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.)

When life gives you neps, make slippers.

I once bought a Rambouillet fleece from a New Mexican rancher who bred her animals for the fineness of their fleeces, trying to create the softest of the softest; she sold them by micron count. Oooh. Nice.

But I made the mistake of shipping it off to a mill that did not, at the time, have the equipment to deal with so fine a fiber, which I did not know, and they cleaned it and combed it into roving that was full of neps. My fleece! Working at my wheel with it was like spinning rubber bands with chicken pox. It wanted to sproing back into its pre-stretched state, with those little nubbly bits peppered here and there.

My daughter had a high school biology teacher at the time who so inspired her that she wanted to go into the field, and is now working on a microbiology PhD herself. At the end of that school year, I took that fleece, spun a bit of it up the best I could, gave up hope of knitting socks out of it (see, I did knit socks, once upon a time) and instead gave in to the thickness it wanted to be spun up at and knitted that teacher a pair of cozy slippers.

I told her, as she opened the package, that I wanted to thank her for inspiring my daughter to want to walk in her shoes.

Sockweight or not, you certainly couldn’t ask for anything softer, and I wanted them to be handspun: biologists live with a love of the workings of the life of this planet, and I wanted something as close as possible to the animal that got the haircut. I actually had a picture of that individual sheep, too, courtesy of the rancher, with the lovingly poetic name of #1235, or some such number. (Ah, well.)

The teacher was thrilled, which thrilled me. I did not know that day that she was going back to Stanford after that school year at the high school ended, so I’m glad I didn’t put it off till my next kid got to that grade level.

Meantime, someone on the Knitlist casually mentioned awhile back that wool roving is great for stuffing around your feet inside your shoes when you’re doing long hikes; it keeps blisters from forming. Hey! The local Boy Scouts were about to do their annual 50-mile hike! So some of the fleece went to that good cause.

Still. That sheep produced a fair-size ball of wool. I have this really soft, really long white rubber band, and occasionally it asks me what I’m going to do with it. For now, I’m ignoring it–again–and going back to that red shawl.

It didn’t matter how much I wanted that to be right. It wasn’t. And if I’m going to spring for pure cashmere, and if I’m going to knit it for that friend, I am going to do it right. End of subject.

That and the fact that I was having a hard time making myself go back to it and keep knitting it–that was message enough to myself that I would never be satisfied with it the way it was. Stop. Out!

So Monday’s work got thrown out and it felt awful but awfully wonderful and freeing to be done with the dilemma and doing it right. A knit/purl combination at the yoke in pure cashmere just didn’t do it for me: I wanted her husband to be able to stroke her shoulders without the speed bumps of the purls. The lacy stockinette side of the reknitted yoke just plain feels better for running your hands across. It matches the yarn better.

The full story later–I have to finish this first.

I rinsed this in tepid water and laid it out flat, and I could have left it at that, but I wanted crisper points at the edges to match the name of the colorway. I don’t have any rustproof pins, but I pulled out my blocking wires and used one per three points. This being my second shawl out of Blue Moon’s Geisha yarn, I’d learned that it has a mind and sproing of its own, and I carefully smoothed down the stitches at the increase row between the yoke and the main body, knowing they had the energy of toddlers bouncing around after snacktime. Shhh, children, lay down now, time to relax. And so they did.

To answer Tammy’s question, yes, I knitted this in eight days, mostly during the evenings. Actually, I was thinking it should have been finished in four or five days, max, so your comment made me laugh and put the timing in perspective–thank you for that. I used size nine (5.5 mm) needles, and it worked up very quickly.

One of my goals in using the fingering weight yarns that I mostly used in my “Wrapped in Comfort” book was to make laceknitting accessible to people who don’t have a lot of time, but who still want to make something unusual and beautiful. This Geisha is somewhat in between laceweight and fingering weight.

Blue Moon Fiber Arts’ handdyed Geisha kid mohair/silk/ nylon yarn, Backstabber colorway. Ready for blocking.  Kinda looks like a psychedelic octopus sketch from the ’60s.

