When I was a kid, Where’s Waldo hadn’t been dreamed up yet, and if you finished reading your book while waiting for the dentist to finish working on your sister so he could get to you, what you could find in that office for entertainment, well, let’s see. There were parents’ magazines and there was the little kids’ magazine to stave off boredom–but it was definitely for little kids and was felt as an insult to anyone over nine. BORINGGGG. Holiday, I think it was called. I well remember the “find what’s wrong with this picture” page and wishing it had something at least challenging on it.

So. Yesterday I picked up my knitting and tried to make up for lost time from Monday’s mess. I was pleased with myself at how much I was getting done while still playing hostess I think okay.

My brain must have been on Holiday.

It hit me. The whole day’s worth of knitting. Right there in front of me, the whole time, the whole day, every time I’d picked it up and put it down, and I hadn’t noticed.

The diamond I’d been working on is the one that would be at the center of the body of the shawl.

What would you do? Would you continue the one center diamond as a solid, then from there turn the diamonds upside down and continue with the open-mesh part pointing down now rather than up? Kind of like a fair isle, with a solid Charlie Brown zigzag across the center and then matching zig zag openwork lines above and below, marking definite horizontal lines across the body of the shawl? Or do I frog it and go do the Constance pattern as it was meant to be.

Opportunity, or, oh crud. Note that frogging two strands is always fun when you have to figure out how and what to wrap it around as you undo, but note also that it is well worth if it needs to be reknit.

I think there’s a jumping amphibian in my immediate future.

Dad Hyde asked, as he wrapped it around his arm, “What is it?” I answered, “My mom calls them yarn necklaces.” This is a scarf out of Ellen’s handpainted merino-silk from Half Pint Farm in Vermont, bought at Stitches East last fall. One of those little projects for stuffing in the purse and carrying around that somehow, to my surprise, actually got finished when I wasn’t paying much attention to it. (When the yarn’s gone, it’s done.) Just add water and block it–except, um, maybe not now.

The silk and cashmere shawl in Constance’s shawl pattern (with some playing around with the yoke) continues only slowly; I’ve got company. Richard and Kim have internships for a month in DC and are staying at my in-laws’ house; my in-laws are doing various jaunts to keep themselves out of the way of the newlyweds. They’re camping out here for ten days.

Camping out is more of a description than we’d intended, as we wait for the sewer services folks to show up this morning. My pipes are barfing. These things never seem to happen when there’s nobody around to enjoy the excitement but us. I think I’d rather go to the Aquarium if I want to show them an interesting day.

Thank goodness we live in a time and a place when such things can get fixed pretty fast.

We’ve got a few leftovers from Saturday. Gee, I bet we could come up with some interesting recipes–lox of luck… Hang on, hang on, I think we’re getting carried away here.

If you ever want a book with all kinds of interesting tidbits, “No Idle Hands: the Social History of American Knitting” has everyday life over the centuries pulled from journals held by the Library of Congress. I used to use it as my reference to make history more interesting to the fifth graders in our school district, bringing my spinning wheel, my carders and some wool for the kids to card while I talked about the level of work they would have had to do back in Colonial times in the US: there was one town, Hatfield, Massachusetts, where the town selectmen came in and assessed each family a fine if they didn’t produce the amount of yardage of handspun, handwoven woolens that was required of them. And we’re talking many hundreds of yards in a year.

Woolen goods were the prime export of the colonies, but the Woolen Act of 1699 suddenly forbade anybody in America from transporting by horse, cart or carriage any wool or anything made of wool between plantations, much less selling it overseas: you could only legally sell what you could carry in your hands on foot from your home to your buyer. England’s enforcement powers, however, were for the most part very far away.

My favorite story is of Old Ma Rinker, whose relatives owned a tavern and whom the Brits thought were loyal to the Crown, so they’d go there to discuss strategy against General Washington over in Valley Forge. The relatives would pass the word on to Ma, she’d write it down, wrap a ball of yarn around it, go out into the sunshine and knit while her flax retted, and toss the ball of yarn to the American soldiers riding by on their horses.

Or, as my hubby puts it: how knitters saved the Revolution.

Not to mention the feet of more than a few shivering soldiers who needed warm socks in that Valley.

I’m suddenly picturing their potential bewilderment at the concept of chocolate brownies, much less whipped cream in a can.

