When there’s a huge push to get a project done fast, and you do it and you succeed, somehow for a little while after that, other projects feel almost like a letdown for a day or two.  I picked up Johnna’s shawl–c’mon, let’s get going again–and saw I had 1000 stitches to have to rip out, that there was a botch back there and just too big a botch to fudge it gracefully.  You know, I honestly don’t usually have this sort of problem!  Eh.  But that’s the good side of knitting: you can always re-create it to the way that you demand that it live up to.

Meantime, the Fleece Artist Sea Wool  is singing a sheepy mermaid song to entice me to jump in.   I find the kelp content is good for the merino as well as their Sea silk: I wish you could see it in person, ooh, doesn’t this feel wonderful.  My apologies to the sock knitters out there, and I do love handknitted socks, but there’s no way I’m turning this into footwear when it could be beautifully draped across a friend’s back.

Okay, that did it, I think I’ve got my knitting momentum back.

So. Sunday night we got an email from Dave, familiar to those who’ve read my book as Dave-and-Wanda Dave. He was going to be in northern California on business and wondered if he could stop by Thursday night for a visit on his way back to the airport? Well YEAH! I asked him if he would mind going and asking Wanda her favorite color?

Note that the original shawl I knitted for her was in a color that was a total guess on my part. Blue is a pretty safe bet for most people, but there are all kinds of blues. White would have been good, too, but at that particular point in my life I couldn’t bear to knit any more white stitches for awhile.

Purple, he emailed back a few minutes later.

I did not have enough purple yarn in the right weight. And every single store in the Bay Area that sells Blue Sky Alpacas AlpacaSilk (which is an exquisite yarn) was going to be closed Monday. Every one. My stash and I were on our own.

I had some lightweight baby alpaca and what was once a full pound of Jaggerspun Zephyr silk/merino (thanks to my friend Karin, who used to own The Periwinkle Sheep.) Together, those would give me close to the same weight, and I could dye it when I was done. I did have purple dye in the stash. And so, as I blogged, the race was on.

I showed a picture of some of those rows I frogged. What I didn’t say was that after that I made another brainless mistake and had to frog it again. So I started 11 pm Sunday night, but in effect I might as well have started Monday.

I alternated knitting with icing my hands and was able to keep on going, hour after hour, Monday all day, Tuesday all day, then Wednesday I was the speaker at a lupus support group meeting and didn’t get to my needles till mid-afternoon. At about 7:30 pm the shawl came out of the dyepot.

I figure, Wanda knew what I was up to the moment she was telling Dave purple. And that’s fine. I love the way the silk in the Zephyr took up the dye a little more slowly, and so came out a little lighter than the baby alpaca and the merino fibers: it shimmers against them. I love it. White is nice, but purpleifying it brought out the best in it.

And I got to give it to him in person. That is SO cool.

(Now, did anyone get my visual pun on that metronome? Given what Dave did for us in the story I wrote in the book, I had to reference the piano while anticipating his coming.)

The clock is ticking…

By the sweat of thy brow

Shalt thou eat thy bread? (sorry dinner was late, hon…)

All the dyes of thy life.

The first full pattern repeat of four and a half I plan to do in the bottom section is nearly finished. Note that this morning I had barely begun–I was at row 14 at 72 stitches. For anybody who might ever think my shawls look like they take too long to do… (Note, though, that I have no toddlers yanking my needles out of the stitches, bosses intruding on my time, nor cats batting at the yarn.)

Okay, back to work!

Sometimes you suddenly need a project knitted yesterday.  I figure this is going to take me about seven hours of knitting a day to get done in time.  What am I waiting for!  And yes, this picture means that 1,2,3,4,5 does not add up to 6 and, since that meant missed yarnovers and thereby more stitches absent than just the one, I gave up and had to rip out three rows to make it look right.  Argh.  I am not good at reading email and knitting at the same time.  Turn on the Michael Brecker jazz to get some quick rhythm going into those stitches, and I’m off!

