Just for fun, a Ukrainian beaded necklace in granny squares. In late ’60’s colors to keep in character.

Made some progress on the afghan.

Meantime, I had some plums from Andy’s that needed to be put to good use, most quite small and a few of another variety a fair bit bigger. I whipped a warm stick of butter with 2/3 c sugar, then with 2 eggs, then added in a mixture of 1/2 c flour, 1/2 cup almond flour, 1 tsp baking powder and a pinch salt. Put it in a 9″ nonstick springform pan with a parchment bottom (my 9″ circles came with pull-up handles) and arranged halves of the small plums in a circle, skin side up, and half one of the big ones in the center.

I should have taken a picture of my pretty sunflower cake before baking it. It really did look like one with those golden plums and darker plum in the center.

When I pulled it out of the oven 45 minutes later (the recipe I was riffing off of with that almond flour said an hour and I knew that was wrong, 45 was pushing it but okay) I looked at that thing and there was only one description for it.

A bellybutton cake.

And it is very very good.

I guess you can make rayon out of just about any cellulose-based fiber, and I’ve seen a few oddball yarns from time to time. Sugarcane viscose? As Richard put it, well that one makes sense, it would be like bamboo, they’re both tall woody stalks.

Stinging nettle? I’ve heard its praises sung but I remember stinging nettle at my grandparents’ mountain cabin in Utah when I was a kid–I learned the hard way to stay on the path but that it didn’t have the manners not to lean over it. You had to be careful. It hurts like mosquitos itch.

Crustacean shell yarn, touted for health effects: that one didn’t seem to last on the market very long. Imagine if your recipient had a shellfish allergy you didn’t know about. It was the only yarn I’ve ever heard of with a warning label.

Rose yarn. Okay, put away the pruning shears and that’s another stiff long-limbed woody plant, okay.

Today Etsy sent me one of those “New Items!” notifications re a vendor I’d bought from pre-pandemic. Yeah, I clicked.

It really was. 100% dandelion yarn. Shiny, white, described as soft.

Dandelion?

Laceweight, too, so you’d be putting a lot of time into figuring out whether it was worth putting any time into and whether it would hold up, or else you’d have to hold a bunch of strands together; well, hey, the vendor wouldn’t mind if you bought extra cones. Oh and look they have peppermint yarn, too. Does it give your hands fresh breath?

I’m picturing a Monty Python Killer Rabbits sketch with bunnies leaping for your shawl for snacks and then polishing it off with a mint.

Next Tuesday, Amazon said. The box showed up today. Ask me if I mind.

Comes assembled, they said. But, it turns out, screw the knob on the drawer yourself, lady. Yeah, I think we can handle that. (Note the lack of application of said knob. That drawer came in handy already!)

I tested out the setup by talking with my mom while trying not to lean on its slight wobbliness, and we now know that my sister Carolyn’s name types out as Kill Christmas. You know, I can actually do that kind of word mangling better than it can but it’s trying.

Speaking of whom, she and her husband have been househunting online. A few days ago, she flew to see her grandkids in Ohio with a day trip to the town in New York where she’s been looking. On that very day the most perfect house for them went up for sale–and now it’s theirs. Great condition and reasonably priced, to top it off. And she got to see it in person. Because it was on the one day.

I can’t wait to see what she does with her new horse carriage in back. Would it kill Christmas if I asked her for a pony? Always wanted one when we were kids.

Nina got her peaches and dried apricots from Andy’s and I threw in some of his plums, too. The lady at his farm agreed with me that fruit straight off the tree was the perfect homecoming after time in the hospital.

My heart monitor came off and went in the mail per protocol.  So did a birthday present for Lillian, who is turning three whether her Grammy can fathom that number so soon or not.

Writing all this it suddenly struck me what it was that I didn’t do today and I didn’t even think of it till just now: I didn’t knit.

Wait, how did that happen?

I hadn’t done anything on the latest project because I’m making it up as I go along and I hadn’t decided exactly how I was going to do the next part. Much less row.

So I didn’t do anything at all.

Looking at the clock after sundown, I finally decided I didn’t want tomorrow to be a no-progress day too, because those just feed on the next one and the next. So I made myself sit down, look at the thing, and at least make that one row come out of my hands.

And what do you know. Totally broke the logjam. I kept going till my hands said stop.

So I sent off that note. She sent me a sweet note back.

