Jasmin knits socks. Saying that is like saying I knit a little bit of lace from time to time: Jasmin. Knits. Socks!

When she made some comment about a month ago about how her sock drawer had run out of space and gee, she was going to have to ditch some pairs, maybe Goodwill, I had no doubt she was joking, and I joked back at her that I could help her find a better use for them than that.

She showed up at Purlescence last night with the cardigan I’d left behind at her house (oops, and thanks) and five pairs of socks. Which she already knew would fit me because she’d already made me a pair.

I was stunned. She loved it. I protested. She threatened Goodwill again, and told me this batch was for me. Now for anyone who has ever thought me a generous person, I tell you, the true me burst right out and said to the group something like “Mine all mine bwaahaahaa” and it was about another hour before I asked a couple of people, individually (and, they will note, quietly–I didn’t say it too loud) that they seemed to have about my size feet too if they’d like some. They just laughed me off.

Some friends, you can do all the nice things you could ever possibly think of for them, and you’ll still never catch up.

(p.s. For the non-knitters reading this: I never understood why someone would bother to knit socks, something that would wear out after all that work to make them, till the day someone handed me her sock as she knit the other one and said, Here. Put this on your foot. You’ll see.

And wow did I.  Instantly.  There is simply no comparison between that and anything machine knit. I still don’t love to knit sock yarn on size 0 needles, but oh, do I love handknit socks.)

I once casually asked my older sister if she ever read my blog, the context being that I didn’t want to repeat myself if she already knew about (fill in the blank).

Yes or no was no big deal to me. What surprised me was her answering, with a note of faint disapproval in her voice, “I don’t read blogs.”

I did not know I was a member of such an unsavory bunch. I can just picture us bloggers plotting away how to force the world to read, day after day, the equivalent of the much-mocked World’s Worst Christmas Letters. Year round! Stephanie Pearl-McPhee once cracked me up by saying how she’d had to avoid the word “blog” with someone and told them, “I have a website. I update it daily.” Oh, well, then!

But it means, either my sister has since changed her mind, or, I can get away with anything. Heh. So, since I’m breaking the rules and giving to two sisters this year, I can give to her too and round things out. (My sister-in-law already picked out a circular shawl in person a few months ago; I feel like I’ve got her covered.)  Can’t leave just one person out!  I posted Anne’s yesterday because it’s not officially for Christmas, right? So it doesn’t have to be a surprise, right?

Years ago, when I did a lot of spinning but was very new at trying lace, I offered that older sister some handspun yarn of her choice made into–something, anyway. She looked at the skeins I was offering and picked the angora. I knitted it up into a lace vest which, um, is still sitting in a drawer because frogging handspun angora when it didn’t turn out just right was just not doable.   It melts into its felted self just from the heat of your hands, it seems like.  I gave up, knitted her a perfectly nice kid mohair afghan for Christmas, and wanted to go hide under a rock on the subject of that angora. She never said anything but a very gracious thank you for the blanket.

So. I’ve felt ever since like I owe her angora–and I do. I had a large bag full of 70% angora roving, but after that failed vest it sat carefully closed up in its bag; it made me sneeze like crazy to work with it. I finally gave it away to Robert, for those who remember the weaver of my much-loved Medicine Blanket that I use as the near-black background on a lot of the photos here. I knew he would spin it and use it to make more warm blankets and that he would give generously with it. Um, I do mean blankets, plural. I had had about eight pounds of the stuff. Somebody had been closing it out for less than the price of most wools.

I stumbled across a cone of pure angora on Ebay. Oh, okay; that wouldn’t have flying feathery bits flinging from the wheel to inhale. I got it.  I knitted it up into my Marnie’s Scarf pattern. It’s not handspun, but it is her color, and it is angora. It’s not a circular shawl, but I only had so much, and, can you imagine how warm one of those would be in that fiber? A thick warm scarf, on the other hand, she can use every day when it’s cold out.

And Carolyn if you read this before the package arrives I am just going to laugh. You had it coming. Besides, little sisters are for teasing, always will be.

I had it all planned out. I found just the right yarn at TKGA–she wanted dead white, but how often do you find that in a natural animal fiber? And then I found close enough to it in the Blue Sky Alpacas Alpaca Silk yarn, with the radiance of the silk increasing the perception of whiteness. Perfect. I knitted it up, and now it just needs a good blocking.

I’m from a family of six kids, and we long ago decided that sanity mandated that we only give to one family amongst the siblings each year at Christmas on a rotating basis. I was giving to Anne this year, and I was fairly proud of myself for getting that knitting task out of the way all in good time. She would love it. I couldn’t wait.

