I didn’t get this person today at the lab.  Someone else won.

One friend suggested hot tea for all that ails a person.  I don’t drink tea, but I could take that idea and run with it–I zapped and boiled a cup of water with a tablespoon of sugar.  Squeezed a lemon from the backyard tree.  Poured the syrup (calling it that is a bit of a stretch) into the lemon juice.  Voila: I didn’t cook the vitamin C out of the lemons, the sugar didn’t all sink to the bottom but was completely mixed throughout, and it was nice and warm and good on a chilly day. Tart, definitely tart.

My daughter in Vermont missed being able to go pick lemons out of the backyard any time as she pleased, so somehow she found her own Meyer lemon tree at a nursery.  She keeps it as an indoor plant most of the year.  And it produces.  In Vermont!  Cool.

Meantime, the knitting gets a move on and one of the lab workers came over to see what I was making this time. The patient next to me asked, “Is it a gift?”  Yes.  And it put a smile on her face for whoever it might be for.  I wished on the spot I had one ready for her, too.

Suffering from writer’s blog, and then I was surprised when the doorbell rang just now, rescuing me: Jim,  (written about here, here, here, here, here and here–he’s Nicholas’s dad) holding a sweater out sheepishly.  This was clearly one of his favorites, not to mention it’s pine-green-wearing time of year anyway; it’s the second year he’s brought it to me.  I assured him quickly before he even asked that I’d love to mend it for him and that it would only take me five minutes or so.

But notice I didn’t invite him in for those five minutes, and I’m pretty sure he was on his way to work at the university anyway.

What I didn’t want him to see was, yes, I can do a pretty good job of mending a small hole in his sweater–but often after several passes at it.  Take matching yarn and dissect one ply from the rest to have a thin enough strand.  Thread needle with it (is there any question that I’d have yarn?) and weave up and down, recreating the missing stitch while connecting it to the still-existing ones. Pat self on the back for doing a good job, check it from the right side to be sure, grumble, carefully undo work so as not to make the hole bigger in the process, rethread needle, try again.  Have the single ply shred due to lack of twist from having been freed from its mates–undo, try again.  And so on.

That’s the part I would just as soon skip having an audience for.  So.

The sweater looked in good shape otherwise, and I was surprised when I looked at the inside to find I’d mended not one but five holes the last time he’d brought it by.  I finished mending today’s and held the thing up.  Right side out again, you really couldn’t tell; I was pretty pleased with myself.

And then I saw it.  Oh, *that’s* going to leave a mark!  About half a dozen stitches and rows’ worth of a mothbite, probably a carpet beetle’s at that size.  I tried. I really tried.  Hey, Jim, did you know that you can throw an old sweater in the washer and dryer several times and then cut it up into really useful hotpads? In green, to match your Christmas decorations!

No, I’m not ready to tell him that yet.  Writing this gave me my required five minutes of throwing up my hands at it, and now I’m ready to dive back in. Undo, ditch the baby alpaca–it has too bright a sheen to it for the wool for that big a space, it calls too much attention to itself–go find the cashmere/cotton that I used last time that’s a closer color match, and go try again. I can make this work.

A really nifty idea: this is a row counter bracelet from Debbie at Knitnsewstudio.

You push the small beads through the little circle of beads for each row up to nine and then a large bead to mark the 10th row.  It’s on your wrist so you don’t lose it, the beads don’t fall through the circle like a post-it note falling off the page, and on mine, the beads are wood, a plus for this natural-materials fanatic.  Very cool.

If all problems could be solved so easily.  I took a shawl project with me on Thursday, because, well, being a knitter, what else would I do?  Besides, since it was early in its process, that way I couldn’t possibly run out of yarn to play with.

After dinner, a game of Trivial Pursuit 80’s edition got going, and it was one of those things where, given the size of the group and the number of ongoing conversations, eh on my hearing; I pulled out my needles over to the side and nobody minded.

Lisa Souza’s Timbuktu has a shine to it and just enough variations in the shading to make it a really gorgeous yarn.

I wanted it knit perfectly.  It had to be bookworthy.  I wasn’t sure of matching the upper and lower lace patterns and experimented rather than thinking it through.  In hindsight, a project at the point where it needed a lot of thought was probably not the best one to bring to a crowd.  I’d actually knitted the pattern before, but had lost my notes while packing for the trip East.  Swatching again would have been the right thing to do, but I didn’t.