I decided to add a detail I hadn’t mentioned: that the consul’s American counterpart had taken my picture. That my hair was not having a good day at all but I still felt like I looked good because of how good her blouse looked on me.

She told me she’d laughed, and thanked me.

Which means I just spent the whole day (even through the Jan 6 committee hearing) quite delighted that I’d made someone in Ukraine have a good chuckle at the world.

Meantime, I was working on this. 

Just for fun:

Taking a break for my hands between rows, glancing at what the real estate vendors are throwing at my inbox…

Picture number twenty had me doing a double take.

There isn’t. Do you see one? There isn’t. There’s a faucet, yes, but there’s no sink beneath it, just flat counter space.

It says the sellers remodeled recently. So how did an inspector let that get past them? Can you just imagine how much fun little kids could have with that when no grownups are looking? And how much it would entice them to wait till they weren’t? I mean, when you were five, wouldn’t you?

I finished clearing some old Piuma cashmere out of my stash today that was very very bright. Blocking helped lengthen it a bit as the water eased the lacework flat but that’s all there was. Fern lace. That bit of STABLE is over: I have now outlived a small portion of my stash.

While munching a couple of dried slab Blenheim apricots from Andy’s and considering how they should be even sweeter this year because we haven’t had fires clouding out the sunlight. No smoke particles.

An hour later someone posted this article.

That’s my route home from Cottage Yarns. Man. Glad I didn’t go today. Mandatory evacuations is not when you want to get in anybody’s way. But that shaded area on the map… I fired off a note to a friend whose daughter and family had finally managed to buy an old house and had done some of the remodeling themselves to really make it nice for their two little ones to grow up in.

They’re okay. Yay for firefighters who are willing to work at a fire when it’s 102F out. We cannot pay them enough.

Near a substation, looks like? Waiting for PG&E to be found at fault in 1, 2, 3…

Colourmart, which deals in mill ends, sent an email. Things were a little slow, so they cut prices in half on a few silks and cashmeres for the week. (Note that you can pay them $5 per cone at checkout to twist the finer stuff into a thicker yarn.)

Thirteen dollars for 150g, and it still did the 22% discount for buying six. Now that was a deal. They say the US postal service now basically requires a tracking fee that they can’t afford to cover, but I could deal with that.

There are those who are even allergic to cashmere, but everyone I’ve ever known has been able to tolerate silk and I’ve worked with and know that yarn so I’m pretty pleased about it.

It’s been a goodly while since I added to my stash simply to have it on hand for when it’s needed. I have a feeling it will be. Because it’s too good to let it just sit there.

So the answer is, a week ago I wasn’t ready to go to Cottage Yarns because I hadn’t done enough yet to know what I needed. Now I do. And so I went. (Quick, before I run out of the aptly-named Whales Road colorway.)

The hardest part of a super-ambitious project is getting it off the ground and past that initial bit of self-doubt.

But if you didn’t, how else how would you ever come to discover that–okay, how long in my life did this take me–that the way to manage all those random balls of color (since I’m not doing it Kaffe Fassett each-strand-only-as-long-as-your-arms style) is to take one of those big sturdy zipped plastic bags that blankets come in, put all the balls in it as you’re working, do the usual double-yoyos process with each pair as you switch strands along the row–

–and then when you’re done knitting for now, just flip the flap over them all, zip it up, and DON’T MOVE IT. Don’t let those roll all over in there. Don’t pick it up. Just keep it flat right there hogging half the couch with everything staying right as you left it so you can unzip and just get right to the fun part the next time. Knowing you’ll have all the more incentive to.

For the next six months. Right. Yeah, that’ll be popular. But man it was so easy to just pick up right where I left off without having to spend any, much less serious knitting time untangling first.

What was really stopping me. That was the question. Sure, it’s the diving in when I know I’ll be stuck with what I’ve done once I do it and I do not have the artistic ability to fully envision what I want before I draw it with yarn. I just don’t. I am good at critiquing how it should have been after the fact.

But I had at least sketched a preliminary overall view of the start of it yesterday, which is essential, and I really wanted to get to it (and to stop boring you all about how I haven’t.)

I debated making a trek to the yarn store that has the best Malabrigo Rios stock (oh cool she’s got a new website!) and I just wanted to say hi to Kathryn anyway. It’s been awhile and I miss her.

But after I went through my second storage bag of the stuff, all I really needed was a bright blue/green skein, and not for days’ worth of knitting yet.

