I know I said I pictured this with a mom with her baby in a highchair. What I didn’t say, since it hadn’t arrived yet and I didn’t want to spill the beanz, is, it’s actually for the grandmother, to represent a beautiful woman who works wonders with dyes and yarns–to look like how I imagine the backsplash around her stove would look like, in her dye-raj, as she calls her workplace. She and her husband just moved to a new home near their small grandson, up in the Sierra mountains. How could I have knit any pattern for her out of her yarn other than this one? Bigfoot. How perfect is that?

A shawl in a merino spun tight to have the resilience and bounce she needs as she copes with having done the right thing, having taken her aging mother into her home, on top of all the other changes that come with uprooting and moving her own household.

Lisa Souza, just so you know, your fan club is looking out for you. Have a great trip to the show in Santa Monica.

(P.S.  I should add, the Jellybeanz yarn was a gift from Lisa in the first place, and there was no possible better place it could have ended up.   Go Lisa!)

Come if you’re healthy… I’d love to sit and knit a spell with you.  Booksigning this Saturday, 3-4:30, Nine Rubies at 28 E 3rd Ave # 100 San Mateo, CA 94401  (650) 685-6205.

When most of your yarns are fingering or laceweight, and you want to work with something with more heft to it, combining yarns creates a chance to combine and play with color a bit. I find that the finished effect tends to be somewhat flatter than had it been knitted up in a single strand–and yet, the laceweights have more twists per inch in the spinning than a comparable worsted strand, so it seems to me to be less likely to pill in the finished project.

Yarns: Schaeffer Yarn’s handpainted “Anne,” Elann’s “Baby Silk” in Sapphire, and random stash 90/10 silk/cashmere that I dyed royal blue ages ago.

This is the first year we’ve had a good crop of apples on our Fuji tree I planted awhile ago: I crumbled egg shell bits around the base of the trunk in the spring, and the snails couldn’t climb it at night to eat the blossoms. The next thing to watch out for is the squirrels, who like to arrive just before the apples are ripe and pick one, eat one bite, throw it down, and try out the next one till they’ve gone through and stripped the whole tree, looking for that one perfect Fuji. Everybody’s a gourmet in northern California. They get the hormonal twitch to eat big, thinking winter’s coming, in a climate that doesn’t get cold enough for them to ever hibernate, and in the feasting process some of them grow to the size of small cats. It can be amusing to watch the telephone lines sway under their weight.

There’s a metaphor here to Stephanie’s worries about a “wool blight,” and how one must gather up all the wool yarn one can jam into one’s closets, under one’s bed, and down the arms of whatever jackets the kids have grown out of/haven’t grown into yet for storing it. I plead guilty, at least to the closets part.  But then, that means I had just the right shade of green for Erin to choose from when I offered her her choice out of four or five giant balls of the green baby alpaca I had, to get her started knitting; I like to call it my yarn library in there.

Lisa Souza’s new yarn, Hardtwist Petite in superwash merino wool, two balls, my Bigfoot pattern. It’s sproingy, a yarn with good tensile strength, and practical for a new mom who doesn’t have time to worry about the fragility of laceweight.  The little overall splashes of color–well, once she starts feeding her baby in a highchair, she’ll understand why that belongs in her shawl.

My daughter’s friend from college came out to visit us, spend a few days sightseeing, and then they’re driving back to school together.   We were all sitting around talking last night, when I picked up my shawl project and started knitting away, eyes barely glancing at my project.  After awhile, she said, “You know, I should be doing something too.”  She knew how to crochet; and now, with some baby alpaca to help keep up the enthusiasm, she knows how to knit!

I was talking to Tina Newton of Blue Moon Fiber Arts on the phone the other day. (How’s that for name-dropping and borrowing some coolness factor. Go Tina!) I was just curious… Among other things, I had bought a skein of Rock Creek-colorway bamboo yarn to play with and make a scarf; that wouldn’t be named after…? Would it?

She laughed, and said, “There must be a Rock Creek in every state. But, yes.”