So, we got an enrollment option form from the company my husband works for.  Longterm care benefits to cover us and our four parents (who are all close to or over 80)  for five years for under $20/month total?  No having to prove we’re healthy enough to sign up if we do it right now?  Hey.

And then the conversation went to being about me.  I tried to deflect it.  Dontwannagothere.   The coverage could be done at home or in a facility, and I was asking, you wouldn’t want that five year clock to start ticking while you could still take care of things at home, would you?

“Yes, but c’mon, where would you rather be living if you could?”

I smiled at him… (wait for it…)   And then, with a look of utter innocence, answered him sweetly (along with a ‘you-so-set-yourself-up-for-this’ grin), “Why, where my yarn is.  Of course!”

I got a good start on Johnna’s shawl.  At the 48-stitch point, I thought, you know, better count those…  But why?  C’mon, I know I did those increases right, it’s not like this is rocket science!  I did a brief check without paying enough attention to the doubled strands, which of course tend to tangle stitches over each other on the needles if you’re being in a careless hurry.  It went past 48, and I just figured I hadn’t been paying attention anyway, so I must have missed a stitch or two in my hurry.  Eh.  Whatever.  I went merrily on.

It wasn’t till I hit what was supposed to be 193 stitches, and had 204 (still didn’t know that) so that the  new pattern section came out totally hashed, that I found out what I’d done: I’d cast on with 13 instead of 12.  Wayyy back there at the beginning.  I frogged just a bit, trying to finagle it, which is the point at which I snapped this shot, and then started knitting it again.  Stopped, looked at it, realized how bad my fudging job looked, and finally gave in to the inevitable and frogged all the way back down to the cast on.

One simple single stitch, all by itself.  Just one.  One quarter of an inch, max.  And everything built on top of that, over and over and over, until the whole thing was way over in left field.   All I had had to do was stop and take a full accounting of where I was going, while I was so sure I knew what I was doing that I ignored my inner gut check and kept right on, thinking I was following the instructions.

I love the way knitting gives occasional life metaphors.  I also love the fact that when it doesn’t work out right, you can rip the thing all the way back to the beginning, painful though it may be, and start fresh.

You should see it now.  More pictures later as there’s more and more to show off.

First of all, I want to thank everybody. Being one who believes strongly in the power of prayer, I want to thank everybody who added theirs in for me or who simply Thought Good Thoughts. There’s power in that–and last night I had no problems breathing whatsoever. I can’t tell you how wonderful that feels. Thank you, your efforts did me immeasurable good and buoyed me up, and I’m praying the same for your own days, each of you wherever you are.

Okay, the post for the day: I goofed. I was at Stitches West this past February, stopped at the Pacific Meadows Alpacas booth, and bought the most gorgeous deep red. Now, vivid, orangey reds make my balance go bonkers, but this was a calm enough shade that it seemed okay. (I discovered this past week that a friend with a brain tumor gets dizzy if she’s around too-bright reds. It felt wonderful to not be the only weird one, much though I wouldn’t wish it on her; mine is the after effects from a car accident.)

I’m curious to see how Johnna’s silk and I get along together when it’s finished and I’m not sitting down and holding still knitting it, but it’s worth it; it’s a gorgeous color, and she and I love it.

So. There I was, I picked out this deep red, and it wasn’t till I got home that it hit me: this wasn’t fingering weight! They had only ever sold fingering weight at Stitches, but this was sportweight, and I hadn’t even noticed! So instead of buying more than enough, I’d bought less than enough, maybe, and the weight of it and the look in a shawl would be way different from what I’d been planning. I hesitated to start with it.

But curiosity got the better of my hesitation, and I finally did. I knew I’d have to do a shawl with a lot fewer stitches than most of mine: for one thing, so it wouldn’t look like a bulky afghan on, and for another, there just wasn’t the yardage. I cast on the Constance shawl, one of the ones with the fewest stitches and that goes best with a heavier yarn. I got it up to about 22″ long, and then didn’t have enough yarn for another 10-row half-diamond. So I added this: on the next right side row after the last pattern repeat, I did, k1, *k1, (yo, ssk) twice, k1, (k2tog, yo) twice, k2, repeat across. Next right side row: K1, *(yo, ssk) twice, yo, sl1-k2tog-psso, (yo, k2tog) twice, yo, repeat, end k1. That gives you a continuation of the zigzag pattern that kind of adds an exclamation point to the bottom of the last diamond; I quite like it. Enough that I’m going to add it again whenever I knit this pattern.