Sometimes, a project gets started and then it stalls out. It was too boring, when I needed something more interesting to work on; it was too interesting, when the rest of life was being too distracting and I needed something brainless. Either way, it got started–and every time you start a project, it is an affirmation of life and of looking towards the future–but then it got put aside.

I want to defend the lowly WIP here. (The TOADs, Trashed Object Abandoned in Disgust, not so much.) If you really don’t like it, let it go, just rip it, rip it, let it go back to being a ball of yarn full of possibilities. How many other parts of our lives do we get to rewind at will and have a do-over?

But there is value in having something on the needles simply waiting its proper turn, or, if you run shy of needles, you can always run a thread through the tops of the stitches, leave a note re the needle size, put it in its own zip lock and set it aside. It is not mocking you. It is simply waiting to be able to tell you why it is there.

I once knitted a sock and a half, before all the self-striping yarns came out that helped grab the imaginations of sock knitters. Plain and beige, boring and terribly practical, in the most basic pattern, no lace there. But size 1 needles and my hands aren’t friends to begin with, that yellowish beige was deadly (and it was right after knitting a very large pair in dark charcoal); after awhile, I just couldn’t make myself pick them up when there were other, brighter things to work on.

Till the day I badly wanted to knit a pair of socks for one of the nurses who’d taken care of me at Stanford, to thank him for his compassion and his willingness to walk in his patients’ shoes. A man. Boring beige and no lace, plain and practical. Perfect. Yes, Brian, this is a bit of a confession here. Knitting him a hat or a scarf in this climate was a little silly. He was about my height, so I imagined his feet weren’t that far off from mine, and since I’d been making them to my EE width feet, they had some lengthwise stretchability built into them. I felt swamped, because I was knitting something for all the medical personnel I could find who’d been involved in my case: in just over two months, I made 14 projects to go back and say thank you with.

And to do what I really wanted to do for him anyway, all I had to knit was half a sock. Done. He absolutely loved them. I mean, how many people get to see, much less own, a pair of handknit socks in their lives? I well understand wondering why anyone would want to bother, but put that first sock on and you instantly know. You never want to have to settle for a machine-made pair again.

A sock and a half for a year and a half, so close to being done, that had so bugged me–till I knew why I was glad I had them. Had I finished them earlier, they would have been well worn, had I declared them a TOAD and frogged them, I wouldn’t have had them to give. There’s a reason for everything. A small stash of WIPs is a very useful thing.

I have two shawls for which I’ve done the yoke but gone no further. One, the color just wasn’t right for me, and I still don’t know yet whom it is to be for; when I do come across the right person, it will feel like a very fast project because the first day’s worth of work is already done. The other, I picked up today, counted the stitches to be sure I’d done the final increase and to make sure on the stitch count–I’d eyeballed the lace pattern and was sure of myself, but best to check–and now off I go with it. I had cast on just as the wedding preparations were starting up; I simply ran out of time for it.

And now I know exactly whose face I can’t wait to see lighting up. I’m tweaking the pattern for the body; this will be a custom job. The first day’s work is preknitted, and off I go, delighted to be ahead of the game.

Meantime, back in knitting, last fall at Stitches East in Baltimore, I bought some merino/bamboo/nylon yarn from the lady at Maple Creek Farm; she had a whole long rack of hanging loops of hanks, ready to be fondled by passersby, color after color after color, like a tapestry on display half-imagined, half done. This is the start of the smaller Water Turtles shawl, and my two skeins will get more length than I need. The yarn is a little thicker than my usual, although it doesn’t appear heavy like some might, so a shawl with a somewhat smaller stitch count was just right–and that pattern to me is mindless knitting, which is definitely a plus this month.

Meantime, here’s my attempt at photographing the MOG shawl. (No, that’s not the dress).

Did it again. (As always, don’t miss the captions.)

I think this is like how, when I was a kid, I picked up the habit from my friends for a time of dotting my i’s with smiley faces, practicing a great deal on the sides of my notebooks so they wouldn’t look like grimaces. Sometimes I added curlicues sprouting off all kinds of random places on my letters as if to pull attention to the words themselves, wanting to shout visually, I wrote this! I put language into effect, I made this marvelous tool of writing carve beautifully ornate statuary out of my thoughts, come see!