One of the amazing things about going off on a trip is how everything seems different when you get home. Wasn’t the counter an inch higher than that in that bathroom? Was the kitchen really quite that size? You see old things with new eyes. Hence, major housecleaning has ensued, stuff I hadn’t had the energy nor the breath to tackle for so long and now I both do and want to. And so:

I found a UFO so old I struggled to find any memory of knitting it. Now, I have wanted, ever since I was ten years old and watching my mother knitting my older sister and then my dad a complicated Aran pattern, to knit me one of them thar things. I knit Lynda one, a friend who later died of postpolio syndrome, who’d never had a sweater that fit her odd-sized body in her life; that, at least, I could do for her, and did. I made one for my husband, as close as I could remember to what my mom had made. Same yarn. Basically the same pattern. He was twenty-four inches taller than Lynda, and I always wanted to get a picture of the two of them side-by-side in their matching sweaters, saying, And this is why we do gauge swatches!

And apparently I started to make a matching one for me. I didn’t remember it. I didn’t know why I’d stopped. Probably for Lynda’s sake–she probably asked for a warm sweater when I had already started mine, and after I finished hers I probably didn’t want to look at that yarn again for awhile.  By that point I’d knitted a lot of it. And then I so much didn’t remember mine that I actually eventually gave most of the yarn away to my mom, not realizing what that meant, who later gave it away to a neighbor when she and Dad downsized and sold the house.

But look what I found. The back, and another bag of yarn. Seven balls, 63 yards each. Huh. Enough there to finish it into a vest, definitely, and at least one sleeve, although it’s definitely an outdoor-weight sweater. Not two, though, even if I have short arms. It’s not exactly how I’d design it if I were starting from the beginning now, but it is what it is and I quite like it.

I’ll get right to it, as soon as I finish my present project, my sister’s Christmas present, the one for… Oh. Right. And that must be why it never got finished.

I’m doing this pattern again, sized up 10%. I gifted the original to Tina of Blue Moon Fiber Arts when I found out she and I grew up at the same time about two miles from each other. She happily surprised me back with a whole box of yarn, including another hank of the Geisha in the Backstabber colorway that I think is so gorgeous. I quite regretted that I couldn’t give her the pattern, too, but I’d designed it with the next book in mind.

Which meant I did still have that shawl knitted up, but not in her yarn. The other day when I blogged that all those yarns were calling out, knit ME, when it came down to it, what I really wanted to do was to knit up that Geisha for Tina’s sake.

And so, Sunday, I cast on. What I hadn’t expected was how intensely satisfying it is to work on. Normally, that feeling comes with looking forward to making someone happy by gifting them with what’s about to come off my needles, whereas this one, once it’s done, won’t be going anywhere.  But it’s a promise kept. A hope of the book to come, but plans can change; the feeling of thanking her back by knitting this and a new friendship treasured is what I’m really enjoying about this.

I emailed her; the new one would be bigger than the one she had sent for display in the booth at Stitches East, was that all right? She laughed, and wrote back, “It’s your design!” Well, yes, true, but hey.

There was another yarn in that box that, a little before the trip, told me what it wanted to be when it grew up. And so, while in Maryland, we pulled off the road in a couple of places and I snapped pictures of the rock quarries: Carderock, River Road. The Giancola one is gone, along with the stone house that had been perched above it, just a scooped-out blank spot in the earth. But the other two, on opposite sides of the street, continue on.  I need to knit me a quarry–those were at the midpoint between Tina’s house and mine, growing up.  A piece of home.

Steady as a rock. They carve out those stones and use them to strengthen and decorate the homes and places surrounding them.  If you go back and look at my American Gothic post, they’re most likely where my in-laws’ fireplace came from.

And I scoop out my yarn with my needle tip and knit on.

(I knew my folks would want to see this. They’re turning the old living room windows into a walk-out onto the soon-to-be wooden deck upstairs.)

I knitted a scarf for the woman who bought my folks’ old house, one that had the name of the street incorporated into the lace pattern. Now, I’ve used this particular baby alpaca yarn and that pair of needles together dozens of times, but somehow those two stitch patterns came out looser-looking than many. No, I didn’t swatch. I know. I was pretty sure of myself, and yes, when I knit it again, I will tighten up the gauge a bit.

