I wrote in my book about Nina’s Seder; the other family she invited was Phyllis and Lee’s that day, nearly 21 years ago. Nina and Phyl and I have all been good friends ever since.

Phyl and Lee came by Monday night for a visit with a bunch of flowers for me. They weren’t going to let me be sick and be stuck by myself. They also weren’t going to let me get too tired; they left after about an hour, with me pleading for them to stay longer, and them explaining that they didn’t want to overtax me, Lee grinning, “Always leave them wanting more.”

Then Nina appeared on our doorstep last night with, bless her, a bunch of flowers and her knitting in hand (I would show you pictures of both bouquets, but my camera batteries both died snapping shawl photos–I’ll try later), pulled up a chair with me and sat and knitted and kept me company for the evening. After a week of playing solitaire, other than those two visits, I tell you, they weren’t afraid of my germs and they were more concerned about me not getting too lonely–I can’t tell you how much I love those guys.

My Dr. R assumed Phyl was my sister when she and Lee came to visit me in the hospital. She almost is.

I spent the evening chatting, knitting and frogging. I had a project I’d thought about but not started, because I couldn’t decide how I wanted to do it, so with Nina there, I simply tried out one idea after another, over and over. Didn’t get a thing accomplished; I was back to the cast-on when she left, but–I did, though. Now I know what doesn’t work.

And here is why I needed a new project.

I kinneared it.

(Sorry for the wrinkled-towel background; it was the color I needed, and for today it has to do.)

I have a nearly-finished silk scarf for my daughter I need to get done and mail, but it’s staying safely inside its ziploc bag and away from me, germ free. I have a shawl I want to photograph before I mail it off, and, ditto. Even if other people don’t get Crohn’s flares when they catch a bad cold, it’s still a bad cold.

Today is the first day I feel like I could actually hold up the needles for awhile, meantime, and the knitting bug is getting to me. I wanted to show something: in person, the Kid Seta (the bigger ball) and the Orenberg handspun “kidd/silk” from Russia are a little bit off from each other, the one more to the brown side, the other more to the vivid pinkish-purple. But knitted together, they’re absolutely stunning. They were so made for each other.

I bought the Kid Seta from Warren at Marin Fiber Arts http://www.marinfiberarts.com/ last summer while I was doing my second booksigning. I adore Warren. Every yarn store owner should be like Warren, not only as kind a soul as you could ask for, but his yarns! Chosen by how good they feel, as far as I could tell: wonderful. At the time, I just bought two balls, thinking I’d do a scarf or two, nothing major, a souvenir of my coming to his shop. But every time I went to go work with it, it just felt like, nah… It hadn’t found what it wanted to be yet.

My friend Margo Lynn totally surprised me with the gift of the Orenberg about two weeks ago, just to make my day, which she very much did. I pulled out Warren’s yarn, curious, and instantly knew. Yes! This is what it had been waiting for!

Neither yarn alone had enough yardage to do a shawl, but together they could. I thought, let’s see, I got two shawls out of 1000 yards of Lisa Souza’s fluffy Kid Mohair (the turquoise Julia shawl in the book), and the second one was pretty long, at least for me. Two balls of 230 yards of the Kid Seta, and the label says 50 g and approximately 600 yards on the Orenberg–yeah, that’ll do. I’ll just have some Orenberg left, that’s all.

It’s not working out that way. Handspun is of course variable, but the Orenberg appears, calculating by the weight of what’s left of the Kid Seta, to have been about 350 yards long. But oh, such gorgeous yards. And yet–I think this thing will still be long enough to keep me happy. And I’m thinking that silk has a tendency to stretch over time, which couldn’t hurt. I’m just glad I’ve got a scale in grams so I can see if I can get one more row, and another, out of it, and one more after that. I’m so close to being done.

Design-wise: I chose the smaller-stitch-count Julia to try to stretch the yardage as far as possible using 7mm needles, but past the yoke, I ditched the Julia stitch pattern for a different 6+1, doing the pattern from the main body of the Michelle shawl from there instead. I’ll show you when it’s blocked.