Talking to my brother on the phone last night, he mentioned whom he was giving to, and I did a doubletake. Wait, that means… He counted on his fingers out loud: “Yeah, that means you’re giving to Marian.”

I *what*?

The sister who’s allergic to all animal fibers? The one whom none of my stash would match? The one whom I have not yet knitted anything for because there was no particular reason I should for the moment and oh my now what do I oh goodness.

“Who’d you give to last year?” he asked me.

Like I ever remember? But wait, I last made Marian that afghan that… Um, yeah, it has been awhile…

And thus begins the insanity you knew was coming. My husband helpfully said I should put Anne’s shawl away for next year. Dude, I pointed out, Anne comes after Marian, Carolyn, and Morgan–I am not putting it away that long! I made this for her, she’s getting it and that’s that!

(The copy of the book is my author’s proofs pages, which I had spiral-bound at a copy shop for $1.13. The picture is lopsided because, well, I am.)

Note that I am hiding the picture at the bottom of this post. You think she’ll miss it down here? You think she’ll obediently close the screen and go, oh, right, better not look at that?

Right. Have you met my little sister?

You know, this is working up fast enough that I ought to finish the silly thing before snapping its picture, but here it is, unblocked: 33 stitches and five minutes to the inch. Being a very open pattern, it stretches out a lot, which means it’s good for getting as much length as you can out of a small amount of an expensive yarn (I would say go for at least 250 yards of a fingering weight with size 5.5 mm needles). This is three repeats across plus one plain stitch added to each edge, the main body of my Water Turtles Shawl pattern from “Wrapped in Comfort,” rows 38 and 40. The yarn is by Blue Moon Fiber Arts, merino/tencel in the Moonstone colorway.

Five minutes an inch. You don’t have to knit the whole shawl, a scarf from the pattern will do. So, how is your holiday knitting deadline coming along?

Some of mine just got moved up two weeks: our son John is going into the Mission Training Center in Provo, Utah, to start his mission for the Mormon Church in December. When his big brother went off, his dad took him; this time it’s my turn. I haven’t seen my folks’ new place in Salt Lake City yet, so it only seemed fair.

And I thought yesterday of how much I’ve gotten used to Californian winters, of just how cold I was going to be, and wished I had something warm. You know, like a scarf, and maybe a hat, too.

Wait a few seconds for it to hit me… DUH! Even with a few holes here and there in the patterns, yeah, um, I think I’ve got a scarf or two around here.  Now to finish this and go knit a solid one for the kid.

Look! My ball of yarn has a belly button!

“Sometimes I wonder if you live on the same planet Earth we do, Mom.”

Update: she chose the Blue Moon Geisha one–it matched the sweater she happened to be wearing. Yes! Her mom was there, wearing a pair of pants that matched the brown one, and absolutely loved it. Perfect!

I had three unfinished scarf projects I threw in my knitting bag yesterday and took to Nina’s. When I went to go knit, I picked up the one in the color I wanted to work on, and found myself looking at it, going, nahhhh…and putting it back down and picking up the brown one instead that had languished for so long, because I just hadn’t known whom it was supposed to be for nor why I should be making the effort to finish it. And I finished it.

It was the perfect color on that lovely African-American grandmother visiting her daughter and grandchildren for the afternoon today.

Moments like today’s are why I keep knitting.

If you’ve read “Wrapped in Comfort,” you already love Nina and Rod, and we do, too. A month or so ago, they took a chance and invited us for Thanksgiving this year, knowing that we always spend it with my husband’s aunt up in the mountains of Los Gatos.

Turns out the aunt was flying to Arizona this time. Thank you, Nina, much appreciated, and a grand time was had by all yesterday (hi, Maryam!)

Michelle decided to make the two pies I’d volunteered to bring. Only, as we went along, why stop at two? She made two batches of rolls, two chocolate silk pies, two pumpkin pies and a pecan pie. Go Michelle!

Nina had specifically told me to bring my knitting, and at one point, thirteen of us sitting at the table after the meal, she and I pulled ours out as we chatted away. I said to her sister-in-law next to me, “You know you knit too much when you see someone’s project and instantly know what brand of yarn it is,” spotting the Noro in Nina’s hands. I finished two scarves, the Blue Moon one and this baby alpaca one that I’d dyed, adding a bit of burgundy to its natural brown; it had been a UFO threatening TOADhood for awhile, and I rescued it on our way out the door, somewhat on impulse, and now it’s done. After three months of having it be seven inches long, it’s kind of hard to believe it actually grew up at last.

