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.

Thursday at the booksigning at Purlescence, my friend Jasmin mentioned that Constance was making the drive down for the weekend.

Turns out, Jasmin had just bought a new house, and it needed a lot of work; the place had been left in terrible shape when the previous owner had passed away. Lots of her friends were coming to pitch in, scrubbing floors and walls, playing barnraising, and one of them was Constance, the same Constance I mentioned in my book; she had a three-hour drive down from the Gold Country. Any excuse to get together anyway, and this was a great one.

Saturday morning, my phone rang; did I want to be kidnapped? Heck yeah! Much though I would dearly love to, I’m not up to much when it comes to being useful, but I was greeted with huge hugs and Constance told me I was to be the decoration to the festivities, and that was that. So here, in a moment of total karma, is Constance reaching to rearrange knitting books just so while adding more on Jasmin’s bookshelf. Note the four Barbara Walker stitch treasuries to the left of her hand: the important stuff first.

But what I didn’t expect was that when I exclaimed over Jasmin’s pair of handspun socks she had sitting on a shelf in a basket, from Lisa Souza’s Jellybeanz roving, Jasmin said they were too small for her. My feet were 6.5? Here, try them on!

Thus giving new meaning for my feet to the term housewarming present, when the air conditioning kicked on briskly. Oh. My. These are wonderful. Wow.  Thank you!

Or Cinderella. Glinda the good witch calling, this definitely feels like one for the fairy godmothers. It does go through a wedding ring, but that doubled-strand cast on at the neck means it has to be my husband’s ring rather than mine, and it’s careful going, but it does go.

We used to have a little kid’s magic wand with a silver star at the top in the Halloween costume box. And a turkey-feather white halo headband. If only.

Although, given that this shawl is going to be a wedding present, I’m not too sure the bride would really go for that anyway.

If anybody wants a signed copy of Wrapped in Comfort, they can order it from purlescenceyarns.com and I’ll come into their shop and inscribe it. This Thursday evening, though, I’m going to do a little more; I’m going to show up with a whole bunch of shawls for an official booksigning and trunk show event there. Please, no sniffles, for those coming; it would be highly appreciated.

This shawl is done in Blue Moon’s Geisha line (which they carry), a non-furry kid mohair/silk/nylon blend. My only problem is, I love the colorway. But how do I–I mean, can you imagine a more intense disconnect… I like to write about the ways knitting helps create connections between people and how giving of our handiwork can forge friendships. This colorway is called Backstabber. I would love to know the story behind that name!

Maybe I’ll have to keep this one?

One note in response to a comment the other day: handpaint yarns go well with simpler lace; lots of variations in the colors will visually overwhelm the stitch pattern. The Monterey shawl in my book is one that I would very much recommend a solid or near-solid-color yarn for. It is complicated enough to work without having the jellyfish look like they got put in the blender while you’re trying to piece them together.

You remember the Dr. Seuss story of Bartholemew Cubbins and his 100 hats? He kept taking his hat off to the king as protocol required, only to have an identical one appear on his head, over and over. Finally, as the count got close to 100, the hats started changing and becoming more and more unique and more fun to see what might be coming next.

I think every creative person can relate to that one. You have to put in the practice time before you can play the instrument like a pro, but then you can really take off with it. (I am remembering a neighbor mom, who, when I was a teenager, often hired me to babysit her 10-year-old while the kid practiced her violin and their poodle howled non-stop. Smart mom.) You don’t start off with the stradivarius. Although, the Julia shawl, for instance, while aimed at beginners, is a beautiful rendition of Chopsticks (not to mention a simple carry-around project for anybody).

I’m hitting the Cubbins factor, and have started branching out more. This one is a wedding present for a dear friend and his bride. I can’t wait to finish it and pull it through my ring, so I can go, tadaah: a wedding ring shawl! If by wild chance there’s any problem, then I’m glad my husband wears a size 12; no one said whose wedding ring it had to be, right? But I’m sure it’ll go through mine. And the bride’s, which is what matters for that oh cool! factor.

Almost done. I can’t wait!

Some of us at Creative Hands in Belmont…

…And what my family had waiting for me when I got home. I love’em.

I’ve been terrible about announcing booksignings due to fear of exposure/chemo issues, but I’ll be at Creative Hands in Belmont at 1:00 today. Meantime, here’s a picture I just got of Karen Brayton-McFall, owner of the Rug and Yarn Hut in Campbell, from my signing there.