I can’t wait to see!

Okay, I think I’m ready for a nap. Knitting later.

I am changing her name here.

The whole way along, Jo hasn’t been entirely sure about this whole aging thing. Californians are supposed to stay young forever.

Picture a woman with white bouffant hair, holding tight to the high style of her youth, and a well-preserved old Mustang muscle car that she’d babied for decades as well as any hobbyist. She used to laugh at young men who would roar up alongside her at red lights and start to offer to drag race when the light turned, till they got a good look at the person in the driver’s seat. A woman! An OLD woman! As the first female to get an MBA from her university in the 40’s, she enjoyed lobbing other peoples’ expectations back at them like that. I think she was into her 80’s before the hair deflated, after she’d had a stroke, and her beloved car was totalled by her ex-husband, whom she had stayed friends with and who had borrowed it.

She goes to my church. Her stroke turned her into an instant little old lady, and she was not happy about that. There was a Sunday morning when I asked her how she was doing, and she, from her wheelchair, declared, “Heavenly Father forgot about me!” She didn’t care much for this dependency thing, not one bit!

From there she seemed less and less often lucid; sometimes she didn’t recognize me anymore, despite our having moved here in ’87. But she still had good days, just, none recently, when I made my decision.

I didn’t know how she would respond to my knitting for her, but I decided to do it anyway. I took some baby alpaca in white, white being about as generic a color as you could ask for, one that wouldn’t freak out the caretaker if her patient played dress-up with too-wild and crazy abandon; I knitted Jo up a bit of a scarf. Not too long, since she’s seated these days, you don’t want it catching in the wheels, and besides, she might not notice if it did. But oh so very soft.

I took it to church. I put that scarf around her neck and kind of patted it in place on her shoulders, telling her I’d made it for her and what the yarn was made out of. (Ever the fiber artist here.)

She’d been feeling down for some weeks, and that day, she was just plain out of it. She reached one hand absent-mindedly upwards towards mine, but she didn’t seem to have a clue what was going on. Some of her elderly friends swarmed her as I stepped out of their way, exclaiming over her, exclaiming over her new bit of adornment, telling her what it was and how wonderful it was. Jo’s face went from blank to mildly bewildered.

The next Sunday, there was Jo. She was bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. She was with it. She greeted me cheerfully. She totally knew who she was and where she was, she was her old self again, and she was ready to challenge anybody to a drag race in her wheelchair, scarf flying.

It was startling to me how changed she was and how much of a difference a simple gesture had made in reminding her that she really was thought about, honest!

I thought of all that today, about a year later, as she sat parked in her chair waiting for her ride home to pull up near the door. She waved hi and laughed. I didn’t put her on the spot by asking her my name or hers; she recognized my face and was glad, and that was reward enough.

The kids we put on the plane yesterday were heading home to a foot of newfallen snow to have to haul their luggage through.

Later in the day I got a note from my friend Gigi, one of my testknitters for “Wrapped in Comfort,” who grew up in Iran: she was off on vacation and enjoying new snow, too, and mentioned quite gleefully what the word for snow is in her native Farsi language:

Barf.

She was cc’ing her note to a bunch of us back in California, saying she wished we could all come play in the barf with her.

Ahem. Moving right along. I got totally blown away by a surprise package in the mail yesterday, handspun handdyed yarn, Cherry Tree’s Orenberg in Raspberry Sorbet. Wow, thank you, Margo Lynn! You have to love a yarn that gives employment to handspinners in Russia trying to keep a tradition alive that goes back to Catherine the Great; google Orenberg shawls if you’ve never heard of them, they’re gorgeous. They have geometrics that remind me of Persian rugs. Although, traditionally–this is an aside to the laceknitters reading this–their patterns have one quirk: the decreases are all of the knit two or three together variety. There are no ssk’s to lean the other direction to keep the fabric from biasing. The Orenbergers blocked the heck out of their shawls, with the fact that they’re made of cashmere plied with silk–not wool, so there’s much more limpness and much less memory–making up for that inherent biasing.