Oh. Wait. That’s what a blog is, too. Never mind. Well anyway.

I often, when I get to the end of a shawl, leave the cast-off, just the cast-off, to do the next day. I have no real reason for that. It’s as if it were to flourish and curlicue and smiley-face it into an exclamation point: I did it! Look at this, totally effortless!

As if the one final row were what creating the whole of it had been about or the whole of the effort involved. C’mon. I can’t fool me, not that easily.

Or maybe it is that I don’t want the shawl to have any whiff of a slogging, endless grind attached to it. Rather, to have it be like a young girl holding it over her head, running into the wind with it Superman cape-ing behind, or her twirling around and around with it till she gets dizzy and falls down laughing, the silk turning into a landing parachute settling down around her.

I think I’ll run the last end in tomorrow.

I’m usually not one for memes, but I’m going to use Sheila’s as a jumping-off point. Maybe I’ll answer another of her questions tomorrow. This is a bit stream of consciousness, but here goes.

What was I doing ten years ago? Driving, constantly driving. No school buses here, and I had four kids in three different schools, soccer games (we may have given up on soccer by that point, I’m not sure) and oboe, piano, piano, piano, clarinet, and saxophone lessons, later organ too, and for that one summer, trumpet tutoring thrown in as well. “Make a joyful noise.”

Ten years ago, we had a big family reunion coming up. When my Grandfather Bennett had died, Gram, at 94, watched all of us cousins having a grand time being reunited en mass for the first time as adults and asked us when we were going to do that again. Nobody could bear to say out loud, When you die, Gram.

Two years later, what was left of her hip, which had been replaced at Johns Hopkins when I was a kid, crumbled, and she became bedridden. My cousin Katherine’s husband, a cardiologist (trained here at Stanford), quietly told us that in general, once a very elderly person can’t get out of bed, they’re gone within about six weeks.

Gram would last about twice that.

Gram told her oldest son she wanted money not to be a reason why any of her 29 grandchildren couldn’t come to her funeral: he was to send $5000 of her money to each one right now, and promise to reimburse them for any hotel expenses they might incur as well. He did, and about two weeks later, after considering living to see three different centuries and deciding it wasn’t worth the hassle, she slipped away.

We came.

We had such a lovely time together. We lined up by order of year born, and everybody pulled out cameras and snapped pictures of each other.  (I had at the time, for a winter coat, my Kaffe Fassett’s Big Diamonds in two strands of wool and mohair knitted on size 9s, quite dense and warm, but it definitely seemed a bit bright for the November occasion, happy/sad as it was. I have no doubt my cousins remember me standing in the snow at the gravesite wearing that 86-color piece of clothing. I later bought a somber charcoal coat, a little too big, not realizing immediately that it was a horse-after-it’s-left-the-barn effect. Once I did, I gave it to my tall daughter to take to college in the snow, where she needed it far more than I, and it fit her better anyway. I had my handknit one; in my climate, why would I want more?)

And so, a few years later, it was decided that we needed another reunion, one with no funeral attached to it, just purely for the sake of joy. It was July 1998, the year Grandpa would have been turning 100. As a central gathering place in the country, Katherine decided to schedule us at an offseason ski resort that was within a stiff hike of where our grandparents had owned a mountain cabin near Brighton. (I can see the ski afficionados nodding their heads.) That cabin had a small back patio overlooking the creek with an iron railing around it, deeply bowed in; my grandmother had once told me that it was from the weight of the snow there.

Grandpa used to like to go that cabin to get away from the pressures of his US Senate seat; to get to a phone, he had to walk a mile to the little general store. Nobody could reach him unless he chose to be reached. When he was on vacation, he was on vacation, walking that mountain, listening to the icy-cold water of the creek going over the pebbles, seeing chipmunks dart and eagles soar. I used to feed those chipmunks, the times I got to go to that cabin in the summer, growing up; it was a lesson to an antsy child in being still and waiting, trying to teach a tiny animal not to be afraid of me.

My sister Anne and her six boys decided to drive from Atlanta for that reunion, and since they were coming that far anyway, went further and came here first. We got to spend a joyfully noisy week or so with them at our house before they continued to Yosemite and then on over to Utah with us joining them there. Muir Woods, Chinatown… That was the visit where I gave her copies of my photos, and she asked her identical twins gleefully which one of them was in this picture in her hands. They both claimed themselves. “See! You can’t tell you apart! Now you can’t get mad at anyone else!”

