and then knitted plain in the back because I was afraid of running out of yarn.  The vest buttoned down the front, which turned out to be a very good thing: the heavier weight dragged the fronts about six inches downward, coming down, if I wore it unbuttoned, to look like I’d knitted points on purpose, while the back stayed primly in place just covering my waistband. Moral of the story: be careful of mixing dense and lightweight stitch patterns when working with silk.)

So.  This shawl will either still be rather on the short side, which is fine with me, or it will stretch out surprisingly far when I block it and grow even more over time and I’ll have something long and swoopy from my gorgeous, shimmery yarn. Either way…

…(launching into storytime here, folks)…

My husband and I met for the first time when my parents decided I was an old enough newborn to be taken outside and to church.  (Or maybe when Mom had had enough of cabin fever, right, Mom?) It is safe to say I really don’t remember the event.  Thus, given our 15″ height difference in adulthood, the jokes that are, by now, a tad shopworn: we grew up together, he just did more, I knew when to quit, yadda yadda.

So we were just old friends who started finally actually dating in college.    I had a classmate, about 6’2″ or so, who saw us on campus one day.  The next class she and I had together, she took me aside and reamed me in great indignation. “All the short girls take all the tall boys!”

What could I gracefully say? I beat you to it?  Neener neener?  I told her simply, “I took him in the size he came in.”

I thought of that as I measured this shawl and wondered what its real dimensions will turn out to be–just like I wondered once what married life was going to really be like.  After 29 years come next week and four fledged kids, I think I’ve got a good idea on the latter.

I don’t quite think he wants me to knit this for him as an anniversary present, though.  It would be too much of a stretch.  I’ll have to think of something else, huh?

Saw a bluejay chasing a squirrel down the fenceline so fast I didn’t know that little bushytail could do it.  Just to let me know who was ruling the roost around here, Little Bird Blue came over to pose triumphantly for me.

Now look at that thing. I grew up with Eastern jays, frumpily plump. This one’s ready for a bikini and the beach. 

Meantime, I’m not quite done with the first 430 yard skein of the seacell/silk fingering weight I bought from Dianne at Stitches, and this shawl already stretches to 18″ at a guess, pre-blocking, across 397 stitches.  Nice!  I want it short and tied in front, a style I like with a lightweight yarn like this one is. I’m going to take a second ball and add an edging, though, so I’m not done yet. Then just add water, and the lace stretches out on its towel and shows off its stitches.

And then.  I got a package in the mail today, a delightful gift from Karin.  This is my favorite silk jacket and her Wine colorway in an 80/20 merino/nylon blend, an on-the-heavy-side sock yarn.  What a match!  And unlike most such blends, it feels so soft that I was sure at first it must have been mislabeled and pure merino in real life.  It is seriously lovely stuff. Thank you, Karin.

(Okay, now, hold still Miss Jay while I measure you for your suit. I’ll make sure to have enough yarn left over for you. How about a little ribbon tied at the back–you know, bow-‘tocks goes so well with that look.  Can’t have you being, you know, nekkid as a jaybird over there.)

Yesterday a small scruffy-tailed gray squirrel started eyeing my birdfeeder with a determination he’d not shown before.  So did a black squirrel, but it quickly decided the thing was not in range and not worth the effort.

That gray one, though, started stalking it. It approached it from every possible angle for hours, amusing me just on the other side of the floor-to-ceiling glass, including climbing the man-eating plant with the prickly trunk that in 22 years I have never, ever seen a squirrel on before.  But it was eight feet away and far too low. Forget that one.

It tried going down from the awning. No go.  It climbed the ladder to the left: that was the right height and straight across, but it was a good ten or twelve feet away.  Hmm. It laid there on the ladder, lifting its head every now and then, judging the distance, willing the birdseed to move closer by the power of its little mind.  The feeder stayed obstinately put.

I glanced over: the thing had climbed the near pole, four feet away, took a flying leap right through the twiggy branch I’d hung that was nowhere near strong enough to support it, and had lucked out and landed on the feeder, which went swinging wildly. The squirrel had a panic attack.  I was coming with the camera.  The dang seed wouldn’t come out! Frantic frantic panic panic GIMME THE FOOD! as I approached, trying at the last second to pull the top off with its teeth.

I reached for the door handle for a better shot and it was just too much. There was no way it could jump back to that pole.  Caught.  A surge of adrenalin and it managed to leap up from the top via that string it hadn’t found a way down from earlier, up onto the awning, and away.

It never came back.  Neither did the black squirrel.

Round one to the feeder.

(As I knit away on Dianne’s Caribbean colorway seacell/silk from Creatively Dyed Yarns… Gotta throw in a little knitting content occasionally or I hear about it.)

I got told to take some benedryl this morning and a massive dose of prednisone, which is a steroid, last night, prior to coming in for the CT scan, due to previously having had an allergic reaction to topical iodine. I wanted to argue with the radiologist that I’d been told by a doctor in the hospital, prior to a CT scan there, that iodine is a mineral and one cannot physically be allergic to it, only to what it’s mixed with.  But I decided, eh. Just make them happy. I took it.