The hank was small enough around that I’m guessing it was wound from someone’s hand to the crook of their elbow, what I think of as a vacuum-cleaner hank, because it fits best on the handle of one when you want to wind it up. But this one I was able to do most of the winding simply by putting it on the floor with a flashlight in the center to make sure it didn’t tangle inwards on itself, so that I could sit and read emails as I wound. It worked.

I pulled out the bag of yarns I have from Stitches East, marvelling at how Margo Lynn’s color choice matched so well with some of mine. Her yarn is cobweb fine, and I’m going to knit it with a strand of merino laceweight from Shelridge Farm that slightly contrasts so that the two colors add depth to each other.

Right now, I’m thinking I should knit a scarf in a snowflake lace pattern, wad it up into a soft big ball, and throw it at Gigi.

Knitlist subscribers, forgive me–it’s too good a pun not to put here too.

Someone on Knitlist had mentioned a day at the doctor’s that had gone on and on and on, with technical problems with the x-ray machinery and the like.

To which my answer was, Thank goodness for knitting.  Maybe that x-ray technician was trying to stall you long enough for you to become fond enough of her to knit her some socks.  You know, Sockholm Syndrome and all that.

Doctor R, if you see this, yes, this is the same pattern as your afghan. After I gave you yours, I knitted it again a few months later to keep close the memory of your face as you reached into the bag, stunned, thrilled, speechless, feeling the softness of the baby alpaca and cashmere and finally exclaiming, “Did it take you very long?” And I answered, “About an hour an inch.” Never has the acceptance of a knitted gift from me meant so much to me as what you gave me in those moments.

It was 72 inches long. He had given me every one of those hours by saving my life a few weeks previously. I was sharing some of my newly-gifted time back with him to convey the depths of my gratitude at his caring: there was never a knitting project more deserved.

Now, for the day-to-day part of this post: at least one of the dye manufacturers says helpfully in their literature that although the dye is more colorfast if you simmer it, you can easily dye in the washing machine; that way, the machine can do the heavy lifting of the water. I’m sure they thought that if they made it sound easy, more people would buy their dyes.

Yeah well. I tried doing it that way once about five years ago. Don’t. Worse, I tried it with their cotton dyes. Had it been an acid dye for wool, those just wash right out of cotton anything, but no such luck. Picture the machine in the spin cycle: now picture every little crevice a droplet of colored water could get flung to, and trying to obliterate every last bit from the inside and outside surfaces of the tub. Which is why I have a set of pink pillowcases with blue blobs on them and a freckled tencel jumper: I was so sure I’d succeeded (including running the thing with water only in it). Later, while I was in the hospital for ten days, my family brought me my own pillow and we used those pillowcases–if they somehow disappeared into the hospital’s laundry or trash, nobody was going to cry.

Afterwards, I went thankfully back to normal life, and, as part of that ordinariness, to using a dedicated dyepot like a good little girl.

That second afghan I made in this pattern was for my daughter, who later decided that she’d rather have it dyed burgundy than the natural light brown baby alpaca I’d knitted it up in. Okay. Hmm. Dr. R’s, I’d dyed in two batches, one to each fiber, to get a heathered effect when I knitted them up together. I didn’t have a pot big enough for this one.

The one bathtub in this house is old and crackled, and I didn’t want to risk dyeing the cracks, so I set a large plastic tub in there, filled it full of water too hot to touch, put the afghan in, took the afghan out, stirred the dye in, and put the afghan carefully back in. If I’d put the afghan into the dyebath dry, most of the dye would have schlurped up into whatever part hit the surface first, regardless of any amount of stirring; it needed to be wet for the dye to distribute properly. And I wanted the afghan hot so it wouldn’t cool the dyebath down when I put it in.

But that still just wasn’t enough heat to set the dye, I found. It wasn’t taking up. So I poured a goodly amount of the dyebath into my biggest dyepot and put it on the stove to simmer. I figured the dye was already well distributed by first using that big tub, where it had room to be stirred; I just needed the extra heat.