I grew up next to Cabin John Regional Park. My husband, in the next town over, grew up two blocks from Rock Creek Park, which runs a very long way through DC and along the DC/Maryland line. Tina had named this colorway after that creek. Turns out, she grew up two miles down the road from where I did.

It’s a delightfully small world out there.

If a tree falls on a house, and nobody hears it, is the roof still damaged?  (Actually, I don’t think so.  I hope not.)

Two in-progress top-down circular shawls I’m doing. On the left: Lisa Souza’s Jellybeanz colorway in baby alpaca, which I’m knitting for me to match the socks Jasmin gifted me with, and on the right, the same dyelot done in Hardtwist Petite superwash merino sock yarn. The colors are brighter and the splashes more pronounced in the HP, and with this particular merino, the background is a tad yellower than the baby alpaca. I had not thought of the alpaca one as being pinkish till I put the two together.

The Hardtwist Petite is sproingy, bouncy, resilient, soft, and with the superwash aspect, it’s practical for where it’s going. It can get sneezed on, tripped over, you name it, and the recipient won’t have to worry about its being too delicate to touch. Plus, it’s just plain pretty, and would go with a whole lot of clothes.

I think I need to go buy some speckled jelly beans to put in a jar to send with it when I’m done.

When Nancy showed me these two colors she was thinking of putting together, I wasn’t quite entirely sure. Jaggerspun Zephyr in this slightly mustardy orange and this brighter, deeper-orange Gentle supersoft superthin merino laceweight from The Yarn Place. But knitted up! We blocked it at my house yesterday, and she picked it and me up to take to Purlescence for knitting night tonight. I wish I’d gotten a shot of it on her, because the Zephyr just glowed golden within the orange, especially with its silk content and in the rays of the late sun. It was as if she were wearing those rays themselves. It was absolutely stunning on her.

Colors are like people: they can bring out the best in each other, sometimes in surprising ways.

I got a package in the mail the other day that was a complete surprise: from Martingale? What?… Opening it up, I found this: a copy of my book, signed by everybody there. From the CEO on down to the shipping clerk.  With a cover note mentioning how Martingale felt every person there was important to their success, and congratulating me on such a fine book.

I cannot tell you how much I lucked out when I decided to send my book proposal to them. (That’s the photographer’s signature alone on the next page; I like how it goes with the expression on the model’s face: “Here’s looking at you, kid.”

In real life, the baby alpaca background is closer to a natural than a bleached-white effect, but this is the start of playing with Lisa Souza’s Jellybeanz in the laceweight.

I went to Amy Singer’s booksigning at Purlescence on Saturday, and my friend Jasmin, the one who gave me the Jellybeanz socks, showed up; I showed her this, from yarn Lisa made me to match the socks, and she was delighted. Amy, meantime, was wonderful, like I knew she would be, and I’m very glad of the chance to get to meet her. I introduced Jasmin to her as the one who had driven all the way to Petaluma so I could get to see Stephanie. Since Amy had had no idea who I might be when I’d come in, we all laughed about all of us being on a one-name basis now, right?

And if you want a good book re working with animal fiber-free yarns, “No Sheep For You” is definitely the way to go.

In the book, I mention that for my top-down circular shawls, I double the strand for the cast-on. Now, the thing is, I figured out about halfway through the book production process that I needed to do that, having already knitted dozens of shawls. (I made duplicates: one for the friend, one for the publisher, one for the friend, one for the publisher. Picture pulling the petals off a clover: she loves me, she loves me n…oh wait, never mind, doesn’t apply–Martingale is absolutely wonderful.) I did not specify to their photographer which were the New Improveds, so there were closeups of the single stranded necks as well as the doubled ones.  So I wanted to reassure those who haven’t been sure how well that neck would hold up that if you *do* do that doubled strand, and then weave the doubled-strand ends through the back of every purl stitch on Row 1, it gives you a braided effect that works out particularly well.

Meantime, yesterday I received a large skein of Lisa Souza’s baby alpaca laceweight from lisaknit.com in Jellybeanz, to match the handspun socks Jasmin gave me from Lisa’s roving. The pink will have to wait its turn, because, right now, my needles are loving the Jellybeanz more. I’ve never had handknit socks to match a shawl before. Too cool!

