This yoke idea and that lace in the main body. They were supposed to go together.  All the time I spent over several days  hashing out the yoke pattern,  sure of what was going to come after, I had another idea that kept nagging at me to do next instead, saying all the reasons why it was the right one and why I should ditch the one I was so bent on.

And I kept saying no, no, be a good little lace pattern, go away.  While carefully counting stitches.

But then the one I thought I wanted to use didn’t work.

Upper and lower just didn’t fit together.  What on earth?  I counted stitches again, fifteen ways from tomorrow and it just.didn’t.work. It made no sense.  It was late.  But still.  I couldn’t believe it, and I made some mutterings about math.  And then protested, when I got teased, “But I’m GOOD at math!”  But after spending most of the day yesterday in front of the computer, knitting, writing, editing, frogging, deleting, knitting, writing, editing, frogging, deleting, knitting, writing, editing, frogging, deleting, rinse, lather, repeat, my brain had bugged out and that was that.

That other little pattern, patiently biding its time, pounced on me.  “You know you only want to show off with that fancy-schmancy. You know I’m the right one.  And you know why.  The symbolism is so obvious.”

I do. It was right. It looks wonderful.  It IS wonderful, in a way I can’t describe without instantly giving away who I am knitting it for to that person.  And I can’t believe I even argued with myself over it, it’s so obvious now that I’ve started knitting it.  And it’s a fair bit of fancy-schmancitude itself.

But the killer?  As soon as I decided to go with what is now so patently obviously the right one…

…I saw exactly where my mistake was and how easily the yoke would indeed fit in with the pattern I no longer wanted and that I am really really glad now I didn’t put in there.  Of course they match up!  Piece of cake. Not that that matters now.

You know how I once said my knitting was not the boss of me? You hear it snickering back there?

I’ve been knitting all day and I am thisclose to being finally finally past the swatching stage. I’ve never before tried to do what I’m trying to do, and one more round and I think I’ll have it.   I feel like I’ve earned my keep on this one.  But I am taking a break and showing off Kris’s fish bowl that ate a fish while I flounder around.

Speaking of which, this must be a young one: it hasn’t moved its second eye to this side yet.

Okay, time to go dive back in.  Tuna in next time.  Same thyme, same sturgeon.  Staging.  Frog that pun and pass the fishyswasse soup.

I finished it!  And I can’t really show it off yet, which runs totally counter to the instincts of a blogger, but never mind.  Don’t miss the caption–it’s true!

Continuing the food theme, I saw these and had to try them once. The idea of green beans being potato-chipified was well into the nonpsychodegradeable category.  Um.  Hubby, day one: “Gaack!”  Hubby, day two: “There’s some left?  Sure, I’ll have some more.”

Make sure there’s plenty of water nearby to help you swallow–trust me.

Meantime.  I told this story last month on my blog, but a lot of people at Purlescence’s knit night on Thursday didn’t know anything about it.  Mary was there for the first time in awhile, so I decided to tell on her generosity a bit and say what she’d done.  And I did want to know if her shawl fit okay.  I told her, if she wanted more length, she had the rest of the dye lot: after the shop had gotten their shipment in from Handmaiden, she had shown up that Monday morning to buy a new skein to replace the one she’d given me. I, not knowing that, had shown up an hour or two after her to buy two skeins to knit her a bigger shawl to replace, you got it, the skein she’d given me.  They’d sold out of the periwinkle fast.  Heh.

She loved it, told me it had been a complete surprise, and that it did fit.  Good! That helps confirm my idea that for a larger size, starting at a wider neckline (row 2 in most of my patterns) and adding length works best.

But the group laughed when I admitted I had two more skeins of Casbah somewhere and I couldn’t find them for the life of me. I knew I had them. I knew where I would have put them.

“You’ll just have to buy more!”

“Twist my arm!”

Next shipment… Maybe I should knit a shawl in the Blackberry colorway, long as we’re talking food here.

(Edited Friday to add this picture of an Ostrich Plumes shawl I did in gray laceweight a year or two after theirs.  It too will fit through a wedding ring, hence the name.)

Today I got to see a doctor I seldom see and told him that there were only two people mentioned in my book whom I hadn’t given a copy to yet.  And that I needed to fix that.  I hadn’t referred to him and his wife by name in there, I said; last page, second paragraph.  I was a brand new laceknitter way back when and I’d made them a wedding ring shawl on size 3 needles in white laceweight Ostrich Plumes.