I came to look at my shawl patterns, because of that day of testing at UCSF, in a way I hadn’t before.

When they sent me to the room for the full-body scan, the technician was six months pregnant. We got to talking, and I found myself telling her I had had four kids–and then adding, “And a miscarriage.”

Now, that’s not something I usually talk about, much less mention to a woman who’s expecting. But somehow it felt like the right thing to say.

Was it my first? Yes. She told me she’d miscarried her first at five months. “Five months!” I exclaimed. Yes. This, then, would be their first child.

Mine had been at about four months. She knew then that she could tell me about it, and I would know, and I did: the sense of holding back just a bit, the slight wariness at the possibility of great loss repeated, the need to hold one’s child, arrived safe and sound and healthy. She was relieved to hear from an older mom that I’d gone through that and gone on to have four healthy kids just fine. And this from someone later diagnosed with lupus and Crohn’s!

The next morning I woke up to the mental image of a nursing mother with one of my circular shawls wrapped around her and over the baby for those moments in public. The green hand-painted merino one that I’d knitted to convey my impressions of the kelp forest at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. Another image came, of the baby wrapped up in that shawl in the chilly San Francisco fog. For a mom who had suffered such a great loss, but who had so much joy ahead of her–pain and joy intensify each other, but it does go both ways–yes. I love how happy the colors are in this, and how good they would look on her. I had felt for quite some time that this shawl was waiting for me to meet its recipient. It would be someone petite. She is. I hadn’t considered that it would be someone expecting, and so deserving of, great joy. Now I have met her. It’s perfect.

I had to call the researcher first to ask the woman’s name again, I didn’t quite remember, and I couldn’t just mail it off to “that nice person.” But I will always remember how she made me feel: she’s such a beautiful soul. And now it’s ready to go.

And I wish I could come hold the baby too when it comes, truth be told. I remember.

That last post was a tad breathless, but you can imagine I was pretty excited; I’d been going to take that paper to the recycling bin for the evening, and just happened to open it up to where I saw that article. Very cool.

Nontoxic mosquito-repellent bracelets will make me a happy camper. Yarn, however, is to make the whole world happier if I had my way.  I am saving the first email I got after my book was released from someone telling me about the shawl they felt inspired to go start on for someone they loved.  That’s it exactly.  Go knitters!

There are some lovely reviews of Wrapped in Comfort up on Amazon, and I thank those of you who have written them. One, though, describes my shawls as all of them being half-circles. Not to quibble, but to explain, there is a half circle shawl, but this is more of what you’re going to find in there.  This is Water Turtles, the smaller version, done in fingering weight baby alpaca/silk.

My sister-in-law is running in a marathon to raise money for breast cancer, and so is for a brief time on my side of the country; yesterday she drove from Sacramento down here for a visit–not a trivial amount of driving time, and much appreciated. I had two shawls I’d been wanting for quite some time to have her pick one from in person. Actually, no, more than those, but those were the two I was sure she would like the best.

I hauled out a whole bunch of ziploc bags, started opening them, and she immediately loved the two I’d most anticipated she would. She picked the one made from this baby alpaca yarn, and I was pleased that she was getting one that was in a yarn that I’d dyed. She asked about the pattern, and I told her the story of the Water Turtles and gave her a copy of Wrapped in Comfort. Oh! She told me about her friend who had so much loved turtles. They had recently scattered his ashes…. There was a moment of pain and love in her face. And delight that she had somehow picked the turtle-related shawl, a way to hold him close to her thoughts and not have him be gone.

I was so focused on spending every last moment with her that I could that I utterly forgot the camera. Which is as it should be.

(Ed. to add: the photo is a bit hazy close up, and clearer to the view as you get farther away from it. As so much of life is, especially the parts involving loss. I rather like the photo. It fits.)

A detail edited out of Wrapped in Comfort for the sake of space: Dave’s astonishment at being offered a full berry box’s worth of strawberries at dessert. I had bought a case at a farmstand, my rebellion against New Hampshire’s refusal to give up the cold weather at Easter. He had never before considered a pint of strawberries and a person to be a one-on-one possibility.