Today we go off to a friend’s way up in San Ramon that we see once a year, and I can’t wait to offer the wife her choice of colors. That brown I think will be perfect for her, but I’ll let her decide. Over the bay, and through the woods…

My daughter was seven when I watched–something, I don’t even remember what–go past her face on the playground at the elementary school. What stayed with me was the look on her face: an utterly bewildered, helpless, I don’t get it!

I hauled her to the pediatrician’s and said, Humor me. I know you just tested her vision six months ago.  Do it again.

She sent us to the pediatric opthalmologist, who found the cataract and operated on it, explaining that most pediatricians would never see a case and could easily miss it, but that he saw quite a few.

And every now and then since then, we’ve had an occasional blip related to that eye. They saw a cyst last summer, and asked that she come home from college this week to get it checked again.  I wouldn’t mind having her home for Thanksgiving, would I?  Hey.  Twist my arm.

So today, they checked it.  A cyst?  Maybe not, now.  They do think it’s benign. Ultrasound at Christmas break.  That’s suddenly a lot longer away than it was.

I knitted away in the waiting room on a lace scarf out of the Geisha yarn left over from the shawl I gave Tina Newton of Blue Moon Fiber Arts, picturing it on the person it’s going to and looking forward to their face lighting up when I give it to them; it’s lovely stuff. As I sat and other patients and parents came and went over nearly two hours, two toddlers got antsy, and I had a Peruvian handknitted finger puppet for each of them. Both of them instantly lit up, as did their parents and everyone around them.  They put their fingers in them–a whale and a parrot–and brought them to life, dancing in their hands.

And I think things will turn out okay.

I have as many UFOs as the next knitter, and it can be very useful at times. The Barnswallows scarf that stalled because the needles were too large and my hands were aching? It’s probably been sitting in that bag for four months now; it’s 27″ long, and I can easily finish it up this afternoon. Yay! Because I know exactly who it’s for now, and the shortcut is a help this busy week. It’s often like that; I stumble across my UFOs when I need them for the person they were really meant for all along, and knowing now why I’m making them helps them fly to the finish line. Having a small stash of UFOs can be a very useful timesaver. (Why yes, I do own a lot of needles, funny you should mention it.)

But I like to think I never have TOADs. I figure if it’s that bad, I know it, and I rip the thing out and put it out of its misery. I never rip the needles out and just leave it abandoned like this.

So when I found this, it rather surprised me. Came with its own mascot, too.

Picture by permission and courtesy of Doc at www.docwalkersphotography.com .

Photos from knitting group night at Purlescence last night. Gigi and Jasmin of http://cuteknitter.blogdrive.com/ Jasmin’s T-shirt reads, “I’m blogging this,” so I had to take her up on the challenge.

The one and only infamous No-Blog Rachel, http://no-blog-rachels-blog.blogspot.com/ who actually happens to have a blog now.

Kathy, http://queenofpurpleyarn.blogspot.com/ who finished her pink socks!

Colleen pummelling Chloe with yarn. But was it merino? I mean, as long as it’s soft it’s okay…

Which brings up the thought for my family, for their own protection: come the next earthquake, where would you rather be doing your Christmas shopping? Say, Costco, with the pallets stacked up to here with crates of #10 cans hovering above your head, just waiting for that 7.5? Or a yarn store? Skip the kitchen supplies. We’re talking major safety issues here. Go directly for the cashmere. Or the new Fleece Artist Camel Spin (oooh, aah).

Colleen, Rachel, and Cynthia quietly plotting world dominknition in the back.

I tell you, if the head of Microsoft ever tried to go into yarn to take them on, I’ve got just the title for his efforts: The Purly Gates.

They’re huge. They’re yellow. They live among the redwoods. And they are the unlikely mascot for the university a bit south of here.

A northern-Californian in-joke: at knitting group at Purlescence tonight, as someone was showing off their project, we envisioned the perfect piece of handknit clothing for UC Santa Cruz women to show their spirit for their school.

The banana shrug.

Kristine at lilacknitting.blogspot.com says that she doesn’t want to hear anything more about nesting. (Her first baby is due next month.) Ah, well. Here’s her thousand words’ worth, with photo by permission of Jens Birch http://jensbirch.smugmug.com/ of Sweden. (It’s on page two of the birds gallery.)

I want to thank each one of you who has left a comment on Marguerite’s post; there is great comfort in reading those messages. Thank you to each person who simply Thought Good Thoughts, too; caring matters. The immense message of illness is that we’re all in this life thing together, looking out for each other.

And I want to thank each person who ordered a pattern from Lynda at http://home.comcast.net/~lmmichaluk/Lilly/ and http://luna-knits.blogspot.com/ She had a problem with IE with her computer for awhile there, and Karin’s comment gave her the heads-up she needed; it’s fixed now.