The truth hit me. It was the winding. I wanted to go to Kathryn’s Cottage Yarns because she and her husband do that for you and that’s why buying new was so tempting. I could not start my first color-pattern row without attaching lots of new strands on the needle and they were still stubbornly sitting there in hanks because I’d done the previous two afghans from cones and hadn’t had to bother with that and definitely didn’t want to.

Which is a really dumb reason for not beginning colorwork you really want to knit.

Edging, ocean floor, rocks, fish (and there’s a Purple Mystery, too.)  They’re not hanks anymore.

The first few miles of seed stitch. The partial frame to the future picture of a bed of coral and wooly fish and the waves above.

Reefer madness.

Same spot on the fence. It likes it there. The shrug–its shoulders went no higher–as it looked up at where it wanted to follow its parent to while doubting itself again and again. He tried wagging his tail like his parents, nowhere near as much but still a new thing from yesterday.

C’mon, you can do it. I’ve seen you do it. You know you can. C’mon!

Shrug. No.

Shrug. (Looking up wistfully.) No.

The wind was blowing; not hard, but how do you trust it won’t gust. It was a whole new set of variables and the fledgling had no idea what to do with it and was clearly reluctant to test how this whole flight thing goes when the air fights back.

Suddenly, with the outburst of hungry two year olds everywhere: ME DOOZ IT! It raised its wings to the height they were meant to reach to and took off into that not-holding-still sky. Totally overshot the first limb on the tree, stumbled, but grabbed the next and held on for dear life. Phew!

See? You *can* do it.

It suddenly dawned on me: I’d been procrastinating and procrastinating and procrastinating getting going on my latest project because I couldn’t decide whether to make the coral a three-dimensional effect with waves and wisps of it growing out of the fabric or just go for a flat pictorial version so I don’t have to try to make the fish somehow 3-D too and whatever all else ends up coming in after that, and picturing small grandkids pulling at protruding bits didn’t help–but when you come right down to it, part of me had just never believed I could pull the whole thing off anyway. If I knit it one way I’d probably wish I’d done it the other, and you can always see after the fact how you could have done it better when you’re making it up on the fly. I love my ocean afghan created by googling “pretty ocean fish” but I can sure show you where the mistakes are.

I was being a baby bird. Stop it. Now just go knit.

So this post is a little like the fledgling finch I watched trying to land on the newest leaves of an apricot seedling today: kind of flapping its wings all over the place with its feet flailing before flitting off thataway.

Pete Buttigieg, talking sense and being reasonable on the whole Roe issue before the Court.

Last night I was going to start Gansey squares above the brim next on the requested gray hat–when all that other stuff happened. I took it to the emergency dental appointment because you just never know.

But my brain was just not doing patterns. Stockinette on auto-repeat only.

Just need to decrease at the top now.

My new Skacel olivewood needles showed up for tomorrow’s highly anticipated new start in brighter yarns and I’ve never had olive ones before. I know it’s a particularly dense wood. If you’ve tried them I’d be curious to hear what you think.

(And yesterday’s post should have been titled, Another one bites the dust. I think my brain is back.)

I took a gross picture of my face. My husband, with better lighting, took a grosser one and sent it to all the kids. Um, thanks I guess?

The new dentist called this evening to follow up to make sure things were okay. I like this guy.

Newborns! (Falcon video.)

Meantime, the sour cherries on the bottom of my tree are about halfway to ripeness while the top of the tree has finally come into full bloom–and the result is, I’ve really been wanting sour cherry pie again.

There was one last bag of them in the freezer.

From the last of the season, when I was so tired of pitting all. those. cherries. that I didn’t. I simply picked them, filled the largest ziplock as full as it would go and that was it for the year, knowing full well I’d wish later that I’d pitted them but also knowing that that was way better than tossing them after waiting too long to get around to it.

Today was the day. I was motivated. I found them. I covered four dinner plates with them to let them thaw fast.

For the record: pitting them from fresh is actually, probably, I think, easier.

But there is a 10″ pie in the oven from those hundreds and hundreds of small tart cherries and it smells divine.

And then, fingers dyed a bit pink, I realized what I’d done.

J’s white afghan, having needed the mill oils scoured out of its yarn so it can be its best, softest, half-cashmere self, is soapily soaking in the tub.

Daring those fingertips to come anywhere near it.