I finished it!  Maybe.

Sometimes you just go back to old favorites: this is the Michelle shawl from “Wrapped in Comfort.” Curious–I did one fewer half-repeat in the main body than in the one in the book, and the effect with the edging came out completely different.  In the book, the edging and the triangles above it form a perfect diamond and the lines are flowing in a connected continuation.  Here, the edging is set apart, more distinct from the body.  Such a small change, and yet it’s so different, and it totally fascinates me.

Here’s what the shawl looked like last night and this morning. I’m debating re-blocking it with my wires to sharpen the points or to rinse it down again and round it out instead.  Haven’t decided.  Baby alpaca is drapy by nature, silk tends to sag…but I do like points.

Barbara-Kay’s comment sparked this one.  Growing up, I took piano lessons from Louise Kupelian, who required I come in twice a week, once with a piano partner and once to meet with a group, teaching under the Robert Pace method. (That last little bit in case any old students of hers come googling so I can wave hi to old friends.)  My mom used to do some grocery shopping at the nearby Safeway in Chevy Chase while she waited, or she would sit there and knit till I got out.  (Usually, anyway–one year, it was a needlepoint bench cover for my grandmother’s Steinway Grand.)  The lessons were far enough away that for her to go home in between meant she’d have to turn around the second she got there.  No point.  So.

Her father was a US Senator.  She wanted to knit him a sweater.  My grandfather did not dress casually, and his reaction was that a bit of warmth would be nice, but it couldn’t be anything outdoorsy; it needed to be very formal-looking, something he could wear in the hallways of Congress and that he could throw his suitcoat over as needed.

A few years ago, I was mentioning that project to her: with her busy household and six children, it had taken her a year to finish.  I remember those size 2 needles and the needlepoint yarn she’d had to buy 30+ skeins’ worth to get a fine enough yarn to work with.

What surprised me was Mom exclaiming, all those years later, with me remembering and her not, “Size two needles?! I must have been out of my mind!”  And maybe that’s why I remember the details; she wasn’t so sure she wasn’t out of her mind back then, either, and carefully explained to me at the time why she was using the needles and yarn she was and why it would mean so much to her dad.  And it did.

She knitted Grampa an all-over single-stitch-wide Aran diamond pattern, a monochrome argyle effect in a subdued sage green.

And all that time and all those piano lessons and all those evenings I saw her working on that gorgeous pattern, allowing love to become visible and tangible, I very much wanted a sweater like that too.  The great act of maternal love beyond my understanding at the time was that, with a heavy sigh, she actually did.  She knitted me one too when she got done with his. After having plugged steadily away at that same pattern for a YEAR.  She let me pick out the color and then made it in worsted-weight acrylic so it would go much faster and, I was in heaven, she put a zipper in the front so I could be in style just to top it all off.  With a big brassy triangle zipper pull, not just some plain old thing. I loved it.

Grampa took care of and wore his wool diamond sweater for the rest of his life.  He retired from his seat in his 70’s and died at 95. And that’s one of the reasons I love working with animal fibers: no cotton sweater is going to look great 30 years out, but wool can.

Mine, I wore until the sleeves barely covered my elbows and Mom was embarrassed to let me be seen in public with it.  That was MINE.  *I’d* picked out the pattern, *I’d* picked the color, my MOM made it just for ME, that was MINE.

She finally hid it, to my distress.   So.  We were doing this reminiscing a few years ago, and I asked her whatever had happened to it; it would have been nice to somehow be able to show it to my own kids.  She didn’t remember.  She assured me, “I would only have given it to someone who appreciated what went into it.”  True, but… I don’t think anyone could quite love it as dearly as I did back in the day.  My mom made me that and nobody else had one but me.  And Grampa.

Of my parents’ six children and their four daughters, I’m the only one who knits.  I wonder now if how thrilled I was at Mom’s unselfishness, eagerly watching Grampa’s sweater and then mine coming slowly to be, helped nudge me in that direction.  I quite think so.