But the perfectionism of the knitter isn’t what matters; what does is that I designed it just for her, I finished it just in time before we left Maryland, and I got it over to her new house, where her contractor in great delight promised to get it to her, along with the copy of “Wrapped in Comfort” I handed him with an inscription thanking her for loving the old house and the woods behind it. I told him that in the spring, before the neighbors’ ivy had overwhelmed the ground cover (which, thankfully, he’d pulled completely out), there had been a field of mayapples under the trees to the right in the spring, with box turtles living among them. Box turtles love mayapples. I told him that one time we kids had brought a snapping turtle inside by mistake, and Mom had told us to take it right back outside, now! My brother Bryan, part of the conversation, said in surprise, “I didn’t know we had snapping turtles back there!” Box turtles, sure. I only remember the one snapper ever.

Read the book, I was thinking at the contractor as well as the new owner. See some of why those turtles mean so much to me.

Amanda’s green yarn is going to be the next rendition of that pattern. Right now it and the newly gifted Superior and my sister’s Christmas present and that lovely rose laceweight from Stitches East and and and are all vying for attention like toddlers jumping up and down, going, Me, Mommy, no me! Knit ME next.

All right kids. One at a time. Don’t everyone try to speak to me at once.

I was not expecting this package. There was no packing slip, no name, nothing, just a Patternworks label on it. Inside was one ball of a yarn I had picked up at Stitches East, wished after, and put back. In retrospect, with all the yarns I did buy there later, I would go back now and put a few back and buy several of these instead, but at the time I did not think of it and so it didn’t happen.

Filatura di Crosa “Superior,” a brushed 70/30 cashmere/silk laceweight, is what Kidsilk Haze aspires to be. This is glorious stuff, soft as some qiviuts I’ve touched, absolutely beautiful. Wow.

And I didn’t buy any. But apparently someone noticed how much I’d loved it and bought a ball for me and surprised me. I am surprised, totally. I called Patternworks, just to make sure there wasn’t some mistake–oh heck let’s be honest, curiosity was absolutely killing me.

The woman who answered the phone had no clue either. But she was delighted for me and delighted that someone out there somewhere would do that for somebody else; it completely made her day, too. I wished her a good weekend as we hung up.

Whoever you are, thank you for this mitzvah. I hope to live up to it by knitting and gifting well with it.

This little scale is exceedingly useful: when it’s getting tight re how much yarn I have left for a project, and I’m debating whether I can squeeze one more pattern repeat out of it, I can weigh the remaining ball as it shrinks along the way and know how much I’ll need. In the case of this Julia shawl, I think I’d better quit: I generally allocate twice as much yarn for the cast off row as a regular one on a circular shawl, and though it’s close, better safe than frogging.

As I weighed this, looking at the gap between the back of the piano and the wall and the size of this ball, I suddenly remembered reading in a newspaper-style newsletter that Interweave (I think it was) briefly published, a story about a knitter in DC who dropped her ball of llama yarn as she stepped off the Metro subway, realizing to her dismay that it had gone down between the train and the platform. I’m guessing she was about as close as I am here to being done with it anyway. So she sat down on the nearby bench and simply knitted till the last bit of yarn came bouncing back up at her. As she knitted, it gradually dawned on her that some of the people around her weren’t getting on the trains she thought they must be waiting for–and then, when that last bit of yarn twitched back up off the tracks, to her surprise, spontaneous applause burst out around her.

Wouldn’t it be cool to get that when you cast that last stitch off.

I had been knitting in the airport and then the plane for nearly ten hours straight, with a few breaks for Southwest Airline snacks and drinks; I had all these new yarns to play with, and I wanted this older one finished with. The only way to make that happen was to sit down and do it, so I was resisting the call of the Brooks Hansen novel and just kept on endlessly going.

But somewhere over Nevada or so I needed to stop and my hands needed icing. I knitted a few more 385-stitch rows while considering that, and then it dawned on me: I asked for some ice water. I drank the water and then spent the last half hour of the flight holding that small airline cup against my hands and wrists. Note that the bottom of those are thinner and less insulated than the sides and therefore more helpful, should you ever need to know that.

