(Gee, how did we do visual puns before the ‘Net? And how many non-knitters are going, Huh?)

This is Chloe, aka C., one of the co-owners of Purlescence, where we had our knitting group meeting tonight (and where I was really, really, really hoping she’d show up. Funny, that.) One of the regulars was exclaiming, “She picked out the yarn last Friday?!” Well. Yeah. I didn’t offer her before that, so how was she going to do it sooner?

And this is tomorrow’s baby alpaca project in periwinkle.

Gotta be done by tonight if I don’t want to block it outside where… (See the bluejay shawl’s story, June 11 when the book comes out.) And I’m not going to put it in the oven to dry like Stephanie Pearl-McPhee did hers! Seventeen more rows, the bind-off, and a dentist appointment today. I think I can I think I can I think I can.

Twenty-eight rows yesterday: if that’s not a record for me, it’s real close. It felt a combination of, this is nuts, (as I applied ice mid-day), and, look at this! Why don’t I do this all the time?

Twenty 381-stitch rows done yesterday. (8.5×11″ book for scale.) Onward!

A younger friend of mine has found herself suddenly facing surgery that is emphatically Not Fun. I took a number of balls of yarn over for her to choose from on Friday, and she chose this one. I am trying hard to get her her shawl done fast, but at least she knows that I’m making it in a color she loves and that I’m thinking of her. She’s a knitter too, and has stroked my ego over and over by telling me how much she’s waiting for my book to come out, but by golly I’m going to beat her to it with a shawl from it myself rather than waiting for her to be able to when it comes out next month. It’s what I can do.

There’s a photo in the book of a number of balls of yarn together, all in different colors, with a light blue one dead center, a color I’d found very much on sale and the rest being ones I’d created from that light blue. What the picture doesn’t show is the scale of the things: the balls are all from 450-g cones of baby alpaca. The needles in the picture here are 32″ long.

In other words, I know I have enough yarn, absolutely. I have enough time, too, before the surgery date–as long as I make the time. Like I made the color. Just throw it in the dyepot of my life and make it happen.

…Running off to the needles now…

Briiiiiiing, briiiiiiing.

Hello?

Is this lisaknit.com?

Yes?

Yes, I’d like to order the merino pizza number six.

The merino/angora?

Yes.

What kind of toppings?

Oh, everything. Really make it a party.

Okay, so, perhaps you’d like the Mardi Gras, merino angora special?

Sounds good; what’s it got on it?

Well, we’ve got an organic blue cornmeal crust, sauteed orange and red heirloom peppers with baby eggplant, topped with our in-house pesto sauce and stone-baked with three-year-aged Wisconsin cheddar. And perhaps some pepperoni, if you’d care for that as well?

Yes, yes, that sounds wonderful.

Is that for here or to go?

Um, let me think, yeah, to go. It’ll definitely be able to go with just about everything. Yeah.

And how did you want to pay for that?

With size 10s, 53 stitches, and about eight or nine hours.

Very good! We’ll see you then.

‘Bye.

‘Bye.

(With apologies to the cute waiter at the Commodore Inn in New Orleans who actually flirted back with me the summer I was 16. I was smitten: with him, with the French Quarter, with the bouganvillea that draped itself luxuriously down the side of the buildings like cabled baby alpaca, with the horse-drawn carriages on the cobblestones, the whole thing.)

Stephanie Pearl-McPhee, on her well-loved yarnharlot.ca blog, asked today why publishers don’t often offer charts and text instructions both; was it cultural? The expenses involved?

The cost is a huge point; every page adds up. On the other hand, offering both greatly expands the audience, given that people tend to feel passionately about the method that they prefer.

When I first contacted Martingale Press, I told them upfront that I had visual memory damage, and that one of the effects of that was that my instructions were all going to be line-by-line; chart symbols were scrambled scribbles to my brain, but text, no problem. (To me, following line-by-line is like reading music, just moving the hands in another language.)

Martingale said sure, text is fine.

But after some time and some discussion, they felt they really did need to add charts, and that my instructions were short enough that they had the space. They asked Donna Druchunas, author of Arctic Lace and The Knitted Rug, if she would be willing to draw up those charts. She did. I will forever be grateful to her for that, and to be able to tell knitters that my “Wrapped in Comfort” book is accessible to both styles.

One more month and it’ll finally be out!

Maybe eight years ago?–I’m guessing here–Vogue Knitting sent me a please-subscribe come-on. I debated, wondered where they’d bought my address from, and then, always curious for new knitting ideas, sure, so, I did.