Dr. M was the ENT who, eighteen years ago when my lupus was diagnosed, finally put together what had eluded everybody else for all those years: that my progressive hearing loss was due to an allergy to aspirin.  I’d apparently triggered it with an overdose when I’d climbed into the medicine cabinet as a toddler and had eaten not quite enough baby aspirins to have to get my stomach pumped.  It was a new bottle and Mom counted pills and fed me baking soda instead on doctor’s orders to neutralize the acid.

With the lupus, I had a new diagnosis and meds to have to take, but I went completely deaf on the prescription-strength Aleve.  I have to tell you–you can close your eyes and try to see what it’s like to be blind, but you cannot close your ears.  It was like nothing I could have expected: when someone talked to me, I felt waves of pain in my ears.  But no sound.  Nada.  Except for the roaring white noise in my ears that didn’t respond to anything but itself.

Apparently Aleve (called Naprosyn then) was different enough from aspirin that I lucked out, but whatever, my hearing came back to what it had been when the dose wore off, and under Dr. M’s directions, I never took NSAIDs again.

And what he told me meant my kids wouldn’t go deaf in their teens too.  And they did not.

And what he told me meant I didn’t have to go any more deaf.  And I did not.

The man was right.

There is more to the story, related to when my Crohn’s was diagnosed ten years later, but this will do for here.  Suffice it to say, I owed him, bigtime; that wedding ring shawl felt absolutely imperative to do.  And it became one of those projects that I will forever rejoice that I knitted it: both for my own sake, and for the great joy of their reaction to it.

I signed and gave him a book today. And he signed my copy for me.

If there’s anyone who hasn’t discovered Sandra Boynton yet of “Hippo Birdies Two Ewes” fame, let me help you find her site.  Including here, for a little music with your knitting. (That’s not the only song, just my favorite.  Not to diss Davy Jones from the Monkeys singing “I Want To Be Your Personal Penguin.”) Boynton’s “Dogtrain” album is where I first heard Alison Krauss.

But the part that intrigues me is where she says she wrote “Chocolate: The Consuming Passion,” which my husband and I laughed over till we cried, solely because that way she could write all her chocolate off her taxes for a year.  The book recently went out of print after 20 years, I’m hoping simply so she can update it.  You know, it might need more research.  Yeah, I can see why she let it go out of print, just, you know, while she stocks up.  I can’t wait to buy the new version.

Do you suppose…I wonder what types of chocolate would best match my favorite cinnamon-brown baby alpaca…  Nah…

The 20″ long tie-in-front blue shawl is one skein of Lisa Souza’s Sock!Merino in Siobhan; the white is one strand Misti Baby Alpaca laceweight doubled with one strand of Claudia’s laceweight silk, 1100 yards/100g, a half skein left over from an earlier project.

I’m playing with my yarns.  I’m reversing the placements of the ssk’s and the k2tog’s.  Except, doing one project right after the other, my fingers keep stuttering: wwwwait, which, oh, that’s right, got it.  I feel a little like a teen in driver’s ed trying not to hit the gas when I’m going for the brakes as my movements re-orient to the new reality.

I came back here and Michelle had already made that comment–and I laughed out loud. Surgeon’s hands!  While I was coming here to write that I had the central line installed, two more IV’s to go.  Too funny.  Now, to connect those two on the white needle to the lines above them.  This may take awhile.

Channon wanted a lace repair book.  Here you go.

It’s splayed out like a seventh-grade frog dissection in science class.  Here’s what I’ve done so far:  I undid the cast-off to the point above where I needed to work and opened up the work space by holding the stitches on separate needles there.  Every time I unpicked a double decrease, I ran a length of laceweight between the two side stitches to hold them together (tying it in a knot so it doesn’t pull out) so that when I come back up, it’s clear they’re a pair straight across, with the one between to be added back in.

I then thought to add a length of yarn through the stitches being dropped as I laddered them down to get to the offending part.  Ahoy!  Here be drag-ins!

It does help that I’m doing this after a rinsing-and-drying so that the stitches want to hold their shape.  I got a few rows worked back together.  But it gets squirrelly where I knitted past the drops, and I have now spent an hour doing everything but going back and working on it some more.  I keep thinking things like, you know, I really need to get that carpet cleaned.  Maybe today’s a good day to go do that instead.

You know those cartoons with a tiny devil dressed in red and a pitchfork leaning into one side of a person’s head, and the angel waving frantically on the other?  “Just frog it!” “No, no, it can be rescued and you know it!”

What is ironic is if I end up trying both, but I don’t think so.  Yet.

The first picture is the update on yesterday’s problem. Today’s the day for making progress on it.