I went ahead, sure I’d gotten it, found that nope, I’d made a mistake, and debated: do I tink back three whole rows, nearly 1200 stitches worth, or just wholesale frog them and then work them carefully back onto the needle? I looked around at the crawler, the 18-month-old, the 3-year-old and the 4-year-old and the dog and wondered about the ball rolling around forgotten on the floor and one of them running off with it with my stitches running freely.  No thanks.  Tink it is.

Which would have worked, too, had I not let myself get distracted by cries of delight and gotcha over from where the game was going on. During which I managed to drop a few stitches that quickly became (oh goodness) something like 15, down down down.

Yeah I could have worked them back up carefully. But yes I wanted everything looking exactly perfect, and I was being a little obsessive about it.

The three younger children had been put to bed during my tinking.  Hmm. I thought of a comment on my blog awhile back, someone saying she’d never regretted frogging.

I frogged.  That made seven rows’ worth.

The four-year-old started watching as I did, and clearly that looked like it might be a fun thing to come over to help out with; I looked him in the eye from across the table, smiled, and told him, I’ll play with you when I finish this.  Please don’t touch it before that.

Oh, okay! Cool! And he hopped off to something else.  (Phew!)

Then last night, as Michelle worked at her laptop in the chair next to me, throwing out the occasional comment and conversation, I reknitted those stitches.  I have it written down now, no longer on lost notes as to exactly how that lineup should be worked.  There is no question now about how to work that pattern. And it’s on paper.  Solid.  It WAS worth it all.

Meantime, a little showing off:

Amanda aka NHKnittingMama never knew that I kept looking at her Huarache yarn on her Etsy site and debated buying it; and yet, somehow that was the skein she picked out and surprised me with when I met her at Kaleidoscope.  See how well it goes with the Creatively Dyed Yarn’s Seacell I bought at Stitches?  I do like those colors.

On that note, Paula aka MadAngel likewise surprised me at Kaleidoscope with some cashmere/merino. Nice work!  I’m a dunk-the-whole-skein-in-the-pot-at-once kind of dyer, and people who do multicolorwork are way beyond my skills.

Speaking of which.  Melinda of Tess Designer Yarns gifted me with some of the most gorgeous merino she’d dyed. I don’t know the name of the colorway, but was there ever so cheerful a yarn?

And, just in case of homesickness, I now have this Maisonette yarn by Neighborhood Fiber Co. in the colorway “Grant Circle” to remind me of Washington, DC, dyed by a fellow native.  Karida and I instantly hit it off, and as knitters so often do, could have talked for hours.  I’ve been wishing I could knit her yarn into, say, the Lincoln Memorial or some such.

(The colors are more subdued in real life.)

When my grandfather died in ’94, the coat that I wore the winter day of his funeral up in the Rocky Mountains was my Kaffe Fassett one, knitted in one strand of mohair with one of wool on size 5.5mm needles: in other words, it was dense and surprisingly warm, even with snow on the ground.  My feet, on the other hand, froze memorably.

I felt somehow like it wasn’t quite right, though, to wear that there. I just felt it called too much attention to itself at a solemn moment.   So not longer after, for the first time since I’d gotten married, I splurged on a new, more formal, long wool-and-cashmere charcoal-colored coat.  Gorgeous.  When it came, though, the sizing was generous.  Um, like, real generous in the sleeves–I’m short-armed to begin with.

My children are tall.  Returns are a major hassle.  I kept it.

My oldest went off to college, and at the first snow, she called and told us she had her electric blanket set to “Deep fat fry!”

Two years later, her brother was packing for his first semester at BYU too, and she was having far too much fun telling him just how cold he was going to be out there.  Heh.  I heard her, thought about it, and it was clear to me I should have done this two years sooner:

I had bought that long coat for all the wrong reasons. I had bought it to fit in with my husband’s co-workers at their Christmas parties.  Did I think it would be more impressive than my Kaffe Fassett?  I had bought it so as not to be loud come the day that my grandmother should pass away; I did wear it to her funeral two years after Grampa’s, where we were, again, standing in snow at the gravesite.   But my husband and I had run out of 90-something grandparents to have leave us; we were done with that need.