The first issue that came had nothing that interested me whatsoever, except one sweater: they had a Blast from the Past section, where they said they would be bringing back one classic design from much earlier editions of the magazine, starting with that one. Clearly they were going for the baby boomer nostalgia factor; they had originally published this pattern in 1969. It looked reeeeally familiar, it took me a few minutes to figure out why, it being in a different color on a different model, and then…

…My mom had owned the original copy! I’d made that sweater in high school in the mid-70’s!

My sweater was a miracle, really; I’d known nothing of gauge swatches, or if Mom had warned me to make one, I’d ignored her totally. I’m sure the weight of the yarn I’d bought bore little resemblance to the one called for; I’d just gotten what I liked that happened to be white like the one in the pattern. I winged it with the arrogance of youth that could see no reason why it wouldn’t work. And somehow it did!

It needed three zippers sewn in, however, and for that part I ran to Mom for help. I remember my good Mormon mom going and buying tea at the local Safeway to dye them when we couldn’t find the right color separating zipper for the front; my wondering if anybody saw her at it (buying tea! The horror! And yes, that’s very funny to me now: the self-consciousness of teenagers.) I remember watching the zipper tapes turning a soft beige in the little red enamel pot on the stove. She was as fascinated as I was at watching water bubbles that afternoon.

Mom told me that creating the actual pockets for the inside of the sweater and attaching them to the zipper tapes, however, was my problem. Which is why to this day you can unzip those pockets and find a whole lot of nothin’ goin’ on there.

That sweater was kind of my backup jacket in college. I haven’t worn it in ages, although it still fits; I’ve spared my sweet hubby the “does this make my butt look big” question, because it does, so, into the closet for you. (You know, though, I could dye it denim blue, and then it wouldn’t… Now, there’s a thought!) The zipper at the top needs a bit of resewing, and those silly pockets… It definitely needs a good cleaning. But there are no moth holes, and it’ll never really go out of style.

Which is something I like, but is a distinctly un-Vogue characteristic. I let the subscription go after that.

Last night, he hadn’t said anything, so I figured yonder blogminder hadn’t read the blog. So I opened the conversation as we sat down to dinner, with, “My pet gopher died today.”

You should have seen his face! “Your *WHAT*?!!!?”

And then we quickly moved on to other things. I’m posting these amaryllises in memoriam to the little animal. Richard did make a comment that had me suddenly realizing that the gardeners who come for maybe an hour a month happened to have come Tuesday, and they’d probably poisoned it. I once caught them spraying weeds between me and the neighbors, and I’d made it clear, I thought, that there was to be no poison in my yard. I guess they didn’t think that applied to gophers?

What I had been going to blog about yesterday before it showed up and acted cute was a tutorial on how to chop off lace without screaming and running. I had this project in Kidsilk Haze and Merino Oro that I’d started off doing, the Crohn’s flare had wiped me out, I’d put it down for most of a week and then when I’d picked it up I’d continued it *in the wrong pattern* without noticing until it was almost to a finished length. And then it suddenly hit me what I’d done. Oh my.

I was spending too much time outside in the sun yesterday, something I really can’t risk, which is one of the reasons I grabbed the kid and we went to Karen’s shop instead. While we were there, I mentioned about the goofed project and how I was going to just cut it off two rows before the change and undo it backwards just a bit from there and then cast off that end. When you’re frogging backwards, you have to pull the yarn through the last stitch in the row every time, which is a very good reason not to unravel the whole section in one uninterrupted strand.

Another customer in there immediately responded with an idea that should have been obvious to me: “Make it a pattern!”

I thought about it: she was right! The scarf was not quite long enough to call it done; all I had to do was repeat that beginning section at the other end. The midsection was similar enough anyway that a non-knitter might not even ever notice.

And now that I’ve done exactly that and liked it, the funny thing is that I’m sitting here debating which yarn and needles to repeat the whole scarf with to make the contrast show up more. It needs to be a denser knit. I like it!

(Picture snapped mid-frogging.)
A quarter ounce, five inches, let’s see, four ounces in the ball of Lisa Souza Mardi Gras merino/angora, that would come to 80″ long by 22″ wide, yeah, that’ll do… Except… I really didn’t like that one superfluous stitch there and that one there as the thing grew, they threw the balance off visually. And I wasn’t going to like them any better if I kept on going. They might not really have been that big of a deal, except that this was a new design idea that had been swimming around in my head for the next book–out!