I turned off the overhead light as I was icing, taking in the California lights that were just beginning to glow beneath us and that grew more frequent and intense as we approached the Bay Area. Brilliant white and orange jewels inlaid along the obsidian of the night Bay, and I was guessing–Stockton? Walnut Creek, over there? I was wishing I could place where we were.

I had that feeling suddenly of being watched, and glanced up to see the fellow to my left as we sat in the bulkhead seats, who’d been looking intensely out his own window across the aisle. He glanced quickly away; I think he’d just been trying to see the lights on my side, too, to compare.

I glanced back a few minutes later, and it struck me how much change there is in travelling: you leave one place and one set of faces and experiences completely behind you physically, and substitute another set for it in your life. I wondered if he was coming home or leaving it, and his fingers began to rapidly drum the bottom of his windowframe: playing music? Writing email, subconsciously? Was he reaching out to those behind, or those coming, in his thoughts? It felt so utterly human and alive as he sat there hunched down, seeing out that small bit of glass so intensely as if he could will his destination to hurry up. The small child in me inwardly whined the classic, “Are we almost there?” and I laughed at myself for it.

A moment later, I saw him stroking one long set of fingers with the other, then again, switching sides, as if some part of his mind had realized that it had put his thoughts out on too-open display, if anyone could but read the workings of his hands, and that he needed to erase the typings to regain his privacy. I’m sure he had no idea he was even stroking them.  His mind seemed far from the inside of that plane.
Street lights, and as we descended some more, those of individual homes. Clearer and clearer rushing at us, each place with its own stories.

And I silently wished him well as he returned to his own, wherever that might be.

All these photos I can’t post yet!  But I missed getting one of the gust of wind capturing a goodly number of perfect yellow leaves and sprinkling fall confetti shimmering over the canal, a little ahead of my brother and me as we walked along the towpath at Swain’s Lock.  Gorgeous.

Bryan drove down from New Jersey yesterday to see us, and we had a delightful time visiting.  He and I spent several hours again today driving around, reminiscing, pointing things out to each other and generally behaving like a couple of homesick types glad to be back for a short while.

One of the things we were remarking to each other about is how growing up in Washington is probably different from other places: you learn early on to wear a celebrity-filter-o-meter.  We were chuckling over stories and memories of people we knew whose parents were names you’d often read in the paper: presidential candidates, ambassadors, you name it, but to us they were just Tom and Fabriccio (did I spell that right?) and the like.

We drove past the old homestead, and the contractor nicely allowed him the grand tour, too, like I got to do a week ago.  I gave the man an inscribed copy of the book and a scarf designed specifically to celebrate the rebirth of the house and how happy Mom and Dad were to sell the place to the woman that bought it; he promised to pass them along to her for me.  We drove past a couple more times in the afternoon on the slim chance the new family might stop by to check on the contractor’s progress–it would have been so cool to get to say thank you in person–and I waved hi as we passed by that last time, hoping we weren’t getting annoying by then.  (I’m sure we were!)
And that’s probably that.  Tomorrow we fly back west.

Stitches East! I had way too much fun.

Friday, Kate and her mom Deb found me. They’d decided to jointly knit me some lace socks, and settled on toe-up so that different gauges would be okay; Deb got them started, Kate carried on.

When I was a kid, I only liked the biggest box of crayons, because it had the One True Color of deep rosey red, nice and bright. It’s still my favorite, and it’s a blueish enough shade of red that it doesn’t make me fall down.  Guess what Kate and Deb just happened to pick out, out of all the colors in the world? And they fit exactly perfectly. I asked them if it would be okay if I waited till the next day to wear them, when they would match with the pink shawl I was going to wear. Sure. Meantime, I was wearing Kristine’s beaded socks, the ones you see on her lilacknitting blog page. I had at least six or seven people stop me wanting to know about those socks Friday. Not my shawl or my book but those socks, which delighted me. As I told Kristine, and want to say to Deb and Kate too and the others who have knitted me socks, some people wear their hearts on their sleeves. I do on my feet. They announce to the whole world that I am loved.
Karen of the Water Turtles shawl was wearing the one in the book and pushing me in a chair, and people were coming dashing up to us wanting to know where we’d gotten the patterns. Hey, I can help you with that one!