Meantime, Toni has a kiwi-faced clock on her blog to show which time zone she’s in. I got a good chuckle out of it, and told her she’d just triggered my next blog post. Ergo.

It was back in the day before we were on the Do Not Call registry (which expires soon, by the way, just a heads-up that you need to renew your place on it.) Stephanie Pearl-McPhee was doing her first book tour to the Bay Area, and I bought some Blue Sky Alpacas AlpacaSilk at the yarn store she spoke at, Stash, in Berkeley. I found several balls on the shelf, and they assured me they had more in the back, but with the crowd that night there was just no way–would I mind if they found it later and mailed it to me?

Sure, no problem.

I got a very sheepish message later: they didn’t have more after all. They were very sorry, but there was nothing they could do.

I wasn’t about to drive the 45 or so miles through the worst traffic in northern California to return it; I just had to try to find more of that dyelot somewhere else, then. I started poking around on the web and made a few phone calls.

One place was happy to say they had it. Great! They mailed it–and it was a different one. I reported back, they checked, and went, oh no! The dyelot number stated on the outer bag was the one I’d wanted, but the actual balls inside didn’t match it. Okay, scratch that one. I mailed them back.

The next place took my email and phone number and promised to get back to me when they had a moment to go check. Fine. It didn’t occur to me to tell them where I was.

At the time, we were getting many a cold call from random hopeful newbie Wall Street stockbrokers and the like. Occasionally, you would get one that did not stop to think that there was more than one time zone in this country. Sir, what on earth makes you think I would ever be interested in your spiel about investing in your proferred company at 5 am!?

So. It was dark o’clock, and we were out cold. The phone rang–you know, it’s great to be deaf…and my husband, assuming it was a Red Cross dispatcher, woke up and grabbed it, trying not to drop the old heavy princess phone on my head as he fumbled around for it.

Then he thrust the receiver at me, grumbling sleepily, “It’s your boiler-room yarn pushers in New York City. They want you to know they don’t have your dye lot.” Busted!

At that, I finally appealed directly to Blue Sky for any help on where I might be able to find what I wanted. They had some themselves, it turned out. And not only did they send it to me, but they generously gifted me with it for my troubles.

And so I redesigned Wanda’s shawl to match their yarn as my way of thanking them, and the yarn they gave me is there in that particular shawl that is pictured in my book. And here in this post.

Written Saturday, waiting to be able to deliver it.

So much to say on this one, as I wait for it to dry.

The first day I was at Stitches East last month, we got to the end of the first row of booths, something soft-looking caught my eye and I went, “Ooh, I need to touch that.”

Karen and Amy wheeled me instantly over to it. I was just going to stroke it and be satisfied with that and go on; to me, it is a given that you never ever buy the first yarn that catches your attention at a Stitches event. It’s Disneyland for knitters with major sensory overload and you have to kind of scope out the place before you can make any decisions with any kind of sense, even if that means you miss out on a few things that other people snatch up before you can get back to them.

But it was their first time going. Cashmere? It was exquisitely soft, some of the best I had ever felt. I liked it? A good price? They weren’t letting me leave till I got it.

There were three to choose from. The dove gray was emphatically not my color. That shade of vivid orangey red is exactly what makes my balance go bonkers. No way. There were only two skeins left of the white, so I thought I was safe–no luck here, okay, let’s move on.

But no, they were telling me I would find just the right person and I would be disappointed later if I didn’t get it and I had to buy it and that was that. I argued and we went the rounds for several minutes.

Now, that’s unusual enough, coming out of those two, that when my inner feeling was, okay, just go with the flow here, I finally counted up how many balls I would need, took a deep breath, and bought a half a pound in that red. One or two for a scarf didn’t seem to cut it: I needed enough for a shawl. But I wondered why; I kept picturing a particular friend it would look great on, but hey, I had other yarns already in my stash I could knit up for her (part of why I kept trying to put Karen and Amy off). How many ages was that red going to languish in the back of my stash, I wondered, as I signed that credit card slip. It was so much not my color.

Fast forward.

My friend of twenty years, Marguerite, let it be known at church last Sunday that she’d been diagnosed three weeks before with breast cancer.

But. But. She’s too young! She… Her kids…

I wondered whether I should knit an afghan for her teenage children and husband to wrap themselves up in when things got just too hard, or whether I should knit her a shawl, or maybe eventually both. Knowing what I know and what my own family has gone through, I truly felt for them. I had to knit–something!