So I thought I’d pass the idea on.

Note: I will be signing copies of “Wrapped in Comfort: Knitted Lace Shawls” at the Pacific Meadows Alpacas booth at 2:00 Friday September 28th at TKGA in Oakland, and I will be at Lisa Souza’s booth to sign books at 1:00 at Stitches East in Baltimore on Saturday, Oct. 13th. I plan to be at Stitches East both Friday and Saturday. See you there!

I’ve been trading off between the big-stitch project and the little-stitch project, trying to wrap up the big one fast and get it out of the way so I can really get into my mug-o’-cocoa Malabrigo shawl. Scharffenberger, Dagoba organic–only the best in those stitches. I can just picture it on Alice Medrich: those who have her gorgeous “Cocolat” or “Bittersweet” books or ever ate one of her truffles at her Bay Area Cocolat shops before a fire closed down the plant and undid her business would understand what I’m talking about. Malabrigo? Something this soft, and with the swirls of different chocolates so artfully displayed? Absolutely. Only the best would do to represent her.

Not that I happen to know her, so that’s a totally moot point. But I can just picture it on her, the woman who pronounced that one must never cook the raspberries to make the raspberry sauce to go with your chocolate torte, or “You will assassinate them!”

But meantime, back in real life, Johnna wanted red. Johnna’s the friend who overhauled and updated my website, and I’ve owed her bigtime for a goodly while now. Hmm. Not that shade of dark-ripe raspberry sauce that I’ve been working on, which was heavier than she wanted anyway–it pleased me, but it wasn’t quite right. Not that finished Bigfoot shawl in a handpaint. Too variegated, too casual. Something vivid and splashy and formal and gorgeous. I had her come over yesterday to look, telling her, I’ve looked in all these yarn stores I’ve been doing booksignings in, and I just haven’t found something that quite declared itself to me as being the right yarn for you. But I’ve been looking!

She immediately asked me, Something I would like that you could stand to knit?

Alright, now, don’t put me on the spot like that… 😉

I showed her my Lisa Souza fine silk done in St. Valentine’s red; beautiful and bright, and I’d thought that one would do well on her, but so thin I would want to run it with another strand. I knew Johnna didn’t like the fuzzies; Kidsilk was out. (I showed her some. She wrinkled her nose.)

And then–I realized later I’d always kept it in a separate place from the silk, and somehow I had just never pulled the two out at the same time together: I showed her some 50/50 cashmere/lambswool I’d dyed, telling her I hadn’t found something to run with this one, either.

And she offered the absolutely obvious solution of, why don’t you just put those two together?

It was one of those stunning moments when you realize something so blatantly right there in front of your face, how on earth had you not thought of that yourself? I had never pulled them out together at the same time before, I’d never seen what could be. We twisted the strands together to see how they played off each other. Exquisite. And she was thrilled at the idea that her shawl would be hand dyed by me and by Lisa–not just something bought from some random shop (not that there’s anything wrong with that.) More personal than that.

So now I am about to go sit down and launch into the last four silly rows of that dark red to get it out of my way so I can wind up the 1000 yards of St Valentine’s so I can finally go make Johnna’s shawl so I can finish the Malabrigo after that so I can work on the… Carry on! Johnna’s project has totally changed for me: it’s no longer the angst of, this yarn or this? This pattern or this? Will I like it? Will she like it? Will this work? I will trade off with the Malabrigo when my hands need different needle sizes for a break, because it feels like it’s going to be hard to stop knitting either one–I’m too excited about both these. And just look at those reds! I love it. Johnna loves it. It will look fabulous on her–definitely just right. Yay!