Good thing.  Yesterday evening I’d been back to serious pain, holding my stomach to be able to walk down the hall.  Took the pred, went to bed… And although I was quickly wired to the max, the pain, I suddenly realized, was almost gone.

It was absolutely stunning. Pred has never touched my Crohn’s, ever, at any dose. They had me on 200 mg/day via IV in the hospital, and, nada.

I had a longstanding appointment anyway with my surgeon for right after the CT scan, and she was delighted.  “Different body parts sometimes respond differently to the same med, and you’ve only ever had Crohn’s in your colon before.”

She thought she saw a Crohn’s spot on the small intestine in the scan; the radiologist’s preliminary report didn’t think so or didn’t catch it.  Two pairs of eyes is a good thing. We’ll see how that settles out; as the surgeon cautioned, “I’m not a radiologist.” (Ed. to add: they talked, the radiologist went carefully over it again, and said no, it was normal. There is another test that could be run, but Dr. R will have to order it when he gets back.)

But there is now a definitely-maybe hope of being successfully treated. I can’t tell you how good that feels.  It’s not gone, but I’ll take all the improvement I can get.

Oh, and, I tried to knit my Monterey shawl during the long wait between the half dozen large paper cups of dye I had to drink and the actual scan, I really tried. But benedryl and no sleep and a complex pattern–I got about a dozen stitches into a row, shook my head at a mistake, couldn’t see what I’d done for the life of me–that’s when you know I’m drugged out–and tinked back to the beginning and stuffed it back in my knitting bag. I had carefully packed a spare ball of yarn and needles just in case, picked it up, and launched into a scarf in the Michelle shawl lace pattern.  Something utterly brainless, silk and merino comfort knitting to comfort someone else by.  So many people have knitted for me lately.  Time to get back to work on giving back.

The answer to last night’s dilemma was obvious, once I thought of it: rubber needle tips.  Used’em today at the doctor’s office to keep from dropping stitches mid-row when they called my name. Worked like a charm.

The knitting itself, however, not so much: I had a whole lot more done than this earlier in the day. But there is one row in my Monterey pattern that starts with a yarnover, and I decided to knit in the front and back of the first stitch instead. (Note that I could have done an M1 after the first stitch instead if I wanted to substitute.)  And I went merrily on my way.

That back-and-forthing in the one stitch created a knot-like effect in the silk, much more so than it would have in a different yarn. I didn’t like it. I kept knitting. It bugged me. I finally sat myself down and went, look: if you don’t like it now, you’re really not going to like it when you’ve added 20+ hours onto this.  It will have this one tiny spot that you’ll feel like apologizing to the recipient over when it’s going to be a perfectly gorgeous project and they’ll never notice it. Still.  What if it felt uncomfortable on their neck just in that one tiny spot.  It’s much easier to change it now.

Which is how the afternoon’s work got frogged.

Which means it will be all the better when it’s finished. (And yes, I did the M1 this time. I’ll be keeping an eye on it as the rows add up again.)

Correction to the above: I didn’t twist the bar I picked up, as I think about it, so no technically it wasn’t an M1, it was more like picking up a phantom dropped yo: just a plain pick up the bar between stitches and knit it.

“Begin: the rest is easy.”

Right. So I began a new project today, got interrupted, snagged the mostly-silk yarn getting off the couch, came back later, looked at the mess and frogged it on the spot.

I avoided it the rest of the day.  Don’wanna.  Silk is so lovely but it’s a bit of a pain to work with–you have to watch those needle tips every second so it doesn’t treat them like being on a slide at a water park.  Whoosh and away and hey, now let’s go running!

My favorite cure for not feeling like knitting is Knit Night, Thursdays at Purlescence: the colors and the wool fumes will do it every time, and, best of all, there are the good friends to be found there. Who knit.

I began.  Again.

I think I see now why my rose-colored yarn had already gradually migrated over to my knitting perch and thus was near the front door when I had no shawl project and had to grab something, anything, on my way to taking Richard to the ER on Monday. I didn’t even see it till today, but then suddenly it was so obvious. The climbing roses along our front walkway.  The color. The pattern I decided on after we got there. Taking the safety of home with me and putting it forward into the unknown.

One of these days I’ll learn that the picture looks better if I take my hand out of my pocket or over the shawl and then in the pocket, but vanity aside, here’s the finished baby alpaca shawl I was working on. It’s the Tara’s Redwood Burl pattern, though more in the color (it’s greener than this in real life) of a tiny redwood sapling’s baby needles.

Burls are like pearls to an oyster: something interesting and beautiful created by the living thing’s reaction to an irritant.  I’ve been fascinated by redwood trunk patterns ever since we moved to California, and that pattern was my second attempt at trying to capture the essence of some of them.

Just some background on how that redwood-colored shawl in “Wrapped” got its name.

Oh, and that’s the baby plum tree my kids gave me for Mother’s Day last year, growing like a weed.