By the time the thing was ready to come off the stove, nobody else was around. It was New Year’s Eve, the kids were off. It was way heavier than any dye pot I have ever dealt with. I went to lift it, and it didn’t lift. I had this moment of, hey! If I say lift, lift! I can do anything if I try hard enough!

Thank goodness for the thick cotton sweater I was wearing when the boiling water hit.

I was going by my usual premise that it’s always better to start with a smaller amount of dye when you’re not sure; you can always add more later. But this time, I’m not going to. It’s beautiful; it’s much closer to the color of Dr. R’s than the deep shade I was aiming for.

Cool.

Row by row. Gonna make this garden grow. Gonna take the rake and hoe, sow the seed on fertile ground… Was that an Arlo Guthrie song? I heard it on a folk-rock album by I think Stan Rogers, back when CDs were a new technology and my kids were babies, and thinking at the time how it applied to every moment of being a mom to these brand-new people: I kind of made it my personal inner theme song for awhile there. Part of me wonders, if I sang it to them now, would it somehow feel familiar to them?

But it had receded ages since into the far-away background, and then I suddenly realized that’s what I was humming as I was looking at this wad of circular knitting. (A shawl. Whodathunkit.  Blue Moon Fiber Arts’ “Silkie” in Turquoise.)

Hmm. I held it stretched out, squinty-eyed. I weighed the ball and I don’t have enough to finish another half-repeat, it would have to be this long (however much that means once it’s blocked) or spend more money to make it longer. I need to rinse it still on the needles and lay it out to dry overnight to see; then I can cast it off. Or not.

It’s been sitting in my knitting bag the past couple of days. There was nowhere in the house to lay it out without someone tripping over it.

We just put one kid on a plane, and his fiancee, who’d been staying with her grandparents and visiting them and us; they’ve arrived at the visit-both-sets-of-parents stage, and it’s her folks’ turn now. I can go spread my knitting out in his room. Part of me wants to say wryly, Oh joy–I’d far rather have my children around than their empty space.

Which is a good kind of problem to have, definitely.

Nancy finished this and had to show it off to another knitter before her small grandson opens his present tomorrow. What to wrap it in? Her husband had an idea, so he was spending part of today making it a cage. Of what, I’m not sure, maybe she’ll tell us in the comments.

I would pose Grendl here with the cookies Nancy baked us, but you can tell by that satisfied patting of his tummy that he already helped himself to them all. (Sorry, Santa; maybe Nancy can get him to toast some marshmallows for you.)

Merry Christmas and the peace of the season to all.

The suitcase that put on someone else’s tag like a pair of sunglasses and went on vacation to LA to audition for the movies made it home with the audience giving it a standing ovation (ie, the kid got up out of bed at 7 am to answer the deliveryman.) The other kid changed his ticket and will be coming in tonight. Go Jetblue!

Last night I went to the last hour of knit night at Purlescence: my Sea Shanty poster from Chris Baldwin at http://littledee.net/ was just too perfectly Chloe, I had to go. I was one of the lucky people who ordered one the first day; they sold out pretty instantly. Pirates and knitting: what more could you ask for? (I forgot to take my camera, so I’m making do with two older pictures of her with her Kathy shawl.)

So. Handmaiden’s new Camelspin yarn, wherein my fingers thought they’d died and gone to heaven–till I went back to Purlescence and discovered Handmaiden’s cashmere yarn. There are many grades of cashmere out there in the world, some of them apologetically asking for quotation marks around the word, but this is right up there with Lisa Souza’s handspun. Wow.

Silk yarns have a tendency to collapse and go limp and long as you wear the thing; this is 70 silk/30 baby camel, and I wasn’t quite sure how it would behave. It’s the perfect kind of yarn for one of my circular shawls, which hang in such a way that they stay on the body effortlessly and the stitch patterns stay open and beautiful. But even if I’d been willing to spring for two skeins, there was only the one in the shop. I didn’t know, then, if this would pull into a hopelessly long scarf, or, if I stopped it now, it would be hopelessly too short to be worn as a shawl stretched open across the back. Width or length. Which is it gonna be.

