I remember reading once that the color royal purple was, anciently, derived from mollusks, and that it took something like 10,000 of them to produce a pound’s worth of dye; hence, the only people who could afford it was royalty. We, in our day, being able to buy clothing of any color whatsoever, have no idea how privileged we are. I’m sure one could overdye indigo on top of brick-red madder root–and I have seen ancient Egyptian cloth that still had a touch of madder redness to it, thousands of years later–and get a brownish-tinged variant. But a true purple would have been vanishingly rare. (There are natural dyers out there who know far more on the whole subject than I.)

There are artisans in South America who still go to the shore, gather sea snails, squeeze the purple out of them, and then put them back. It washes out of their cloth to a soft lavendar over time, I am told.

At Stitches West a year ago, I bought a half pound hank of Lisa Souza’s handdyed alpaca laceweight dyed in Shade Garden, a soft purple/green/blue mix. I dyed some Misti baby alpaca laceweight in lilac last fall and knitted the two strands together into Kristine’s shawl; recently I took some light blue merino lace yarn to the rest of the hank and made the second one shown here.

I put it on, after blocking it, and felt like royalty indeed wearing Lisa’s work.

First, let me say that by a combination one particular day of chance and of decision on my part–and then hers–this woman and I became friends in an instant, and all was healed. Enough said: I don’t want anyone to realize, oh, her! It’s been 20 years and long gone.

We had just moved 3333 miles, as the moving company bills, and went to church for the first time in our new ward. We had moved from one that had 40 toddlers under the age of four to one that was mostly elderly people and had very few children of any age. Being in a strange place, ours, ages 11 months, 33 months, and just shy of five, were–well, reasonably good and not crying that first day, but not totally silent through the whole meeting, either. They were little kids, plain and simple. Actually, I thought they did a pretty good job of being quiet.

I of all people should understand, and do, what background noise does to make a meeting difficult to follow for older folks with any kind of hearing impairment. I have also learned that sometimes that’s just the way it is, after the hearing aids and the lipreading classes and the what-all-else. You learn patience.

Afterwards, a woman we had of course never laid eyes on before came up to us and gave us what-for for our having disrupted the meeting with our little ones, and ordered us to haul them out next time.

This was absolutely not your normal meet-the-new-folks greeting one encounters in a Mormon church! We managed not to say a stony, Welcome to the ward to you too?

Like I say, there’s a follow-up story, and she, who at the time, it turned out, was going through terrible things in her life that I have never had to go through, and I, eventually became good friends. It required a conscious looking for the good and wanting to move forward. But we both did.

But the flip side to that day, and the reason I tell the tale, is what came from it. It had been one of those moments that epitomizes how small children can be very unwelcome from time to time simply because of who they are, and the hugeness of that encounter in my life to me just then as a thoroughly-isolated stranger made a radical difference to me: I didn’t want any young mom to ever feel like I felt right then. Ever. I wanted every small child to feel treasured and welcomed. So when there’s a new mom at church, I make a point of celebrating her little ones. There’s always a smile and, should it be helpful, a knitted finger puppet in the purse to cheer them and charm their parents.

The last two weeks, there was a woman with a husband and a one-year-old who had just moved in, and I noticed her outfit: bright red, both weeks. Got that color in my stash, cool, so I knitted her a lace scarf from the ball pictured above. Today I gave it to her, putting it in her hands with, “This is just a little bit of cashmere and silk I made for you.” She was wearing a different dress this time, but again it was bright red; clearly a favorite.

She was stunned, she was delighted with the color, she was thrilled at having been noticed when she didn’t really know anybody yet, and thrilled that she mattered to someone enough that I would spend the time and that kind of fiber on her. Every emotion I had hoped she would feel in the moment I gave it to her, she felt. It was intensely gratifying, and a strong reminder of why I do this.

And I have to say, I am grateful that that older woman took out her frustrations on us, all that time ago. Because of how important it made it to me to actively do the opposite. And especially because I know that now, she would want to be having that same positive effect herself; she grew and changed over the years and became a much happier person. And that is something to celebrate most of all. I am so glad and so relieved that I did not lose myself in my hurt and turn away from her and the possibilities she had to offer of friendship after all.

(Last year’s amaryllis, blooming again, late in the season under the skylight in the bathroom.)

I have a friend I owe several favors to, who picked me up last night to carpool to our knitting group. Remember when I posted about bold and red and big? I thought I had just her color. Yeah, well: without showing what they looked like, size or width or pattern or anything, just the colors–because color is everything–I offered her that or that spring green scarf I’d just finished. I kind of pushed the red a bit, I realize in retrospect.

“Well, I really like the green,” she answered. Green it was, and it looked perfect on her. I’m so glad she got what she really liked! Didn’t take long for those lace-knit leaves to go to the right person.