(Ed. to add for those who asked: the doctor at the ER said the bloodwork was clean, which I interpret to mean that as for This Little Piggy, Richard Had None.  He’s feeling a fair bit better today; thank you for looking out for us, everybody.)

Thank you everybody for all the kind words and support re my aunt’s passing.  It has been much appreciated.

Today: a doctor’s appointment.  The Casbah scarf was done.  So many projects needing doing all at once, all of them important to me, so many people to knit for, how to choose…  One particular someone in mind, it was a mystery to me what color she’d like best–but she’s a knitter, so I looked up her favorite colors on her Ravelry profile. (I know. That’s cheating. Heh.)

I dithered some more anyway and balled up hanks so they’d be ready to cast on with whenever the mood might strike. This one. That one. Love merino/silk by Blue Moon: would the Silkie stand up to the constant laundering a new mother would do? Would it survive being a baby’s favorite blanket?  Depends on how dedicated the mother is to a handknit–I didn’t know.  But I do know what kids can do. Maybe a shawl for the mom out of it… Maybe.   I flipped the rolled ball back in the bag.

The clock kept ticking and I just grabbed whatever felt right right then and went.

I knitted and waited for the (new) nurse to call my name–and got a few extra stitches in before I realized that “Hiddee” (she’s lucky I heard that) meant “Hyde.” Oh.  Right.  Hiddee/Us.

It was amazing to me how, once it was apart from the rest of the stash, the yarn in my hands there, which I’d debated and debated over,  once I was actually working with it, it was like, well yes: what else could I possibly have chosen?  Clearly.  This is it!

Sing it with me: love the yarn you’re with.

(Background to the left: Robert’s medicine blanket.  Here’s a shot that does a little more justice to the colors of my afghan.)

As for the black shawl.  I weighed my yarn carefully after my pattern repeats, wanting to make sure I didn’t launch into more than I could finish. It was so close; if I continue in pattern to do one more repeat, with the yarn at hand I should be able to get through about a third of the cast-off row.  Um.  That doesn’t work. I could add a different edging with fewer rows.  But it would break up the visual effect.  Jasmin offered to help me out, dye lot match and all, but I’ve been thinking the shawl is probably (hopefully) long enough now anyway.  But I wasn’t sure.

So while I was dithering, hey, what’s the best way to think a problem out?  Every knitter reading this is laughing that I should even ask.  Right.  So.

While I was at Stanford earlier this week, the charge nurse chose the dark teal Casbah scarf. I had enough left on the skein to make a second, and it leaped onto my needles this afternoon in a simple pattern–the one from the body of the Michelle pattern in my book, with an extra stitch knit plain each side, cast on 27–simple patterns making it easier to let the mind wander and figure out other problems. Like how to finish off the black shawl.

It’s so good to be back into knitting. And I mean really knitting. Finally!

Yarn: Lisa Souza‘s Mardi Gras in merino, a gift from my Purlescence friends’ gift basket when I was so ill in January. Now I finally get to play with it.  My Carlsbad Scarf is a good pattern for showing off a busy colorway.

Thursday evening I ran off by myself to the once-a-month South Bay Knitters’ meeting at Green Planet Yarn down in Campbell.

Where half the room burst into clapping when I walked in, and the other half had no idea why I hadn’t been there since October.  I explained.  I got quite a few hugs, and Beth, the store owner, couldn’t get over how good I looked–the best she’d ever seen me, she said.

But I didn’t buy her rosewood needles over there that were calling to me.  I was trying to be frugal. (We won’t mention that silk cashmere  that did come home.)

Now, the last time that Stephanie Pearl-McPhee was in northern California, Jasmin and (formerly) no-blog Rachel (go see her new dress!) and I road-tripped together to see her. I took my knitting project and a backup, just in case; it was going to be a long day.

The bag with that backup had in it my pair of Holz and Stein rosewood size 5.5 mm (US 9) I’d used for all the size 9 projects in my book.  It was a particularly beautiful pair of needles, made from the leftover wood from making musical instruments,  a needle not sold in the US anymore, and that particular pair had been much loved for many years.

And I never saw it again.

It still hurts.

There was a pair of Destiny rosewood size 8s from Vietnam at Green Planet.  They had a beautiful grain, but the tips and joins weren’t quite what I’m used to.  And they just weren’t Holz and Stein.  As if I could ever replace that one pair anyway.  I passed on the idea.

Coming home, it having been a long and very busy day, I found myself suddenly almost doubling over in pain and nausea–only for about ten seconds, but it was a complete throwback that told me to definitely take it easy.

So of course today, feeling well and having an hour to myself, because I could and in reaction to that episode, WHILE I could, (after all, you never know), I ran back to that shop to buy those needles.  I did like the grain.  I’m going to at least give them a try.

Where Beth again couldn’t get over just how very well I looked.  And you know?  I realized on my way home, it’s a comfort to be told that.  Her delight may have been the biggest reason of all why I decided to try out her needles and made the trip back down there.  Because now I will always associate them with her caring.