And what nobody could have foreseen was, the thing now drove me nuts: the bottom of it flapped and wrapped around my cane with each left-foot-forward step, now that I was using a cane post-accident.  When your balance depends on your muscular feedback, this is the equivalent of my coat trying to throw me down on the ground in rhythm with my gait. Tell me, do your clothes do wrestling moves on you?

So my daughter upgraded to a longer, nicer coat. She traded it back and forth later with her little sister’s navy peacoat, each as she saw the other needing whichever.

…And I am hanging onto the memory of being warm at Grampa’s funeral, because my Kaffe Fassett is going to have a large job to do at my older daughter’s house in Vermont.  The sleeves on this thing came out too long, and I’ve never gotten around to going back and fixing that.

My children are tall.

The housesitter’s got the keys, the flight’s leaving soon.  Baltimore first, here we come!

I heard recently from someone who didn’t quite see what my shawls were about; she thought that when I said circular, I was just referring to the needles used to knit them.  I realized I hadn’t really shown much of my work lately.  So I thought I’d show off some old pictures and try to show the v-neck styling a little better.

The red is the Peace shawl for my friend Johnna. The lilac is the Bigfoot shawl, done in Jade Sapphire’s 4-ply Cashmere; this yarn is about double the weight of the original,  Frog Tree laceweight, but it was exactly the color I was looking for at the time, and the right color and a super soft cashmere–it was hard to go wrong. Somehow this photo seems to me like a Niagara Falls of stitches.

Then we’ve got the Constance, the picture cropped to fit into the blog.  Done in two strands of fine laceweight together, one a silk, one Misti baby alpaca.

Next up is the Michelle shawl, with about 2/3 of it showing, done in a handdyed silk.

Next we have the Wanda’s Flowers shawl, which, like the Constance, is one of the narrower shawls in “Wrapped in Comfort,” done here in one skein of Lisa Souza‘s handdyed sportweight baby alpaca and easily adaptable to heavier yarns.

Next up is Kathy’s Clover Chain shawl in baby alpaca I dyed to match the clovers she and I used to string together. Note the shadow of the amaryllis in the background.

And then, since I can’t wait for my favorite flowers to start blooming again, I’m borrowing one of last season’s pictures in anticipation. Note how the leaf is waving hi.

So.  Finished two projects delayed by my flu.  Got halfway today through another one in the lineup.  I took breaks from the knittingknittingknitting (4620 stitches’ worth today–I think I need to get out more) to go check my email, and…

…Oh, wow, cool, Elann has some nice-sounding new yarns!  I want some of THAT and THAT, and THAT‘s one of my favorites, and it would be fun to try THAT and THAT out in my dyepot…  Okay, c’mon, calm down.  And then, hey, even better, there’s this and this!

Hang on. I already have some kid/silk yarn and some merino/silk and some baby alpaca/silk in my stash. And some Handmaiden.  There’s never enough Lisa yarn, but I’ll see her next week at Stitches East (2:00 Saturday. Signing books.  Come!)

There’s nothing like finishing a big project to make my brain want to run and go play with twenty-leven new yarns and ideas impatiently and all of them at once.  Right NOW!

One extra-large platter of baby alpaca, served extra rare, coming right up.

I showed this awhile ago in its earlier stages.  There was a lull in the knitting with that flu bug.  But now it’s done, blocked, the ends run in, and ready to go.

I wanted a one-off, something unique but familiar.  So I knitted the Kathy shawl through the yoke and from there in the Nina pattern, and I really like how they played together.

I love the arbors in Nina’s done in red: they remind me of the climbing bougainvillea that so surprised me when we arrived in California in March ’87.  We were coming from New Hampshire, where it had been snowing and snowing and SNOWING and snowing, five and a half feet’s worth in 17 days after a whole winter of the stuff.   The kicker was when my little girl wanted to play on the swingset: I looked out the window from the second story and challenged her wryly, “Try to find it first.” You could just make out the top bar.

Then we arrived here where it was in the middle of springtime, with these gorgeous flowers skipping around fences everywhere in cheerful red and bright fuschia, just an explosion of nature singing “I feel pretty!”

Which, you know, is actually how I’m hoping the recipient will feel when she puts this on.

I was going to take and post pictures of the blocked red baby alpaca shawl today to show off before I mail it.  But. I did warn Mel and Kris that I’d woken up with a cold yesterday, and they decided it was worth the risk and came anyway. I hope nobody catches this from me.  My fever and I aren’t touching the knitting today, although that teal project’s got a deadline breathing down my neck.