My kids had loved Tim Robblee, the best music teacher any school ever hired; Tim announced ten years ago that he was leaving to go back to school himself. He had led our high school’s jazz band to a national high school competition in Monterey, where they did so well that his kids were invited to play as professionals at the famous Monterey Jazz Festival in the fall!

I knitted Tim an afghan in many colors, a picture as best as I could do of the Monterey Bay, complete with waves of water at the beach, in remembrance of how he’d believed in his students and what he’d helped them achieve. I took a roll of pictures of it before I gave it to him.

I later found I had a roll of film that had been double-exposed: Anne’s kids at Stinson Beach. Tim’s beach afghan. Superimposed on each other, so that in one wonderful piece of kismet, Anne’s boys were reaching down into the water, their feet submerged in wool and water in the tide. I got not one single good picture of the afghan, in the traditional sense, but the ones I got–after the initial disappointment, because Tim had moved by then and the afghan was out of my reach–delighted me.

Oh, and, one funny thing about the reunion? Katherine, the one in charge, kept emailing me re the arrangements and kept getting antsy about getting no response. I heard through the grapevine, and protested that I had received nothing. She insisted to my brother that the emails didn’t come back to her, so clearly, I was simply not remembering. (This is often a very valid thing to say about me.) But no, I’d been waiting and looking and getting nothing.

Christmastime, five months later, Katherine sent out an extended-family email, and at long last she got a response: from an Alison Hyde in England, saying she’d been enjoying all the emails, almost felt like a part of our family now, and how had the reunion gone? Had we had a good time? And where in the world were we? Were we in Spain for that vacation? (I guess it was all those Californian place names when Katherine wrote to me.)

It let me off the hook, at least!

Nope, Kathy, didn’t get the shoes. One shoe store per day is my outer limit. No-Blog-Rachel’s heart attack at the thought of me in heels made me laugh (she’s seen me walking through yarn stores)–no chance there, honey, don’t worry. Hey. They would make my cane too short. And I don’t need to try to reenact the glamour of the day I so artfully and delicately fell off my roof years ago; let’s keep the feet down to earth.

Changing the subject, come to find out from them that the women at Handmaiden did actually specifically try to match my mother-of-the-groom dress when they dyed my Camelspin. Having their Sea Silk in my book might not have hurt my chances for them wanting to do that–whether that’s a normal thing for them, I quite hesitate to assume, and I don’t want to put them on the spot re their future customers. So. Write a book, match a dress, you put in a little effort, they put in a little effort. Go for it. I’m glad I photographed the yarn with the dress for the blog; they were delighted to see that it had worked out as well as they’d hoped.

Somehow that meant the pressure was on even more to create just the most perfect design in the most perfect shawl ever for the wedding. It would have been so much easier to just chuck that and go knit whatever–but whatever simply wouldn’t do. I spent the last week–a week!–growling and swatching and ripping and trying again and gradually getting lightbulb flashes here and there as I went along, one eye on the calendar and knowing the date was extremely close. I needed to get started, fer cryin’ out loud!

I came home from Purlescence’s knitting night Thursday night, where someone had gasped when I told her how much time I had left, and I thought, no, I really can do it. Honest. (So cooperate, brain!) Did one more swatch or two…

…And my shawl is now humming along. I did it. I got my amaryllis pattern. I did it.

It took a moment to sink in, and then she suddenly exclaimed, “Mom! You’re spinning! I haven’t seen you spinning in” (pauses to think a moment) “years!”

I think it’s been two years since I gave Robert my angora roving. The (now gone) Robin and Russ Handweavers store once listed 70/30 Chinese angora/acrylic roving for clearance at eight dollars a pound; given that most of their customers were, I’m guessing, fiber snobs like me, that acrylic was a dealkiller and the stuff had just sat there. Eight bucks!

Mind you, premium handplucked French pure angora yarn, with each bunny individually groomed and cared for daily, tends to run at about a dollar a gram (as well it should, for that much work). A gram. Compare that to qiviut–or even vicuna. Handplucked angora, especially, fluffs out like nothing else out there, if carefully taken care of. It also felts if you breathe on it too hard.