I’d been wanting one of Sheila Ernst’s new shawl pins, and when I tried to pay for it she waved me away. But–but! Sheila! She looked me in the eye and said, Knitters aren’t the only ones who get to give gifts.

Kate and Deb and Karen and I were towards the back of a large booth talking for ages and ages, with the LYSO occasionally popping into the conversation. We kept offering to move on, and she kept saying, no, I’m enjoying this! She read a story or two out of my book from my copy I was carrying around. We just couldn’t stop laughing as we all swapped stories.

Afton found Karen and me. Afton could get a job as a stand-up comedian–we laughed so hard and so often that, put it all together and Karen said on the way home that she hadn’t smiled so much in years. Afton made me the tam I had always aspired to make and never had. I love blues and greens, and it was blues and greens. I wore it till I got just too hot Friday, and Saturday till she told me it clashed with the pink and demanded I take it off. Aw, shucks, Afton, but I like it! She put her hands on her hips and mock-demanded like a mom who has raised twin teenagers (fancy that) that I do as I was told.

Saturday, Kathleen picked me up. She had no idea what was coming. Turns out she’d skimmed my posts about the Cunningham Falls shawl, noticed that it was for a Kathleen, and was jealous of whatever other Kathleen I knew it that it was for. Heh. She loved it. Karen marched her into Sheila’s booth, found a shawl pin that looked like it had been made expressly for that shawl, and Kathleen bought it in great delight. Very cool.

Rod and Lisa Souza are good friends of many years, and it was a treat to sit in their booth and sign books for them. You know, awhile back, I found a yarn on the web that was–well, it was the color of Kate and Deb’s socks–and I emailed Lisa the link and asked if she could dye me yarn that color. She did, and I found it. Cerise in the Sock! yarn, which takes the color particularly crisply. It went home with me.

Melinda at Tess Designer Yarns and I swapped a copy of my book for yarn, and I was so interested in her colors that I forgot to sign the silly thing. Duh… But it was one of those times where we both came away feeling like we’d definitely won.

I found the Blue Moon Fiber Arts booth towards the end of my second day there. (Finally!) I was not expecting what I got: the moment I showed up, the woman there that I’d talked to at Stitches West in February exclaimed, “We’ve been being yelled at all day because we don’t have that pattern!” motioning at the shawl hanging nearby. That Backstabber shawl on my blog awhile back? Tina had hoped to buy it from me. I’d turned her down. But as we were talking on the phone, come to find out she’d grown up two and a half miles from me. Private vs public schools, our paths hadn’t crossed then (I don’t think.) Anyway. And then I surprised her with it. And there it was in the booth. I told Kaci that it was fairly similar to my Bigfoot shawl in my book, if that helped any. (Well, that was as close anyway as she was going to get to having instructions for right now; if I do a second pattern book, it’ll be in there.)

Weatherly Mize also gave me a shawl pin, a treble clef that had lost the curl in its hair in the California dry weather, is the thought that tickles me when I see it. I wore Sheila’s and Weatherly’s together.

We had people coming up to us asking about our shawls. The entourage grew, till it was Karen, me, Kathleen, and Colorjoy Lynn in my shawls along with Afton and Robin, sadly shawlless. They got shawls from me before I figured out this circular thing… Lynn gave me a handmade kazoo that my father in law really wants one of too. Make some more for your shop, Lynn, because my Christmas list just got easier. She also dyed me some store socks and I have the yarn to make a shawl to match. And gave me a CD of her husband and her playing folksy bluegrass stuff that I can’t wait to get home to put on the stereo.

One of the hazards of going to Stitches in a wheelchair and having your friends egging you on every time you admire a yarn and having them stuff it behind you out of your sight as you buy it is that when we got home and they put it all together, I was gobsmacked at how much yarn I had mysteriously accumulated. That’s a whole rollaboard’s worth! But oh, am I going to have fun.