Stray thought: I never thought I’d see the day when I would totally agree with–Newt Gingrich. Wow. Thank you, Suburbancorrespondent, for the link re the $700 billion bailout idea: I do like my radio in closed captions.

The silk that Claudia dyed that Sandi gave is turning into a Michelle shawl; the second strand is Misti Alpaca laceweight from my stash and my dyepot.  The knitting started off a bit slowly, till my husband told me I was going to have to get me a ghostknitter.  I don’t *think* so!  Back to work!

I’m suddenly picturing Wall Street multimillionaire welfare kings being handed some needles and some Red Heart (got to be frugal, you know, yes, it has its uses, and no, guys, you don’t get qiviut this time) and told to chill awhile till something intelligent gets worked out.

I have a list of projects I want done and a general timeline in mind for most of them.  But all of them were calling out to me at once, and it was driving me nuts: one at a time, children!  And the one I’d planned to do next, when I swatched it last week, it just went, nahhhhh, and told me I hadn’t quite gotten the right idea for it down yet. I dithered.

It’s a relief to finally be going, okay, you, you–out of the bag. Onto the needles.  Pronto.  Let’s get you dressed and ready for school and out of here.

Meantime, over the last week I made five of these for various goings-on.  This isn’t the best-looking one of them at all–it’s one of the early efforts–but it’s the one that got its class picture taken.

I used to be on the PTA. This is to show that I, too, know how to dress a mousse.

The doorbell rang the day after. It was our longtime UPS guy, holding the box in his hands, standing still on my doorstep, actually waiting for me to open the door so he could hand it to me in person.

It took a second for the concept to echo around my brain.  Doorbell.  The UPS guy? A box? Normal life?  Somehow, that all seemed so very far away, but there he was, needing the human contact of seeing me receiving it from him.  Making it personal.  He knew I’d be home; my car was in the driveway.  We both stood there in suspended animation for maybe two seconds, broken finally by my saying “Thank you,” as I received the box from him.

We’d both needed that moment.

There had been an online vendor selling merino lambswool/angora blended into an ultrathin yarn on a cone, very soft; as is, I’d probably never use it, but what I did was to wind half of it off, then two-ply it on my spinning wheel.  Two-ply the two-plies.  Wash the resulting four-ply yarn roughly in hot then cold water to felt the strands together, and knit it up into an afghan for a Christmas present.

For my brother and his wife, who taught high school in New Jersey.  Where a terrible number of the children had lost a parent in the Towers the day before John the UPS guy handed me that box, some of them both parents.  My brother himself had been on the subway: he’d called home to say, “Mom. Dad.  My subway was late.  I’m okay.”

The enormity of it all was not something to dissipate anytime soon, and I knew, as I picked up my needles once my yarn was spun, dried, and ready to go, that I needed to keep it very simple.  I needed comfort knitting. I needed it to be something I could knit without its requiring much attention out of me.

It wasn’t till I was very nearly done that I spread it out, with its 7×1 ribbing, and then it massively hit me: I’d been knitting a representation in yarn of one of the Towers, with not a clue I’d been doing so.  To wrap them and comfort them in softness and love from me.

You know, that header really needs a celery stick in the picture to finish it off, but we’re fresh out.  The charcoal shawl, she is finished.

I wrote a draft last night that I will finish when I finish the project it goes with.   A blog stash.  I can’t wait!

Last Thursday at Purlescence‘s knit night, I was feeling very broke, having just paid college tuition and college rent and the first half of my new hearing aids.  I took a good look around the shop, as I always do: looking at yarns is the best way to come up with new ideas.  Colors trigger memories, memories trigger patterns…

And so I noticed just the most drop-dead gorgeous new color ever over that-a-way, in a yarn from Claudia’s Handpaints that for right now was just plain out of my reach.  One look at it and I knew exactly whom it should be for.  Nothing else would do.  I hoped it wouldn’t sell out.  It was just so exquisitely THE color. (Okay, I’m suddenly stuck with Barbara Streisand singing “Misty watercolor memmmmmmoriesssss…” in my head. Shhh, stop, get out of my post!)