Anyone know how long bacteria and viruses can live on a dry surface?

The designers’ version of the swatch, swatch, gauge, gauge mantra is, don’t swatch a new lace pattern mid-shawl; if you want to run off with a new idea on a tangent from what you’ve figured out and written out beforehand, do it across a few stitches somewhere else first.  (insert whiny voice)  P l e a s e ?  Four hundred stitches across just doesn’t quite qualify as a swatch.  Ah well, live and learn.  (The former is more likely.)  There’s nothing terribly wrong with it as it was, I just didn’t happen to like it, and I’m the one I most have to make happy with it or it would never get finished.  Now that it’s back on the needles, it’s ready to hum along happily and is feeling all the better for having been held to a standard of perfection.  Not to mention, better four rows ripped than forty.

The good part is, taking those needles out, I went and found a UFO and checked the size of their circs, just to see; I thought I’d been doing that project on 10s.  Nines! Holz and Steins!  Not my sentimental pair, but hey!  I switched them out, as long as the slick ones were unencumbered for the moment.  Yay!

I got an errand run in the afternoon, noting how few miles I’ve put on my car in the last month; it felt good to get out.  I pulled off to the side of the road and tried to capture the snowy egrets in that center shrubbery, knowing my camera could only do so much, but hey. I share what I can.  I’ll get a better camera someday soon, since this one is held together by scotch tape; something to look forward to.

A bicyclist came down the bike path between me and the brownery there, saw me perching against my car door with my Pentax in my hands, and shot me a big grin on his way past, clearly glad to see someone else appreciating the day out there.

I can’t wait to see how this shawl is going to turn out!

(It wasn’t till I posted this that I realized how much the clump of stitches looks like an inverted version of the egrets’ perch.  Cool!)

This yarn is a lot greener of a teal in real life.  I finally just grabbed the Knitpicks 9’s on hand and used them.  They’re too slippery-slick for my taste: my hands have gripping problems so they tire more quickly holding onto these tightly so I don’t drop anything, and I was avoiding them.  But I finally sat myself down and realized, they’re not perfect. But I have them. And time is a finite gift, and while I have the time to knit this for the person it needs to go to, for goodness sake, knit it, fer cryin’ out loud!

Holz and Steins they may not be, but it was a relief to see this project finally starting to grow. I hope to get this shawl done before the weekend.

Hmm. My usual take on shawl lengths is that the heavier the yarn, the longer it ought to be knitted to come off feeling like the proportions are right.  This is a fingering weight baby alpaca (what else?)  It seems to be about 20″, maybe 21″ long; I’ll know after it’s blocked.  Each repeat is 3 1/2″, and I’m thinking one more repeat.  If I left it as is, it would come out like how the pink Julia shawl looks on the model in “Wrapped in Comfort.”

I’m thinking yes, one more repeat. I would put it onto two circular needles to hold the stitches over a greater length, dampen it down and let it dry to get a more precise measurement before stopping, but I have lost my other pair of size 9 Holz and Steins.  Let me repeat that.  I lost my Holz and Steins.  The rosewood 32″ circs I knit every size-9-needle shawl in my book on.  The not-sold-in-the-US-anymore, best-tipped, best needles on the (not on the) market, made from leftover wood from making musical instruments, irreplaceable Holz and Steins. The last time I definitely remember seeing them, I packed them in my knitting bag along with an extra ball of yarn to go hear Stephanie, just in case I should run out of my Sea Silk project.  (Fat chance, especially with my then-sore hand, but knitters understand.  That extra ball of yarn happened to weigh a pound.  Of baby alpaca.  Of course.)

I am writing about my acute sense of loss in the hopes that Murphy will smack me upside the head and instantly taunt me by finding them.

Meantime, I thank you all for the respectful discourse on my Why Vote post.  I photo’d our holly bush and captioned it “prickly subject,” and I’m pleased and relieved at the reception the post has gotten, even from those who quite disagree with me.  I think I’m going to keep it to that one entry and just let the comments continue, should anyone feel so inclined.

Making progress… Sorry about the fuzzies; I knit better than I photograph, this was my fourth try.