And a little more playing with various ideas…  The end result is a new stitch pattern I haven’t seen before.   It was worth it.

Now, back in the day, when I had no clue how to make, much less purl into, a yarnover, I photocopied a number of lace patterns out of various books in the library that I thought were beautiful and that I wanted to make someday. I felt that by having them on hand it would inspire me to persevere in my efforts to figure out how to do this.

This was a goodly while ago.

So. I found this one page the other day. Don’t remember it. Nice pattern. No idea what book it came from, and no way to know. Clearly quite old. I translated it into the abbreviations I’m more comfortable working from, and set to work knitting it as the main body of a circular shawl I’d started.

Our friends Nina and Rod and my hubby and I were once in San Francisco spending the day walking around playing tourist, and at the achingly gorgeous Martin Luther King Jr Memorial, http://www.yerbabuenagardens.com/features/gardens.html#2 you get a lovely view of the downtown skyscrapers. There is one odd one (not in those pictures; I haven’t found one of it quite yet) that has what looks like layers of ladyfinger cookies around the bottom part of it, a bit of whimsy amidst all the metal and glass. I always wanted to knit that; at the time, I was thinking Kaffe Fassett style in multicolors. I later saw I think it was a Horst Schulz modular knitting pattern that pretty well captured it–cool!

And here it was in lace. Perfect. Barbara Walker has a simplified version, but this one had the width and the heft to it that I wanted.

I did just a few rows, with an increasing sense of dragging my feet that just made no sense. You know, dear, you really should swatch that before doing 400 stitches per row across. Get the feel of it, at least, right?

Like I don’t know how to knit lace already?

I finally gave into the insistence, set my shawl aside, and did that silly swatch like I knew I should have in the first place. There were 20 rows in the pattern. At row 12, all hell broke loose. I doublechecked–no, I hadn’t changed anything in my rewrite, I was knitting exactly what it said. Whoever had transcribed that thing from her notes must have been interrupted by a small child falling down the stairs or by her elderly husband having a heart attack, or something–it would have to have been something drastic like that to have had that kind of a result: there is no connection between the first half and the second half of those instructions. No connection to the picture. No connection to the stitch count. What on earth? She must have mashed two totally different patterns together?

The end result is I spent three hours swatching, trying, tweaking, trying to redesign the thing, because as long as I was doing that I might as well make it the 20 stitch repeat I wanted rather than the 19 it claimed, right? (The obvious thing would have been to reknit the shawl yoke to match the other versions of the pattern I could find or easily make, but I didn’t do that.) I frogged, I knitted, I frogged, I knitted, and in the end, the frogs won this round because I can’t stand to look at it anymore for now.

To misquote Dorothy Parker, this xerox needed not to have been set aside lightly, but to have been hurled across the room with great force. Watch out for that paper airplane, here it comes.

(p.s. You know, I probably ought to delete this post so as not to scare off laceknitter-wannabe’s. Go with Barbara Walker’s stitch treasuries, you’re safe. She cleaned up an awful lot of old mistakes in old patterns.)

Yesterday, Nancy, Gracie Larsen, and I headed over to a yarn store neither Gracie nor I had been to before. The Yarn Place, yarnplace.com, imports its own line of laceweight merino and sells it to Purlescence, my favorite LYS, but I’d never gone directly to the source. Gracie is the founder of the Lace Museum and the Lacy Knitters Guild, so of course she was interested.

I stood there in the shop looking at some gorgeous, exquisitely soft (and I’m picky) Angel, a superthin superfine laceweight in superwash merino (okay, cue Charlie Brown appearing with the dog dish and Snoopy dancing: it’s sup sup supertiiiiiiime).  It was just the most perfect shade of raspberry.  No way was that not going home with me.

Meantime, I had asked about their colors, and Nancy’s showing something knitted up from one of the balls in this lineup–which makes it so I really can call this a photo of a stitch kabob.