I bought one pound from R&R, just to experiment with on my wheel, wondering why on earth someone had mixed bunny with something so lowbrow. This was probably ten years ago. The Chinese fibers were all random lengths; handplucked from molting rabbits this wasn’t. But still. I assumed it would be difficult to dye, because the acrylic would be impervious, and yet somehow, when I spun and dyed it, you couldn’t tell one fiber apart from another, and the stuff was, even if not as soft as French, definitely–I mean, this was still (mostly) bunny fur! Sheared four times a year. Wish I could grow my hair that fast.

So. I called Russ’s store back, asked how much they had left of it, and bought the whole lot, maybe fifteen pounds. I knew that that would give me the freedom to go play with this luscious stuff for anybody any time without worrying about the price of the frivolity–just go enjoy.

And I did. But boy did I sneeze while those bits of fluff flew as I spun.

I made a number of things out of it, but ultimately, my body got the better of me. I spent a long, hard time, several years, where any extra expenditure of energy left me gasping for breath or simply too wiped out for the day, and handspinning just took more out of me than I could manage. A little ironic, I thought, given what I had named my website. One of my children breaks out in hives if she touches angora, it turns out, and that was all the more reason to not spin this particular stuff.

Robert spins as well as weaves. He taught his elementary school classroom about the tradition of the medicine blanket like the one he made me, and asked them whom they would want to weave one for.

One child said his grandpa had cancer. Another child raised their hand and said *they* had had cancer–which no one in the room had known. Wow. And so they got to work, warp and weft, working together and individually, a lesson put into action on acknowledging what life is and what we can do for each other about it.

And so it was only right: I gave Robert that bag of roving. It was down to maybe eight pounds by then. I knew it would go to the best possible use at his house. He told me later his surprise that it tended to make a heavy yarn, and I nodded that yes, it does–quite pleased that he’d started to spin it. Maybe to please me, to be able to tell me he had, but hey. It will wait patiently for its time. It did for me.

Jasmin got me talked into going in on a Crown Mountain Farms order with her on some hand dyed merino roving a few months ago, and when it didn’t look like I was going to get it spun, she spun the first pound for me. Wonderful gesture, gorgeous yarn. And you know? I had another pound still. It pulled at me.

Last week I sat down and got my first bobbin spun up, picking out most of the lighter areas of the roving first. Then after a few days, I did the second, picking out most of the brighter pink areas. The resulting skein is brighter and lighter than Jasmin’s, and the darker sections left in the bag mean I can’t match my one skein. But that’s okay. It got me started spinning again, it showed me I could, and that was mission enough.  Jasmin, once again, I owe you. The yarn is, as always, a thicker one than the fingering to lace weights I generally knit these days; that may be a contributing reason why I haven’t spun much. I don’t have the feeling in my fingertips required for making a very fine yarn.

But. I am inordinately pleased with myself. It has just the very slightest degree of torque in the wet skein, a sign of my being out of practice, but not enough to impact the final fabric. It’s almost perfect.

I have some seacell/merino mill ends waiting for my drum carder and then my wheel. It’s awfully good to be back.

(Jasmin gifted me with yet another pair of socks as a total surprise Thursday. I didn’t get to hold Stephanie’s sock today, so Jasmin’s pair is filling in as a Pseudo Psock Picture. Note the artistic photographic rendering of an actually perfectly lovely pair of Blue Moon Socks That Rock socks. It amuses me.)

When your plans are castoff (why, yes, that is the Casbah Nathania waved at me Thursday night that I cast on late Friday afternoon in the faster-version Julia shawl pattern and am half done casting off Saturday evening–it should block out to about 20″ and tie in front quite nicely)

and are left adrift

what can you do but knit

to give someone else (not to mention me) a lift.

(I was SO going to finish that shawl during Stephanie’s talk and hand it to some random person at the Maker’s Faire and give them an impromptu lesson on shawl blocking in the spirit of the Faire. Whatever random passerby was wearing the right shade of teal, especially if they said something complimentary about knitting. If only the guard had been willing to move the gate to let me be dropped off near the entrance–although, with a thousand people or so stuck trying to go what was, for us, 1.1 miles in over two hours, I see his point at not letting just one person in. But no. I’ll just have to find some other victim.

I’m sure it’ll be tough.)

“I found my thrill on Blueberry Hill…” I love the colors of blueberries.