I walked over to the bag of yarns I’d bought at Stitches and thought at it, If I’m supposed to knit her a shawl, tell me which of you it’s supposed to be out of. Just, please, tell me, and I sent up a prayer to that effect. I opened the bag, poked around–

–and that red cashmere leaped into my hands the instant I saw it. I held it in front of me, going, Of course! Nothing else could possibly do–this was it! This was why! YES! I did a mental count: it had been three weeks since I’d bought that cashmere. And she was exactly the person I was thinking of as I did so. The only person. Even though I know plenty of other people with her coloring, certainly. But she was the one that I’d argued with myself over. It all made perfect sense now. And that red! For someone of Chinese ancestry! It was perfect, and Karen had been right, if I hadn’t bought that I would have been sorely disappointed now.

Marguerite and her husband used to live in Ann Arbor. I started with my Nina’s Ann Arbor shawl pattern, scaling it down in size to fit Marguerite better, and, because I only had so much yardage. As I wrote a few days ago here, I began, but then I frogged that first yoke. It wasn’t right this time. Not with this yarn. I replaced it with fern lace. Ferns are soft and airy looking, but they have the strength of ancient wisdom: there were ferns on this planet in the days of the dinosaurs. They seemed to convey longevity to me. Cheerful survival. And they are lovely to look at.

Marguerite and her mother are master gardeners, and her mother often shares her floral arrangements with the church. Bougainvillea, I thought, as I knit those red arbors. Or brilliant autumn leaves for Marguerite to enjoy, fall after fall. It was my speaking to her of autumns to come, my inner feeling, wrought in cashmere, that she would go into remission–for how long, I do not know, but she will go into remission. I feel that. I strongly do. And I knitted those feelings into life with this shawl.

Karen and Amy were thrilled to find out what an essential part they’d played. They live 3000 miles away and have never met Marguerite, but now how she does is important to them, and their prayers are added in with mine, befriending her from afar, whoever she may be, no more strangers but fellow travellers in this life. They had intervened for her sake without even knowing it, and now they do because they know it.

……

I wrote this last night. I held off posting it; I wanted Marguerite to have her shawl first, and I wanted her permission.

We compared notes today: it was October 9th that she was given her diagnosis. It was October 12th that Karen and Amy talked me into buying that cashmere. Marguerite said, “I hadn’t told anybody yet. Not anybody.” And yet there I was, thinking about her, thinking about how good that color would look on her and letting myself be talked into buying that yarn.

And after I knew, nothing else could possibly do.

My old friend Lynda at http://lilypadknits.com/ has some darling patterns, from felted baby booties and hobo bags to a “Big Top” multicolor hat that makes me think of the day when…

We were in Washington, DC ten years ago, visiting my folks and my husband’s and showing the kids the sights we’d grown up with. Our kids were 9, 11, 13, and 15. It was July, but it was rainy and chilly most of the time we were there. Good. Show those kids what a real storm is supposed to be like, a good Eastern thundershower.

So. We were standing in line to do the tour of the US Mint, and it started to drizzle on us. Where we live in northern California, it rains from October to March or so and then stops till the next October. We hadn’t packed raingear. We simply hadn’t thought of it. Dumb, I know; my husband and I were just plain out of practice.

There was a street vendor right there hawking his wares to the captive crowd: he had the ubiquitous DC tourist t-shirts, and–umbrella hats!

Picture a half a vivid beach ball, connected to a cheap, rickety umbrella apparatus with an elastic band at the bottom. (I’d photograph it for you, but it has come up missing in my searches for it the last few Halloweens.) Open it up, put on that headband, and you are ready to be the talk of the town or audition for a Frank Baum book.

And they were two bucks.

And I wear hearing aids that I can’t let get wet.

“MOM! TELL me you’re NOT going to buy THAT!” Even my husband didn’t want to be seen with me if I had that on my head. Heh. It was mine. It was later that I found the delightful Elizabeth Zimmerman quote that people will put anything on their heads, and hey, why not? Besides, it was useful. Think of it not as spending two bucks, dears: think of it as saving several thousand in necessary electronics. Besides, it’s my job as a parent to mortify my teenagers and teach them not to sweat stuff that doesn’t matter, but to have a sense of humor about it.

My friend Lynda has that Big Top hat pattern, and yesterday I bought it. Her colors were subdued and lovely, but I pictured it in vivid red and blue and yellow, with a circus animal or two added on, maybe a fingerpuppet ready to be taken off and handed to a small child bored in a line somewhere. There was no way I was going past that pattern without buying it. You, too? Go have fun.

(p.s. Lynda’s husband just got laid off. Humor me. Go help her out a bit here, if you would.  Thanks.)