I thought of that just now as I offered my son a large bowl, like this one, but full of sliced strawberries ready to eat, and his eyes got big as he asked, “All for me?” You betcha. Happy Fourth.

Photo by Renee, Saturday at Marin Fiber Arts; go to  http://www.revknits.blogspot.com/ for her blog.  This is what the Constance shawl looks like if you do it in a single-color yarn. It took me about 17-18 hours to knit it in this fingering-weight baby alpaca.

One note on the book: I did the smaller version of the Water Turtles shawl several times exactly as it is written in the book, a generously-sized example being Sandi’s shawl shown here: https://spindyeknit.com/2007/03/page/2/ While knitting the one that was photographed for the book, however, I skipped rows 30 and 32 in the yoke, making a slightly shorter yoke. Either way works fine.

I had to laugh at Sheila’s comment (thank you, Sheila!) Yesterday, as I was signing and had three stacks of books in front of me (sitting properly in a chair, no less, that should count for something, right?) a woman approached and asked if I were the author of (mumble, mumble, I didn’t quite catch it) and someone else explained to her that no, I was the author of “Wrapped in Comfort.” (You know, the book that was all over that table?)

Oh, well, then. And she hastily retreated. I got quite a laugh out of the ego check, while wishing I’d caught whose book it was she’d wanted me to be the author of so I could go tell them they had a fan. And if you read this, whoever you are out there, thank you; I quite enjoyed that, I hope you don’t mind my mentioning it.

Meantime, many here know that I’ve been on a quest to knit a lace scarf for every woman at my church–my “ward,” ie, congregation in Mormon-speak. I’ll never finish, because I live in an area where university students are always moving in and out, and that’s just fine with me.

But one old-time regular didn’t have hers yet. I wasn’t sure quite what to do there. She wouldn’t know about all these scarves popping up all over the place unless someone said something, and I didn’t know if… B is blind. Scarves, in our climate, are purely for decoration, and how useful is that if you can’t see it? Could it be a potential hazard, even; dunno. But I finally went out and bought some brushed baby alpaca yarn from Plymouth, figuring well, the softer the better, definitely, and something useful and warm would be the only way to go, for cooler mornings when she’s walking her guide dog. I could just picture her fingers deciphering the diamonds in the pattern, and wondered if it might convey something Braille-ish to her; I had no idea.

The needles were huge–13s–and the thing made my hands ache. It drove me nuts that it took me three weeks to finish the thing. Pick it up, do a few rows, bag it and go do something else more comfortable. Gradually it got there, though. Part of the delay I’m sure was that she had a chronic cough after a bad bout of pneumonia, and I with my severe immune problems had no desire to get too close to that.

But today I finally had it fingertip length and ready to go, so I sat down by her for a moment and explained about going out and shopping for the softest yarn I could find for her. About noticing what colors she wore most often to church, and going out and matching them. I pulled it out of my purse, and her German Shepherd was instantly on his feet and all nose, right there–he’d never met an animal like that, show him more! B, however, as soon as she found out I was talking about a scarf, shook her head, saying, emphatically, “I don’t wear scarves.” End of subject. Class dismissed.

And you know? That’s perfectly fine. But the offer, at least, had needed to be made.

Her dog, however, was, I’m sure, quite disappointed.

I had a high school English teacher who never knew the impact he had on me and on my writing: if your name is Mr. Smith and you taught at Winston Churchill in Potomac, Maryland till you left to go get your doctorate, thank you, wherever you are now. One memorable moment was immediately on the first day of class, when he looked over the gathered students sitting quietly in their chairs after the bell had rung, and just kind of went, wow. Then he explained to us that when he’d started teaching, the kids didn’t come in and sit at their desks–that was too establishment. That was Not Done. It was the late 60’s, and they sat on the floor instead.

My friend Nancy and I were at Marin Fiber Arts today, up north of San Francisco, and at one point in the afternoon, it seemed the most natural thing in the world to do just to plunk down on the floor and pull out my knitting along with everybody else. This photo was shot as I was brought another book to sign, a bit after I’d done the others.

Mr. Smith would have loved it. And a very good time was had by all. I can see why my friend Patricia goes out of her way to come to MFA: it’s a well-stocked, wonderful store, with a huge selection of yarns that appeal to one’s sense of touch as well as one’s sense of colors, and Warren, the owner of http://www.marinfiberarts.com/ , is a peach.