The lady at Maple Creek Farm watched Karen and me: I had Karen hold two skeins I couldn’t decide between at a good distance from me, so that the colors would pop out and I could see them better, distanced from all the ones they’d been nestled among.  We did that earlier at a booth selling Fleece Artist; from 20 feet away it was a no-brainer: the blue and green (go Afton!)  At Maple Creek, I still liked the rose and the purple both.  I finally bought the red–and she GAVE me the purple!

Karen and Kathleen and Lynn and I went out to dinner and talked till I dropped. I didn’t even read email, I just fell into bed when we got home.

While I’m trying to catch up, (and I’m sorry I can’t do photos on this laptop) I should also add about Thursday. Bev and I spent Thursday touring old spots. She hadn’t seen our high school since it had been torn down and rebuilt. We went past her old house. We went past my folks’ old house, and totally delighted the contractor by loving the remodelling he was doing on the place. You never know what reaction you’ll get, I’m sure, from a previous owner, but it was well thought out and beautifully done; I told him I wish my folks had done this years ago, it was beautiful. And where the neighbors on both sides had planted ivy that had met in the middle and was decimating the native flora, he had pulled it all out. Every bit.  Off the forest floor, off the tree trunks.  Bev admired the view out the living room window out over the woods, and I mentioned the box turtles that had been in the woods and the family of foxes that had lived under the deck. Bev took it all in, and said, “It’s coming back!”

The man was just floating on air at that. Yes. He was taking good care of it all, and we were seeing not the machine marks on the ground that he’d had to bring in for that ivy, but we saw what he’d done and why. Because we loved those woods. All of us.  It was a joyful moment.

I had plans of what I was going to knit on the plane. But sitting in the airport, I bagged it, grabbed Laura’s handdyeing project, balled the first ball and cast on. I read through the first hop but knitted through the second, getting past the yoke and into the body of the next shawl: the Julia, good, mindless airplane knitting.

While we were waiting our turn to disembark at last, the boy who’d been sitting behind us mentioned to me that he used to “do that,” pointing at my knitting, and saying how much he liked those colors.

“Oh cool! I learned when I was ten.” And then to show him with a grin to watch out where that might lead him, I held up my book, opening it up and telling him I’d had a bunch of my friends sign my copy for me. He thought that was just totally cool!

And you know what? He’s right. I can’t wait. I have two pens. Baltimore! I’ll sign yours, you sign mine, if you’d like.

Meantime, good thing for the kid still at home; he’s FedExing my inhaler… No wonder the airline didn’t give me grief over it. But I didn’t forget my yarn or needles, the important stuff. (Yeah, yeah, I know. Oops.)

More when I figure out how to load pictures from here.

I finished it in time! This is the Bigfoot pattern, but with the variant that I continued the Rabbit Tracks pattern all the way down the body of the shawl, not just in the yoke. Since I was knitting it in black, it was way easier to tell where I was if the second pattern row was five stitches across a repeat rather than eleven.

My friend Karin (watch the e’s and i’s in this post to keep people straight) had a half-pound hank of black baby alpaca yarn she’d bought from the farmer who’d raised the animal, and she felt it needed to go to me.

I thanked her, told her I felt there were a lot of people who needed yarn more than I did, and that my eyes just didn’t like to knit black–but a few days later she came back to me with the idea, saying she just still felt it was meant to go to me.

And so it arrived in the mail awhile ago, lovely, very soft stuff, so much of it, and I was just in awe that she would offer it up like that. It was definitely black. Looking at it, I just had the feeling that I would be glad I had it in spite of my reservations, and that Karin was right, I would find just the right person for it–and it would tell me when.

In anticipation of my trip, I asked my friend Karen of the Water Turtles shawl fame what color shawl to knit for her daughter.

Black, Karen answered. Definitely black.

Now, I would never have had any black yarn in my stash had it not been for Karin’s gift. It turns out that Karen breaks out in hives if she touches wool, a true allergy, not just that the stuff is itchy, and she mentioned that her daughter was allergic too. But they have no problems with baby alpaca.

Heh. Guess what I had on hand to play with.

Karin was right. This yarn did find where it was meant to go to, and with her help it’s about to arrive there.

(Okay, back to packing.  And yes, I know I’m blowing the surprise here, but a few days of anticipatory happiness on the recipient’s part makes that worth it, I decided.)