I’m debating adding to this post… I’ve started fighting a cold, which has started my lupus and dysautonomia flaring. Last night I couldn’t breathe if I tried to sleep on my right side, a Bad Old Days symptom I emphatically do not want back. But I kept thinking, I refuse to get sick now. I refuse to give in. Johnna’s got her red shawl coming at last. I finally know just what to make her. I rolled onto my left side before my blood pressure dropped too low, deciding, so be it…

…And somehow, with all that happy anticipation to buoy me up, slept a good night’s sleep just the same.

If you could package knitting to make others happy into a pill, the drug companies would make a fortune. But it’s a whole lot more fun to be handing the medication money to people like Lisa Souza.

First, the technical stuff: Ruth asked about doing my shawls in finer needles. I’ve done the Bigfoot and the Nina shawls in one skein each of Fino, which is an 80/20 baby alpaca/silk laceweight, 875 yards/100g, on size 7 needles, and loved how they came out. But she’s asking about using 4s and 5s.  (That’s 3.5mm and 3.75 mm.)

I saw someone doing the Pacific version of the Julia shawl, the one with the smaller number of stitches, expecting it to come out bigger because the picture (done in kid mohair) was of a bigger shawl. But her project was in laceweight and was going to come out sized to fit a child. I knew she had enough yardage, so what I had her do was an extra increase row at the bottom of the yoke, doing a row of k1, yo across, ending k1. That brought it to 481 stitches, which would work well for her–and Ruth, I think that would work with your 5s and some laceweight, maybe one of the heavier ones like Malabrigo. I don’t know what kind of gauge you work at; you might want to double the stitch count for one of the larger shawls instead? Shoot me an email at skipthesefourwordsspindyeknit@gmail.com if you need any help figuring out how to get the counts right in the extra increase row to match up with whatever pattern you’re doing.

Meantime, I’ve been eyeing the Malabrigo laceweight at Purlescence for some time now, swooning over the softness of the baby merino and waiting for inspiration to strike. I tend to use fingering weight and larger needles because of arthritis issues, but variety is definitely an enticing thing.

Lynn, a commenter on Lene’s The Seated View blog, teased me about always being able to find the chocolate, after I figured out what that Danish word meant in someone’s birthday greeting to Lene. I was thinking about that all the way to my knitting group last night, egged on by my friend Nancy, who started telling me I had to knit something on the theme: rectangles to represent chocolate bars? Hershey’s kisses in lace?

Nah, I was telling her, I’m much more into hot cocoa with my morning email than chomping on a bar. Besides, Scharffenberger, Dagoba, Rapunzel, the really good stuff. That’s the only form of “milk chocolate” I go for: liquid. And I make it good and dark. We both agreed I needed to find the exact right yarn for this imaginary shawl we were concocting in the air–if it only existed.

One guess to what I found in the Malabrigo cubby at the shop immediately after that conversation. I was not going to buy more yarn, I was not going to buy more yarn… It was absolutely perfect. I bought more yarn. And after coming home with it and swatching, Ruth, you’re on: the size 5s pleased me the best. The shawl is designed, 518 stitches in the body, and the swatch is swatched. It may take me awhile because it’s a lot of stitches and I’ll have to take lots of breaks, but we’re off. Thank you for jump-starting the process, Lynn, Ruth, and Nancy. It’s all your faults. I can wear my chocolate and drink it too. I am having way too much fun!

(Edited to add: I owe one to Jasmin, too, who was knitting away on her own Malabrigo laceweight and not only declaring it lovely stuff, but encouraging me to keep reaching over and fondling the fabric she was creating, till I finally couldn’t stand it and went and looked at that cubby and that chocolate leaped out at me.  Oooh.  Nice.)

I was once gifted with some beautiful but impossibly-fine handpainted silk, and half a pound of it; as is, it would take me years to knit up at the gauge it would need. But put it with another yarn, and it would sparkle and glow and really set it off while working up quickly.

So that’s what I did with it, a large shawl, and this is what I just finished with some of the leftover: an easy, mindless carry-around project, one that says to the nonknitters, lookee what I can do with the time you waste sitting in that waiting room, expecting to be entertained by old magazines that might or might not be there. Pretty, and soft, and gonna make someone’s day… Neener neener.