Only one way to get a good idea: do what I’ve told countless newbie laceknitters on the knitting lists to do. Rinse it gently in tepid water and lay it out on an old white something or other overnight, still on the needles. Not a true blocking, but it does show how the pattern comes out.

And then take a bad picture of it that doesn’t show the colors well so that the intended recipient won’t really quite see it before Christmas.

Stitch pattern: the instructions to the main body of the Michelle pattern in my book, plus one plain stitch each side. Fairly quick, very easy, 45 stitches, fingering weight, size 5.5 mm needles. Merry Christmas!

Wednesday we checked our son John into the Mormon Church’s Mission Training Center in Provo, Utah, the point of our trip. In three weeks, he will be off from there to the Jackson, Mississippi mission, including parts of Louisiana–ya’ll take good care of him for me if you see him riding by on his bike for me, willya; thanks. He’s such a good kid, and his mother is going to miss him fiercely.

Then later that afternoon we went to Heindselman’s, a Provo store that has spinning, weaving, and knitting and crocheting supplies. I was delighted to see Alpaca With A Twist’s baby alpaca roving, my favorite.

Heindselman’s, it turns out, is the oldest continuously-operating yarn store in the United States; it began in 1904. The current owner (this is Ted, with Elizabeth in the background) created a biomedical invention that I’ll let him talk about, if he’d like to, that did very well, and then, since he could now go do anything he wanted, he chose to take on the old family business.

We got to meet Father Christmas http://deseretnews.com/article/1,5143,695235971,00.html when he happened to come into the store.

There were dolls just to the left of Ted in the picture that he explained are Heindselmans: it is not only the family name, but also the word for the characters in the old fairy tale about the poor shoemaker who could not possibly finish the fine shoes in time that had been ordered to be done by Christmas. They are the little elves that came out at night and worked on them for him, unbeknownst to him.

You know, I can’t think of a more apropos concept for those of the yarny persuasions this time of year. There’s a certain knitter in Toronto with a Schedule who could really use some of those dolls right now, but I didn’t think to ask if any of them were for sale. Sorry, Stephanie!

My sister should have it by now. This is the Wanda’s Shawl pattern from my “Wrapped in Comfort” book, in Blue Sky Alpacas Alpaca Silk in an unusually bright and clear white. I wrote that it takes five balls, to make sure nobody runs out, but I used every last bit of four balls for this and had enough.

Got to my folks’ place last night, and woke up to a wide view of the mountain covered in snow, right there outside the window. The pine trees are holding up armfuls of soft white and it is truly gorgeous. I’m not sure yet how to get a photo in from here, so I’m posting a saved one of that shawl. Okay, time to go rejoin the folks. More later.

Note to self: if you want to keep the tips blocked into points, do not pick it up before it’s bone dry.   Let’s go dry it again, now, shall we?

A stray thought (where did I put those Holz and Stein size 8s!)

Ya know? I used to have a mind like a steel trap. But I think now it’s a Havahart, and sometimes the doors get left open. ‘Sokay, just means rummaging around through the stash looking for whichever UFO it’s in, which you know means inspiration for the next cool project is going to strike as I go through that stuff.

Dear Computer,

Imagine you’re knitting a sweater.  A really nice one, allover cabling, cashmere–oh heck, go all out, let’s say qiviut–with honeycomb, moss, all kinds of patterns.  Only, you look down and suddenly realize you’ve just dropped a stitch.   Except that where you dropped it has no connection to where your needles are, and the stitches that run downwards from it don’t either–they might be dropping diagonally, maybe upward, they might have gaps of solid stitches in between with no connection between the holes and no way to figure out how things ripped from here to there.  And when you try to pull it over your head to see how it’s going to look on, somebody sewed the neck shut.

Ah, you understand.  Now, can I please have my photos back?