Sandi, one of the LYSOs, came over, checking up on me–I’d had a sudden severe bout with my dysautonomia two nights before, and I wasn’t going to mention it, but one look at my worried face and she’d decided to ask what was up.  Those bouts are when the brainstem and the blood pressure and the heart and lungs forget to all stay connected to each other for a little while there.  It had been rough.  I’d reacted to it with the thought, Tina Newton and Lisa Souza both just sent me yarn out of the goodness of their hearts and I am NOT going to die with it sitting in hanks in ziploc bags! Those are going to become LOVE first! BREATHE, you stupid body, BREATHE!!!

A little adrenalin goes a long way, and the body did this, Right-o, old chap, carry on.  And I was fine.  And that was that.

Sandi was hesitant to say it, so I did outright for her: knitting for others helps keep me alive.

And she handed me that Claudia silk I’d been admiring, and said, “Take it.”

Ohmygoodness!!!

And now I have a blog stash and I can’t say… yet. But Sandi–you’re a peach and I adore you.  Knit long and prosper well.

Lisa asked if I knit other things besides shawls.  I have, I did, I…

My Kaffe Fassett phase is described here.  Discovering his “Glorious Knits” helped really push me back into the world of knitting after a half dozen years’ absence.

I made a number of cabled sweaters, including a KF-inspired pullover with each half of each cable a different color.  It was a little like the time I made homemade tofu, just to say I had and could.  I knitted an aran for a friend’s son as a high school graduation gift, only, the knitting loosened up as I got more and more comfortable with the pattern and so I was unconsciously knitting faster and looser, and one sleeve, doing the same number of cable twists and the same number of rows as the other, came out, um… I cut the cuff and a bit above it off, reknit a new cuff downwards, and then turned the cut part into a small baby bonnet, chainstitching little ties on.  I took great delight in embarrassing the heck out of that then-18-year-old by telling him I was saving it for his first baby to wear someday to match its papa.

The kid is 27 now and got married this past May, a week after my son did.  I’m not sure if he remembers that bonnet.  (Although I’ll bet he does.)

I thought I didn’t want to learn how to do lace.  But it bugged me that here was a part of knitting that was beyond me, when I thought I was pretty skilled, overall.  I went looking for how-to materials, finding extremely slim offerings in the bookstores and finally driving way up to Lacis in Berkeley with specific ideas in mind.  The Barbara Walker stitch treasuries from 1970 or so finally got reprinted at about that time. They were hugely helpful.

When I started, I thought all lace had to be on size 3 needles or smaller by definition.  It took me awhile to let go of the idea that if it comes out all in a tight wad, that just means you didn’t block and stretch it hard enough. Not so.  It’s the universe saying, yo.  Use. Bigger. Needles.

So at first I made quite a few wedding-ring shawls, airy lacy rectangles that could slide through your ring.  They were and are glorious.  There were a few larger ones that, um, try to find a large male and borrow their ring for a moment if you want to slip your shawl through–and try not to flip the band across the room as the thing zips through.  Ask me how I know.

Little by little, bit by bit.  I got this little website going, in part because my younger daughter took a high school webpage design class. She put a few patterns up here. And then, after the Strawberry Pie shawl, I found myself wanting to improve on the design. I wanted something that would hang straight on both sides, which that one doesn’t–it’s more a boomerang shape.  I spent a summer working out some ideas and the basic template, knitting, not knowing how the crucial upper areas would look with the weight of the lower till they were done, and gradually I came up with the top-down circular shawls that became the basis for “Wrapped in Comfort.” The how-to-knit-lace instructions in there are exactly what I spent so much time trying to find, years ago.