Evelyn at Knitty-noddy.com was already putting in an order to Handmaiden the evening I happened to be exchanging emails with her, and the result was two things: I got to see the color page for Handmaiden’s latest and greatest about to be released, and she got to see the picture of my mother-of-the-groom silk dress–which she forwarded to Handmaiden! And then told me she’d done so. Another email or two, throw in a little Paypal, and then…

My new Camelspin arrived yesterday, along with matching blue needles from Grafton Fibers in Vermont, which I just happened to, um, really need to go with that yarn. Right. The yarn had been dyed to match my dress, and it just happens that that was to be one of their new colorways anyway. The name of it?… For those who know me?…

Ultraviolet. I love it. Get out there and enjoy. Even my amaryllis is laughing.

And I can dive right into getting started. The Bigfoot shawl for Andy’s wife that I started last Friday? Done. Just needs blocking and drying. I can’t WAIT for them to get it!

No, I’m not showing pictures of the project yet. Today’s Picotee amaryllis, not quite all the way open yet, will have to stand in for it. Gotta have some surprises. (Right, and I’m as good at holding off on anticipation as a five-year-old on Christmas Eve, we’ll see how long I last.) I came down with a cold the day after I got the yarn, had to put it away for two weeks, and finally now I can safely knit it up for them. At last.

I got a note from Andy a little while ago that totally made my day, telling about his having taken a walk outside of the hospital, at last, on a beautiful day, wearing his “magical scarf.” There’s nothing like a knitting recipient who loves what you (and Tina!) created to make you want to create more. I offered to knit his wife a shawl or scarf, whatever she’d like, asking for shaping and color suggestions. I wanted to get it right. I wanted them both to feel supported and thought of. The family of the patient has it, in some ways, harder than the patient. They need not to be forgotten.

I was going to dye something from my stash, but when I heard back, I knew none of the base yarns I had would quite get to the colors she liked. I went to four yarn stores, searching.

The last one I went to, walking through it, wishing for lace or fingering weight in a nice soft yarn in just the color, why doesn’t anybody carry colors that–

–there was one. One only. It leaped out at me. It screamed, I am THE shade! Right, yarn, tell me, how do you know? But I just knew. And it was so soft. So perfect.

I still, no, no way. I can’t…

I stood there in Creative Hands in Belmont, then, flashing back to the Crohn’s of five years ago: lying on my side in a hospital bed, too weak to hold up the edge of the page I was trying to read, too far gone to register a lot of what it said anyway: every lab mouse that sneezed was written up in those pages. But my husband and I needed to understand what we were deciding on. The doctor had his (positive, it turned out) feelings on the subject, but he wanted our input before telling us his gut feeling. The side effects of the experimental med being proposed included MS and lupus. (Hah. Beatcha.) Absolutely not to be given to patients with those or any neurological diseases, since it damages nerves. It depresses the blood pressure. (Great. I’d already done 63/21 once, memorably.) And on and on. My lupus had killed off the previously-working main nerve to the right side of my heart; there, as far as anybody could guess, would go the rest.

And I utterly knew in my bones that that med was the door to life for me, and not to risk it would be to die. I was so close. Whatever the outcome, let it happen, I wanted to live. I fully expected never to be able to digest food normally again and to be on TPN (tube feeding) for life, but if that’s what it was going to cost, I’d take it. I remembered my friend Neil’s dad with much gratitude, telling me that getting a pacemaker was no big deal. You just do what you’ve gotta do.

I stood in that store, knowing that one does not choose something like a bone marrow transplant except under circumstances where it comes down to the simple choice: I want to live. Remembering not knowing how I was going to find the strength to take the next breath. Nor the next. And my doctor coming in just then, needing me to live, imbuing me with that strength I needed so much simply by his caring presence, in a way I cannot begin to describe.

It was one of the defining moments of my life: our presence and our caring matters. It matters.

And the med worked. Pass the Green and Black’s mint dark chocolate. That small frivolity became a great joy.

I stood in that store, flashing back to Andy’s words: his trying not to complain, his briefly mentioning the fatigue beyond fatigue, his thanking me for recommending the book “100 days” by a doctor who had had a bone marrow transplant too, someone else out there who knew what it was like. Fatigue beyond describing to the living–Andy only barely touched on it in his note, but it was okay to tell me. I knew it well.