Did anybody else see this? We were watching the debate last night via MSNBC, and McCain and Obama were shaking hands with the crowd afterwards, the thing still being aired.  Just before the cameras cut out–and I’m guessing McCain must have thought they already had–the two men happened to find themselves next to each other again, and Obama reached out with a warm smile to shake McCain’s hand again, not as part of the debate performance but as two colleagues.

And McCain stood there stone-faced, absolutely refusing to.  Cindy McCain finally shook Obama’s to cover for her husband’s gaffe.

(Edited to add: with the help of Momo Fali, this is the scene from a completely different camera and angle to what MSNBC showed.  In this one, you can see McCain patting Obama on the back, but when Obama turns in response and reaches his hand out, McCain steps back away from him and waves him towards Cindy McCain.  I would say that that was still rude, but it definitely is far better than standing there arms stock still like it had seemed. Thank you for the link and the clarification!)

I am knitting again: one row across, rest.  The hand’s doing reasonably well.  What is coming off my needles as I go is so compelling to me that it’s hard to make myself take those breaks.

One of the things I did in Wrapped in Comfort was to give the stitch count for each lace pattern within each shawl, so you could swap out other ones if you want to just use the pattern as a template, or so you could do so many repeats across and make a scarf for a faster project to test-drive that lace pattern.  What I’m doing right now, just because I was curious how it would play out, is, I did the Kathy’s Clover shawl through the yoke. That’s a 10+1.  Did the increase row.  Then I flipped the page to Nina’s Ann Arbor; that’s a 20+1, and 381 for the Kathy divides into 20+1 with no group of ten left dragging.  It worked.  This also gets me a slightly smaller-around finished product than if I’d just done the Nina’s, 381 stitches vs 421.

My record is two of these shawls in a week.  One is a more leisurely pace. We’ll see how well I keep it up, but fingering weight yarn and size 9s, it really won’t take long.

(Edited to add: Knitpicks has books on sale, and you can get it there for cheaper than the used copies on Amazon.  Just sayin’.)

Thank you so much to everybody for all your support and kind words.  They will be monitoring Michelle’s counts carefully; she’s doing fine.  And Richard feels good about how he did on that test.

We went!  Gigi and Jasmin aka The Knitmore Girls and No-Blog-Rachel and I carpooled up to Santa Rosa to see Stephanie. We left early and came home late and had a blast.

Stephanie gave her talk; the bookstore sat me where I could lipread, which was wonderful, but I’m afraid I still missed far too much.  But what I did hear was thoughtful, inspiring, insightful, and very, very funny.  I love that one of our own got Barack Obama to hold her sock on her needles.

Stephanie announced it was time now to sign books–and then instead, came around the table and first threw her arms around me.  Then she turned back around the table again to her seat and started, pre-boarders first.  We hung back and visited.  When it was my turn, she asked me to grab my book for her picture to be taken with, and I went for hers while my friends went, No, she means yours, silly!  I’m not convinced, but either way, look what picture I got!  I had to crop it way down to get WordPress to take it.  Hmm.  Given a choice between slicing her off at the forehead or slicing my book, um, yeah, I don’t think that would be the help with her hair she was talking about.

Laura came!  She told me she always keeps spare needles and yarn at the hospital where she works, just because, well, you never know, right?  (I see every knitter reading this nodding yes.)  She’d recently had a patient who’d been brought in under emergency circumstances, no chance to pack, whom she was talking to–and…

…Hang on a second.  Stephanie, in her talk, mentioned the satisfaction of knitting a particularly nice pair of socks while at the same time knowing that most of it was going to spend its life unseen inside some shoes.  I’ve got an answer to that: Laura’s patient saw a flash of color as Laura was leaving the room, and called out after her, hoping Laura would hear. She did.

Only another knitter would have instantly realized that those were handknit socks.  Only another knitter would have realized that that means either Laura was a knitter, or Laura was dear enough to a knitter for that level of effort and that if so, that knitter also knew Laura would appreciate them.  (Laura had made them.)  Only another knitter, or perhaps someone deemed worthy to be knitted for, would get how dire the patient’s need was.  Yarn!  Oh, please, anything, do you have any?  Laura ran down the hall and got her size 7s and some Encore and gave her patient a promise of more in that dyelot as needed.

Now that’s my kind of medical insurance.

(Hey, Jasmin–I wasn’t really kinnearing you. I was just being a klutz as I turned off the camera, and guffawed when I saw the result.)