Awhile ago, I bought one skein of Misti baby suri alpaca/silk, knowing that was emphatically not my shade of green, but somehow, it just leaped into my hands anyway. Yesterday, the first day of spring, it leaped onto my needles immediately after the red one and danced up and down, going, me! Me! Maybe it was how the color matched the new leaves outside. I have learned to just go with it, that I will find out soon enough why I needed to have a project in exactly that color ready to go, for… ? Part of the fun is in the anticipation, waiting for the rest of the story to come to be. Right now, I don’t have a clue. Who are you out there that this demanded to be knitted for, that the yarn wouldn’t let me be till I did?

One more scarf, ready to block and send on its way. Somehow, for the first day of spring, it needed to be in a bright color to celebrate.

I had just one skein of a bright red baby alpaca fingering weight from Pacific Meadows Alpacas, bought at Stitches. I had someone for whom it was just the right color–but there wasn’t enough of it. Unless… I put it together with some Jaggerspun Zephyr in garnet, and–perfect! Make it thicker=bigger needles=stretches farther.

I learned via Kaffe Fassett years ago to look at yarns with an eye towards putting two slightly different colors together to create a third. In this case, the silk content and the lighter color of the Zephyr really sets off the PMA’s red.

I don’t remember that I’ve knitted Barbara Walker’s English Lace before; her much-simpler English Mesh lace, which makes for good carrying-around knitting, certainly. Unblocked, this one seemed like an awful lot of extra work to get the same look; blocked, it was, oh, now I see! English Lace is unusual in that it has places where you treat a yarnover in such a way that, instead of creating a large round hole, you’re creating one with a slash through it–kind of an anti-lace warning sign, with its appropriately red slash mark through the circle. Cute.

Three repeats, 27 stitches, size 7mm needles, 7.5″ wide x 53″ long as it lies flat on the floor. Started last night a little before dinner, cast off at one minute after midnight. For a friend who likes bold and red and big (I wish I’d bought a second skein! But it’ll do.)

I came across a poorly-worded, complicated lace pattern that I really liked and wanted to incorporate into one of the shawls for my book. I’m certainly no beginner, but there was a definite disconnect between what it said and what the results I wanted would be.

I thought of a friend who can knit lace in circles around me (hi, Chris!) and wished it were a time and day I could reach her. But it shouldn’t be so hard… But it was hard, definitely. I thought in frustration, I don’t GET it!!

And found myself, to my surprise, instantly thinking about my Grandmother Jeppson. I had barely known her before she’d passed away. She had headed her local Red Cross chapter’s knitting group during WWII, and once wrote that she felt that if she could just knit enough fast enough for the troops it would somehow bring her three sons home sooner. (They all made it back okay.) Grandmother.

Suddenly, it felt somehow as if she were standing right there over my shoulder. I looked down at the work in my hands. There was a sense of brightening and then a delighted, Oh! I GET it!! I immediately did that pattern in full, correctly, despite the typos and problems in the original. I did it!

I never did put that pattern in my book, though; how to do what I did was not easy to describe, and if my write-up turned out not greatly better than the original, how on earth exactly would I send my grandmother to go help others out?

Every piece of our handknitting carries a history of our days within it.

Sandi is one of the co-owners of Purlescence, and the person who gifted me with that lightweight, collapsible scooter recently. How do you thank someone who offers you your mobility back? I went into her shop last week and bought (among other things) four skeins of Kidsilk Haze and a matching Alpaca With A Twist’s Fino baby alpaca/silk laceweight. I loved how the two strands played off each other.

My son’s doctor blithely told him he would be home within two to three hours after his arthroscopic shoulder surgery. Three hours after, he still had a breathing tube down him, out cold. I knitted and knitted and knitted Sandi’s yarn, keeping the generosity of her spirit present in every stitch as I did. I knit his recovery into those stitches, and of course, he’s fine; it just took patience and time. Like (what else) knitting.

Three days ago, I showed my friend Nancy what I had so far. It was a guess exactly how much the lace would stretch downwards once I blocked it. I thought I had enough; Nancy said no, keep going. So I did a few more pattern repeats, mostly to keep Nancy happy. Then, as long as I was at it, what the heck, I kept working till I was about out of yarn. I blocked it, checked it over, and thought, Great. Now I just knew it was going to be way too long; Sandi is emphatically not a tall person. Twenty-seven inches–on her?

Nancy gave me a lift over to our first time at Purlescence’s knitting group last night. Before we headed off, I showed her the shawl. I was sure I’d blown it, and I told her I was going to start over with another yarn I’d bought from Sandi, so she’d have a shawl that wouldn’t just totally swamp her.

Nancy said, You made this for Sandi. The color will be perfect on her. She will love it. Give this one to her.

You know how sometimes someone with some sense says just what you need to hear?

Yeah. Sandi loved it. Like there was a question?

This is Edgar.