I spent months and months knitting shawl after shawl: one for you, one for the book.  One for you, one for the book. No, not that color, knit another one for the book, no, that one.  In all, I mailed Martingale I think it was 29 projects and told them to pick out their favorites; each one I had knit at least twice if not four, five times, obsessed with accuracy.

After that, I was quite ready to go do something else for a little while.  I wanted instant gratification. I wanted people gratification rather than having to knit it and throw it in the closet like I’d been doing for two years.  I wanted to knit to give NOW.  I started doing a lace scarf here and another one there, and before you knew it, I was where I knew I had to knit one for every single woman at church so that nobody would feel left out.

And I did it. I knitted for every woman (except for the two who moved away in the middle before I got to them, and the blind woman who did not own nor want to own a scarf, to her seeing-eye dog’s intense disappointment as I took the proffered baby alpaca away from near its nose.) My favorite part of that 18-month-long marathon was Jo.  She’s a peach.  She’s still at about the same place as she was when I wrote that post.

I got awfully tired of those scarves. I know I need to knit more of them; we live in a university town and new people are coming in all the time, and who doesn’t need a welcome like that when you don’t know a soul? But for this particular moment, I’m back on a shawls binge and playing with new lace patterns. When you knit someone one of those, you’ve really knit them something. They are substantial.  They look wonderful. They pronounce of the wearer, “I am well loved.”  And I have to tell you, that never gets old.

Or rather, shawl–quick, go tell Dorothy she needs to accessorize.

I spent an hour today carefully tinking back to a mistake from last night–apparently, I can’t reliably count to three past 11 pm–and reknitting the gray, and after I got done, did something I almost never do: I started another project before finishing the previous one.  Lisa’s Ruby in baby alpaca/silk won the yarn toss.

I love how my shawl patterns, when you’re starting out, relax out on the circular needle in the shape of a resting cat, poised here to bat at the ball of yarn.  And now that the Ruby is ready for me to jump back to as a refuge from monochromatic vision the next time I might need it, I can get back to finishing the gray.

The first few rows, I was working on this to get it done and out of the way of the other, brighter yarns waiting next to me. But the more the pattern emerged, the more beautiful it became to me in its own right, and the more perfect it has felt for the recipient as I’ve been watching it coming to be.

This will be a quiet shawl.  It’s not flashy.  It doesn’t demand attention.  It doesn’t put itself first.  It plays well with all other colors that the recipient likes, as far as I know, and as I’ve been knitting it, I’ve been remembering the real reason I picked the yarn up in the first place: this is seriously nice stuff.  It offers warmth and and a superb softness for a woman who has touched many lives for good. I can’t wait to give it to her, even if that means I have to stop knitting it at that point.

Newton’s at Stitches West last February was selling a 60/40 cashmere/merino blend that was really soft, and not all such blends are; this one lived up to its description, and to knit up a shawl in it was going to cost under fifteen bucks.   I carefully held the skeins up against each other in the light because the dyelots at that booth tend to be…random.   But not a problem with the ones I was looking at.

One was a charcoal gray.  It was clear to me that the cashmere used for it had been natural brown, and the result is slightly towards the earthy side.  Nothing particularly exciting, but I had had times the previous year where I’d needed guy colors in my stash and didn’t have them.

So.  Saturday I got a package from Lisa Souza with her Giverny colorway in baby alpaca laceweight and her Ruby, slightly subdued in how it came out in her baby alpaca/silk.  Gorgeous, both.  Today I got a package from Tina at Blue Moon Fiber Arts: Geisha in Oma Desala and Potomac.  I’m tempted to think of them as, Oma (doesn’t that mean Grandma?) Desala (of the–salad?  Of the salt?  Help me out here, Tina), and Makes-Me-Homesick for my beloved river.  Lovely, lovely colorways, and I’m dying to dive straight in to all four yarns at once.

Saturday I also happened to ask the next recipient on my list what colors she liked best.  It took her a moment to get what was coming next, and then I laughed at her hey, wait a minute! reaction.