I pictured how that exquisitely soft yarn would beckon Andy to lift his tired arm to put it up around his wife’s shoulders as he continued to heal, finding both strength and softness in her presence.

I mentally apologized, and am still doing so, to every person I’ve ever knit for who didn’t and won’t also get a project made out of Jade Sapphire–but hey, please know, you’re in good company. I’ve never sprung for it for me, either.

Although, you know? Truth be told–I guess I just did.

Two weeks now–I ought to have finished shaking this cold off by now. I’m almost there.

I have someone I promised a shawl to, but with a compromised immune system in their family, I don’t dare touch their yarn nor breathe on it till I’m totally over any germ. Which gives me an impromptu deadline: finish this one before I get better, because as soon as I am, I’m ditching this and diving into theirs.

Someone on Ravelry gave me a heads-up yesterday that Knitpicks had started a knitalong using my “Wrapped in Comfort” book. Cool! I joined it (how could I not!) and mentioned that I’d started this Michelle shawl on Sunday.

Oops. Wait. No, I’d started it Monday. But I can’t edit on someone else’s blog. Here, see, if you stretch it out to get an approximation of its future blocked self, I had knitted 14″ worth by Tuesday night–time’s a-wastin’. This is 7/2 spun silk, handdyed, from Village Spinning and Weaving in Solvang, CA, bought at Stitches West from some of the nicest people you could hope to meet.

Maybe one more day of this cold? I’ll finish this and get it out of the way in time. Hey, I’m as much a procrastinator as anybody–I’ll make my deadlines where I can find them. Back to work.

Shawl notes first: Wanda’s Flowers pattern from “Wrapped in Comfort,” Lisa Souza’s handdyed Petal yarn, 50/50 silk/merino and very soft, started Sunday and I finished the last four rows Thursday. I went down one needle size from the book, using a 5.5 mm (American 9). This pattern is not as wide around as a lot of my shawls, and at only 279 stitches across the body, it works up fast. (Don’t let your gauge stray too tight, though.) Shawl pin is handblown glass by Sheila and Michael Ernst in a flower design, one of their smaller and simpler pins. I had enough yarn left over from the one skein that I used that I could have done half a repeat more, one more flower’s worth going downwards.

Now. The rest of this post is in response to a query about my photographs. All I ever needed to know about photography, I learned in third grade. My daughter’s third grade teacher way back when, actually, who casually mentioned to me one day, glancing at an art project of my child’s, that oh yes, she had taught the kids that pictures are most interesting if you can divide them up into threes. The eye likes odd numbers of things, not even: she demonstrated. A tree, standing alone. Perfectly centered square in the middle? Boring. But put that main feature so that it’s taking up roughly 1/3 of the space, or 2/3, especially if it’s somehow on the diagonal relative to the frame, to somehow give it motion: interesting. Thirds up and down, thirds side to side, either, or, better yet, both. If you can’t do that, make it at least off-center.

When I thought about it later, I realized I’d instinctively gone by that basic idea for a long time, but nobody had ever put it into so many words for me. I’m sure my little sister learned all about that in her art lessons growing up, but somehow my piano teacher never said boo about it. Wait–come again, maybe in effect she did: all those piano pieces with codas to go back and play the beginning part again at the end? Thirds.

(Note that this amaryllis photo does not perfectly conform to what I just said because WordPress balked at the extra pixels.  There’s perfection, and then there’s real life.)

Alright, class, homework is to go shoot your best flower picture. Okay–there’s the bell. Class dismissed!

And Canada, we are NOT having a snow day tomorrow.

Totally outshone by those flowers below taking up all the light in the room. Which amuses me to no end.

I really do need to get my pattern photos up on Ravelry. There–if I say it out loud, it’ll happen. Harness that peer pressure and put it to work, right? This is the Clover Chain shawl (rather scrunched up at the bottom here) in the book, done in baby alpaca fingering weight, but something like Jaggerspun Zephyr laceweight and going down three needle sizes would work too, just, you’d get a much smaller-around V-necked shawl that would be good for tying in front rather than a throw-over-your-shoulder wrap.

And, well, yes, for those who have asked–what name could I possibly have used there but spindyeknit. And I’m sitting here lecturing my fingers not to add a .com after that word.