Yesterday, feeling crummy, I needed something more positive to work with.  If I didn’t have any energy, I could borrow some from my wool.

I had some of Lisa Souza‘s Sock!Merino yarn in Siobhan that had been sitting in my stash since the last Stitches, and for days it had been begging to come out of the bag.  I was finishing (I thought) Ocean; I ignored the Siobhan, and besides, I had definite plans for what would come next.  But never mind what I wanted to do: that Lisa yarn leaped into my hands the first chance it got yesterday and stomped its soft little merino feet at me and how could I resist?

I was of two minds about what I would do with it.  Make a short, narrow, tie-in-front type wrap?  Or a long, full shawl, the kind that would prompt a small child to twirl around and around to see it swoosh out around her?  The stitches were coming out flowing and soft.  Hmm.  With two skeins, I had enough Siobhan for one or the other but not both.  I spent a long time hashing out pattern details for knitting it either way: one yoke, a different increase row, two outcomes.  I changed my mind a few times.  I started.  And then, being foggy-brained, I stitched a boneheaded error.

There is a cliche in knitting about mistakes: if you wouldn’t be able to see it from the back of a galloping horse, nobody else will ever notice it either, so just forget it.  Except that idea doesn’t work for me anymore–what I have to go by, I realized, looking at the two missing yarnovers around the central stitch three rows earlier and how tight it would all draw up into the later rows if I tried to breeze by, was the thought that, if, say, a non-knitter photographer enlarged that section and put it on the cover of a book or magazine, would a knitter notice?

And so we had Siobhan, take two, and the photo above.  Early on in the process. No biggy.

And then we got an email last night that totally energized me and made it suddenly clear exactly why I needed to be working on a practical, machine-washable beautiful and soft wool for a new mom.   The short tie-in-front model wins.  Congratulations and welcome to the world, little one!

Yeah, I was tired when all that happened. No, the Russian splice idea won’t work–the yarn’s too slippery. What it did do was give me a thought that allowed me some calming down so I could start to think it through better. Richard this morning looked at it and went, “Even *I* can see that one!”

But I knew in the instant I woke up that of course I could fix that.  Just an extra necklace hanging around the neck of one stitch by the time I get done. Yes it’ll take awhile. Yes it’ll mean dropping down many rows at the point of a double decrease each time, and it will be a major pain.  And yes I can do it. And no it won’t show.

And no I don’t have to and actually can’t right now because it’s still damp–but just wait till I get my mitts on it.  I’ll show it.

Company about to show–later!

Did you?  My stars. I NEVER do that, and now I’ve done it two shawls in a row.  Although the last shawl, at least it was in the very last row or so, quickly fixed.

You see this nice, innocent picture?  With the shawl kind of doubled over on itself so it doesn’t look so big, but, it is.  The color of the yarn is pretty true on my screen.  A bit slippery with silk, a bit dark to work with in a room that could stand to have a little more light in the evenings, which is my prime knitting time.  We even went out shopping for a new lamp while I was working on it, but didn’t find one we liked yet.  Not to mention, I can’t go near fluorescent ones–please, nobody recommend the Otts here.  Thanks.

I snapped this photo and then went to block it. Which, as I started to stretch it out on the guest bed, is when the dropped stitch started to run.  And it was a double decrease, meaning one dropped stitch instantly turned into three lines of yarn droppings.  (Yes, Mom, I said that. )

Right dead center of the whole thing.  I’d gone merrily right past it, closing the gap after it.  Totally unsalvageable–there’s no way to recover that and make it look right.  All I can do is wait for it to dry and then buy me half an Ocean’s worth of frogs to get back to that point.  Dang.

(Edited to add: hmm. I could perhaps weave one small length through, working things back together and fastening the stitches in place and Russian-splicing that into the ongoing yarn.  I’ll have to experiment and see if I can get it to look good enough and be safe enough from running again to satisfy me.  But I’m picky, and rightfully so.)

I’ve never been quite sure what to do with this one.  It’s a fair bit brighter yellow, pink and green with a little blue in real life, with the yellow fairly dominant.  (If you embiggen it the colors come out truer.)  The yarn is Fleece Artist’s Merino 2/6 in Sorbetto, machine washable, totally practical for, say, a mom with small children to try to keep up with, and at the time I got it, I didn’t think I could do anything shawl-ish with one 350m skein of sock yarn.  Now I know I can, but this was already knitted by then.  I used the lace pattern in the main body of the Michelle shawl, six repeats across with one extra stitch at each side, and got a nice length out of it.  (Cast on 39 on size 6mm needles, American size 10…)  The eye is more pleased with patterns in odd numbers, but this was visually busy enough that one would never casually notice that it was done in an even number of repeats.  It’s a good use of the yarn; it made a nice scarf for wrapping multiple times around the neck to keep out the cold.