Well, then.  Black.  She liked black.

I had that coming–I asked.  You over there with the bad eyes and the knitting needles, I hear you groaning too.

I had this in my stash.  And you know it’s soft enough, definitely.  Can we call this light black?  But I also have black dye, and overdyeing charcoal to get black, if it doesn’t take totally evenly, who could tell or care?  I’ve been debating between going ahead with the Jacquard Acid or asking if she’d rather I left it as is.  I guess I’ll give her a call.   Communication is a good thing.  You know that what I should have done was to dye it before I started knitting away at it.

But darn, all those new colors are communicating, too, way too loud: knit ME!  No, ME!

Waitcher turn, kids.  All in good time. I’ll get you, my pretties, and your little dog-eared pattern scribblings too.

I finished Kris’s shawl at about 11:30 last night, which, come to think of it, is the same time of day that I finished designing it Monday night.  Kris now knows about it; I’m still paying a bit for the sun exposure last week, so since Nina was at the Kings Mountain Art Fair yesterday, I called her, she told Kris and Mel, my potter friends, and we arranged how to get the shawl to them without my having to be outside.  Kris is ecstatic.  She apologized that she couldn’t pick it up last night, and I was going, no, no, that’s quite alright.  It’s not quite done.  (I can only knit so fast.)

And now it is.  And I can’t show it to you all yet, which gets really frustrating because I’m absolutely a born show-off.  But trust me, it’s blocked now and it feels like one of the most gorgeous things I have ever knit, and certainly one of the most meaningful.

I’m picturing my readers flipping through future pages and then the blog and going, wait–the original was pink? How does that work for a landscape scene?

Um, early foggy dawn?  But then, a shawl is an article of clothing first of all, and this was a good color for her.   And I am very, very pleased.

(P.S. Kris–Lisa Souza sends a hello, old friend!)

This yoke idea and that lace in the main body. They were supposed to go together.  All the time I spent over several days  hashing out the yoke pattern,  sure of what was going to come after, I had another idea that kept nagging at me to do next instead, saying all the reasons why it was the right one and why I should ditch the one I was so bent on.

And I kept saying no, no, be a good little lace pattern, go away.  While carefully counting stitches.

But then the one I thought I wanted to use didn’t work.

Upper and lower just didn’t fit together.  What on earth?  I counted stitches again, fifteen ways from tomorrow and it just.didn’t.work. It made no sense.  It was late.  But still.  I couldn’t believe it, and I made some mutterings about math.  And then protested, when I got teased, “But I’m GOOD at math!”  But after spending most of the day yesterday in front of the computer, knitting, writing, editing, frogging, deleting, knitting, writing, editing, frogging, deleting, knitting, writing, editing, frogging, deleting, rinse, lather, repeat, my brain had bugged out and that was that.

That other little pattern, patiently biding its time, pounced on me.  “You know you only want to show off with that fancy-schmancy. You know I’m the right one.  And you know why.  The symbolism is so obvious.”

I do. It was right. It looks wonderful.  It IS wonderful, in a way I can’t describe without instantly giving away who I am knitting it for to that person.  And I can’t believe I even argued with myself over it, it’s so obvious now that I’ve started knitting it.  And it’s a fair bit of fancy-schmancitude itself.

But the killer?  As soon as I decided to go with what is now so patently obviously the right one…

…I saw exactly where my mistake was and how easily the yoke would indeed fit in with the pattern I no longer wanted and that I am really really glad now I didn’t put in there.  Of course they match up!  Piece of cake. Not that that matters now.

You know how I once said my knitting was not the boss of me? You hear it snickering back there?

I’ve been knitting all day and I am thisclose to being finally finally past the swatching stage. I’ve never before tried to do what I’m trying to do, and one more round and I think I’ll have it.   I feel like I’ve earned my keep on this one.  But I am taking a break and showing off Kris’s fish bowl that ate a fish while I flounder around.