(P.S. That last little bit of frogging is where I become a tad less enamored of my habit of wrapping the longtail cast-on strand across the back of each stitch along the entire first purled row. I always figure that when you give someone something you knitted them, you should give them enough matching yarn to go with it for them to be able to mend any future holes (or to bring it to you to do so). Now, who’s going to remember years in the future where they put that strand, if they even still have it? But if it’s stored right there across that row, it’s real easy to find, and there’s way more than you need for the task at hand of securing the end. See? Practical.

Till you have to frog the silly thing.)

I have a doctor (bless him!) who believes in being careful (it’s that white cell count thing) but very much in still going and living your life. So with his encouragement and the help of my friends, live today I most thoroughly did.

My friend Nancy and I drove up the gorgeous 280 freeway, with views of the unbroken and blooming springtime hillsides to the west, over the Golden Gate Bridge, and on up to Marin Fiber Arts in San Rafael. There, we met up with Warren, the owner, and Patricia (right) and Niki (left) with Nancy catching me just before I burst out laughing after she snapped the shot. Patricia had set up a cruise ship with how many knitters? Was it 60? And they disembarked in San Francisco, chartered a bus, drove to Warren’s shop, and generally created happily packed-in pandemonium. Niki and Patricia had wanted to meet me, I had wanted to meet them after being online friends with the two for I don’t know how long, so, hey!

Niki, by the way, is the one who knit me these socks awhile back.

You can tell I’m a newbie at this author thing: someone tried on one of my shawls, handed her camera to Nancy, and all I could hear with the background noise was that she’d asked for a picture. Nancy pointed the camera at me, which utterly confused me–she wanted a picture of her in the shawl, what are you doing? Nancy laughed, She wants a picture of you!

Me? Why? Oh, (duh), okay, (there’s still a part of me that will never truly get why, but okay.)

And when I got home, another Picotee amaryllis had opened up, just to top off the day. Thought I’d share.

When my lupus was first diagnosed, I read Norman Cousins’ book, “Anatomy of an Illness,” wherein he recounted dealing with a devastating illness by treating himself to funny movies and the like to make him laugh; you make use of all that the medical community has to offer, but, as the cliche reminds, laughter is awfully good medicine in itself, and he was determined to do the most he personally could to help himself recover.

He went on to add that when anything catastrophically upends your life like that, you need a creative outlet to cope. What that outlet might be is as infinite as humanity itself, but, you do emphatically need a creative outlet.

Reading his book helped propel me back into knitting. He was right about the need for creativity, and right about the laughter.

The last few days, I’ve had three of my kids home, and my nephew and his sweetie visiting (and dearly wishing my oldest and her husband were here to enjoy it all, too); there have been funny stories told, good memories shared, gentle teasings, and much, much laughter.

And all this while I’ve been dealing with a Crohn’s flare. Given that my options for treating Crohn’s are severely limited–steroids don’t touch mine–this is something that can be unsettling to me, to say the least. And yet. There is so much to celebrate around this home, and I’m so glad they’re here right now.

Laughter as an expression of great love: that, that is the best medicine of all. Whether the physical symptoms continue or not, it heals like nothing else can.

Some well-marinated stash French angora that I tripped across while trying to figure out just the thing to knit up quickly. Last night, as I asked the recipient what length she would like, she wondered out loud, Did it take you long? And I told her, I started after dinner. She’s a new knitter, and she just laughed.

It was 48″ long at that point. Fifteen stitches (gotta love that fluff factor) in a pattern I could do in my sleep (which I kind of need right now). Four balls, one more to go. She likes it! Hey Mikey!

I have wanted for years to knit an afghan for Jim and his family; they are dear friends, and Jim’s a second cousin to my husband. It was on that list of want-to-do’s that every knitter has but it had never quite happened yet, even though I knew just what it would be: either cream or green in basketweave, to match their cream and green plaid couch.

I blogged recently about finding the amaryllis bulb in the half-dark in the garage, shooting up a large bud, when I hadn’t watered the thing in enough months that it should have been dead–there’s just no way it should have been preparing to bloom big and beautiful like that. But it did. I took it over to Jim’s as a way of celebrating the life of his eight-year-old son, the one who had fallen 30 feet off the ski lift during spring break.

And there was Nicholas. With a handknit wool afghan. In basketweave, and a cream and green variegated yarn. I was speechless–who? How? Nicholas’s mom flipped the edge over for me to see the label: Linus Project. Someone had made this and donated it to the hospital in Reno, and the trauma unit had given it to Nicholas.

Someone had channeled my inner afghan. I don’t know who you are out there, but we wanted you to see this. Photo by Nicholas’s parents.