Of which, however, there is not a whole lot in northern California.  A short wrap to tie in front against the chilly fog would be much more the thing for around here, and I’ve long debated frogging this and reknitting it.

Except it’s a perfectly nice scarf and there’s no good-enough reason to waste the effort.  Yarn can always be replaced with more.  Time cannot ever.

It’ll find its rightful home in its rightful time.

Every now and then a post comes out that is just so close to home.  That last was one of them for me. Thank you all for your kind comments; they are very much appreciated.

Meantime, back on the knitting front, I’m afraid I can’t show this pattern yet, but I can answer the request for a closeup on the colors.  The large tote was a gift from my older daughter for Mother’s Day four years ago that she knew would be absolutely perfect, and it was.

That daughter and her husband just bought their first house yesterday.   Life IS good!  Celebration time!  We got a funny note about their two cats exploring their new place, discovering hiding spots that the humans in the household hadn’t known were there.

I’m remembering how our small boy stuffed our silverware down the heating grates in our first house in New Hampshire, some of it never to be found again, and the day he flipped off the furnace in zero-degree weather.  It had to have been him.  His big sister would never have thought of it.  I can only guess it must have been in a moment I was carrying him to or from the laundry room–toddlers have an instinctive love for switches and an unerring sense of when Mom is just distracted enough that they can get away with it.

And I’m glad cats are small and don’t have thumbs.  Because they would sure have fun if they did.

Laura, you got it.  The Julia.  It’s in the book all ready to go for you, and you can do your choice of yarn types/sizes in two gauges/sizes.  The whole thing is six stitches long, repeated forever. (I know–you said counting to four was your limit.  Heh. I don’t think you have to count with this one, though, so it’s all good.)  Purl straight across the back every time.  If you want to, when the boys are in bed, you can do the zig zaggy optional bottom edge.  Or not.  Me, I finally bought a Weight Watchers scale so I could measure grams so that I could figure out how much yarn I was using per row and thus when to start into the bottom edging and have enough if I knew I was running short.  (Note the lack of bottom edging on this one.  I like the seashell effect of leaving it plain, too.)

The larger-stitch-count Julia, by the way, is the pattern I used for the Knitpicks merino yarn you dyed and totally surprised me with at TKGA a year ago.  It’s a little thicker than most fingering weights I use, and this is how it looks knitted up on my size 9 (5.5mm) needles.  Funny that you should ask for plain and simple, and, hey, looky what I knitted last fall!

No whizzing through this one quite yet; I spent yesterday’s time on it constantly counting stitches and editing the text to be exactly right (and being distracted while I concocted another design on the side; I seem to be on a roll.) One more row and I’ll be home free to where I’m just repeating what’s been done.  Count count count. I know what the math says–trust but verify anyway. If perfectionism takes extra time, it’s an absolute necessity and worth it.

My friend Jasmin went to Maine a few weeks ago and got to do something I can only dream of–she went to visit Melinda of Tess’ Designer Yarns!  When Melinda found out Jasmin was in my local knitting group, she told her of how I’d snagged some of her yarn at Stitches West two years ago with my motorized wheelchair, breaking a skein; when I’d apologized and tried to pay for it, Melinda had just waved me away.

So I had gone home, pulled some Tess silk yarn out of my stash, knitted it up into a lace scarf as far as the yardage would take me, and mailed it off to Maine.

Referencing that, Melinda sent Jasmin home with some yarn for me. I got an email from Jasmin in the showroom, asking for color preferences.  I thought I was buying it, and told Jasmin I’d love to have more of that Merino Lace.

At Stitches East last fall, I had traded Melinda some of her hand dyed Merino Lace for a copy of my book and we had both come away happy.  Since then, I had taken it out and admired it longingly many a time but it just hadn’t found what it wanted to be yet.

Till Jasmin came home and happily gifted me, from Melinda, with more.  Four skeins, two colorways I like, one that played really well with what I’d bought in Baltimore.  I swatched.  I swooned.  Yes!  Somehow, the brightness and cheerfulness of the fuschia, purple, and coral with a touch of yellow were the perfect antidote to the still-somewhat-smoky skies overhead, and I am totally loving working with these.  Thank you, Melinda!  Jasmin, too!

(P.S. Knitpicks.com still has knitting books at 40% off right now. I’m just sayin’.)