Speaking of which, this must be a young one: it hasn’t moved its second eye to this side yet.

Okay, time to go dive back in.  Tuna in next time.  Same thyme, same sturgeon.  Staging.  Frog that pun and pass the fishyswasse soup.

I finished it!  And I can’t really show it off yet, which runs totally counter to the instincts of a blogger, but never mind.  Don’t miss the caption–it’s true!

Continuing the food theme, I saw these and had to try them once. The idea of green beans being potato-chipified was well into the nonpsychodegradeable category.  Um.  Hubby, day one: “Gaack!”  Hubby, day two: “There’s some left?  Sure, I’ll have some more.”

Make sure there’s plenty of water nearby to help you swallow–trust me.

Meantime.  I told this story last month on my blog, but a lot of people at Purlescence’s knit night on Thursday didn’t know anything about it.  Mary was there for the first time in awhile, so I decided to tell on her generosity a bit and say what she’d done.  And I did want to know if her shawl fit okay.  I told her, if she wanted more length, she had the rest of the dye lot: after the shop had gotten their shipment in from Handmaiden, she had shown up that Monday morning to buy a new skein to replace the one she’d given me. I, not knowing that, had shown up an hour or two after her to buy two skeins to knit her a bigger shawl to replace, you got it, the skein she’d given me.  They’d sold out of the periwinkle fast.  Heh.

She loved it, told me it had been a complete surprise, and that it did fit.  Good! That helps confirm my idea that for a larger size, starting at a wider neckline (row 2 in most of my patterns) and adding length works best.

But the group laughed when I admitted I had two more skeins of Casbah somewhere and I couldn’t find them for the life of me. I knew I had them. I knew where I would have put them.

“You’ll just have to buy more!”

“Twist my arm!”

Next shipment… Maybe I should knit a shawl in the Blackberry colorway, long as we’re talking food here.

(Edited Friday to add this picture of an Ostrich Plumes shawl I did in gray laceweight a year or two after theirs.  It too will fit through a wedding ring, hence the name.)

Today I got to see a doctor I seldom see and told him that there were only two people mentioned in my book whom I hadn’t given a copy to yet.  And that I needed to fix that.  I hadn’t referred to him and his wife by name in there, I said; last page, second paragraph.  I was a brand new laceknitter way back when and I’d made them a wedding ring shawl on size 3 needles in white laceweight Ostrich Plumes.

Dr. M was the ENT who, eighteen years ago when my lupus was diagnosed, finally put together what had eluded everybody else for all those years: that my progressive hearing loss was due to an allergy to aspirin.  I’d apparently triggered it with an overdose when I’d climbed into the medicine cabinet as a toddler and had eaten not quite enough baby aspirins to have to get my stomach pumped.  It was a new bottle and Mom counted pills and fed me baking soda instead on doctor’s orders to neutralize the acid.

With the lupus, I had a new diagnosis and meds to have to take, but I went completely deaf on the prescription-strength Aleve.  I have to tell you–you can close your eyes and try to see what it’s like to be blind, but you cannot close your ears.  It was like nothing I could have expected: when someone talked to me, I felt waves of pain in my ears.  But no sound.  Nada.  Except for the roaring white noise in my ears that didn’t respond to anything but itself.

Apparently Aleve (called Naprosyn then) was different enough from aspirin that I lucked out, but whatever, my hearing came back to what it had been when the dose wore off, and under Dr. M’s directions, I never took NSAIDs again.

And what he told me meant my kids wouldn’t go deaf in their teens too.  And they did not.

And what he told me meant I didn’t have to go any more deaf.  And I did not.

The man was right.

There is more to the story, related to when my Crohn’s was diagnosed ten years later, but this will do for here.  Suffice it to say, I owed him, bigtime; that wedding ring shawl felt absolutely imperative to do.  And it became one of those projects that I will forever rejoice that I knitted it: both for my own sake, and for the great joy of their reaction to it.

I signed and gave him a book today. And he signed my copy for me.