Not that I would ever think that.

Technical stuff first: Jellybeanz colorway, Lisa Souza’s baby alpaca laceweight, my friend Tim’s new wife’s wedding shawl pattern, not yet published, this one just finished and not yet blocked. Lace looks like crumpled tin foil till you add a bit of water, and then, suddenly, the stitches settle into their natural places and you see what it was meant to be all along.

Saturday I got a note from someone I have occasionally emailed with for years via the Knitlist; she had started reading a bit of my blog, and had gone, Hey. Wait. I remember that park… She emailed me, saying, I went to Cabin John Jr. High, I used to live in that area.

That brought me up short real fast. When? (!)

She told me. I was on the edge of my seat, silently begging her to answer immediately: What was your maiden name?

She told me. I echoed it back to her with her name in capital letters. You’re !!??!!

Yeah, and what was your… And then, YOU’RE ALISON JEPPSON??!

So now she knows that Karen of the Water Turtle shawl fame in my book is her old buddy Karen, too. All these years, we had no idea we were talking to childhood chums when we talked about knitting to each other. All these years.

And the stitches settle into their natural places.

I finally finished it!

As I’ve mentioned, I’ve been in this longterm lupus study for awhile now. July marked the first time I actually had to go to San Francisco in person, and I got to meet some of the people that have been behind the names and the phone voices for so long.

One of whom was exactly the right person to get that green shawl. And she got it, and loved it, and I am absolutely thrilled.

So. A few weeks later, I got a thank you card for my participation from the fellow I’d spent most of that day with. Bryan.

The thing I like least about this multiple-major-illness thing is how it sometimes smacks you hard in the face when the subject of a longterm plan of any sort comes up. As we finished up that day, Bryan told me warmly that he looked forward to the follow-up session two years out. That hit me. I made myself ask him the question I’d been having: in this new part of the study, if I’m not here to do the rounds at the follow-up, would the results of July be tossed? Would they be of any value, still? He assured me with a smile from the heart that they would. Good. That was a relief.

But somehow his being somebody I could open up to and ask that question of, and the comfort of the warmth in his response, left me looking forward to that next round. I will be there. Just try to stop me.

Bryan sent me this note recently. Not on official UCSF stationary, it was something he’d apparently picked out himself. Opening it up, it wowed me: I am the daughter of an art dealer. I was taught to look for the patterns in things, to observe. My grandfather was a US Senator, I grew up next to DC, and the ornate patterning in the old government buildings downtown seemed all over this card. My other grandmother, long widowed, had lived not far from San Francisco, and I remember Golden Gate Park and its art museum from my childhood–again, ornate and grand, as are some of the other older buildings in that city–which I live 45 minutes from myself, now. (The De Young was destroyed in our ’89 earthquake, though, and rebuilt in a far more modern style.)

The card from Bryan, then, seemed an instant visual connection between my youth, my life here, and somehow on into the future. Amazing the sense of continuity one artist’s creativity can make, while that artist, whoever designed this thing, will never know.

Inside, Bryan thanked me for taking part in the study, not mentioning anything about his colleague’s shawl; I don’t doubt that it would have seemed to him too much like angling for me to knit him something, too. But he wanted to wish me well, and he then took the time to take it over to the phlebotomist who had waited for me to put down my knitting so she could draw my blood, and as she did so, had mentioned to me that she was a knitter, too. Cool! She’d signed her name after his. I wasn’t just the blood draw at 1 pm; I was someone who, weeks later, still mattered to her. That group has just incredible people in it.

How could I not answer this. Bryan, this is me saying thank you the way I know how. Patricia, that Zinnia scarf–the one with the story in my book, singing, “If you go to San Francisco…” These are for you guys. Check your mail. Cheers.

There’s nothing quite like coming home from the post office feeling like the sun is suddenly shining brighter, the water in the marsh alongside the road by the bay more full of life–look, there’s a snowy egret!–like wanting to dance to the music, any music, turn some on, enjoy!

Priority mail.  Ain’t that the truth!