The cop, who’d only been a block away, leaned in the window of my car, where the change drawer and the glove compartment were thrown open and the contents spewed and the mirror completely skewed sideways, and whistled, “He hit you hard!” I have no memory of the second impact, just of a sense of flying airborne through a crazily-kaleidoscoped Alice-in-Wonderland scene. Somebody far away screamed. It was possibly me–I honestly don’t know. Seatbelts, but no airbags: we had held onto the ’88 Accord for teaching our teenagers how to drive without ever worrying about scratches and bumps.

I arrived for my first appointment for testing that was to try to pinpoint where my brain and visual damage was and to set up a therapy program tailored around that.

Rob came into the waiting room. I had the blue version of the Strawberry Pie shawl in my hands, a shimmery silk/wool mix, the one pictured on my website, and to my delighted surprise, he took a moment to admire it and to say how much he loves it when people create something by hand. It was the day before the first anniversary of 9/11, and yet somehow he was fully focused on his patient and fully there for me. I was charmed.

He then put me through the various tests he had at hand, wrote up his recommendations, and handed me off to the person who was to do those therapy sessions.

But that hour and a half with him had a tremendous impact on me: because, not having ever laid eyes on me before, it mattered deeply to him how I did, and he hoped I might recover my balance. His was a warm and soft touch to a hard time in my life. He had no way of knowing, but my accident was the least of it to me just then.

And so, I went back to that office later with a sheep, twin to this one.

I’d gone to a handweavers’ conference and bought, by feel, the softest kid mohair fleece that Buckeye Farm had had in their booth. When I chose it, the owner picked it up in its bag, exclaimed, “Oh! Edgar!” and rubbed a handful of the locks blissfully against her cheek before parting with it. Edgar was her pet, and now I got to go home with his fleece, which was finer and softer than most cashmeres. She tried to show me how to spin it so that the ends of the locks would fluff out a bit from the yarn. Cool.

The brown is baby alpaca, the eyes cashmere. I had two weeks before my next appointment. I wanted a way to tell Rob:

That he heals the people around him in ways he could never know, by who he is and how he holds them in great tenderness in his work. He had no idea I had a friend dying the day I walked into his office, and another friend’s son had just passed. That my own daughter, with ITP, the autoimmune equivalent of hemophilia, had had her platelets drop by 25 to 25 that week, and since she was away at college, I wasn’t sure I’d ever see her again. My accident was the least of my worries just then. But it was all he knew about.

But somehow, through the gentle words and motions with which he put me through those tests, he made me come away feeling like it would all come out okay. There might be loss, but I could bear up under it now.

Feed my sheep. So I knitted up Edgar into an Edgar for him. I found a card with a beautiful Ansel Adams photograph and quoted that phrase for him: saying, to me, it means, look out for one another. Be there for each other. I thanked him for helping me deal with far more than he could possibly have known, simply by who he was.

And I gave him, as a testimony to the power of his goodwill, the sheep I had knitted for him out of the Buckeye Farm’s kid mohair fleece and two other, nameless animals.

Technical notes on construction: yes, Afton, I made this second one so I could write up the pattern for you, and then I promptly lost the piece of paper before I could enter it in the computer. The bottoms of the legs are single crochet, eight stitches, with the knitted stitches picked up and worked up from there. Bulky yarn, as small needles as you can comfortably work it on, you want it good and dense. The legs are worked separately and put aside, then the main body knitted, adding the legs on as you go. Robert’s was done starting at the tail end. Note that it is far more fun to look at a sheep’s face than its butt as you’re knitting–so I did this one face first. Attach the eyes before you stuff the face with wool roving. Ears are done with short-rowing. One other thing: I tried to make a third sheep with the color scheme reversed, got the head done, and it looked like a Mexican Day of the Dead festival participant. It freaked me quietly out, much though I assured myself it did not, and I never finished it.

The last time I was in that office, Rob showed me his sheep, perched happily at the top of his cubicle for everybody to see. Ansel Adams was on his desk.

Picture a jack-in-the-box: the closer you get to the end of the tune as you crank the handle round and round, the more intense the pressure building up inside, until at last the box bursts open and the clown jumps out at you.

It was like that.

I was at a party, making small talk with some fellow I’d just met; he casually asked where I lived. I named the town. “Oh!” he brightened. “Where?”

The south end of town, near Cubberley.

“Oh.” (A little more intensely.) “Where?”

I hesitated, described a little, he pressed, while I was beginning to squirm inwardly, but I named my street. That got me an intense “WHERE on …!”

I wondered what my better judgment should be saying in such a situation; in those moments, nobody else was immediately close enough to be paying any attention to any of this. Hmm. Oh, what the heck, and I told him our house number.

The jack-in-the-box exploded out into the open: “I GREW UP IN THAT HOUSE!!!”

Pleased to meetcha. Turns out his folks had sold it to the ones who had sold it to us. He’d lived in it till he’d been about eight; they’d been the original owners.

Small world. Too funny. He semi-growled something about how his sisters and he had driven past the old place just to see it, and someone had really changed the front; I grinned with a half-apology and said, yeah, we did. Sorry about that!

Fast forward a couple of years. My folks put their house on the market and moved out of their home of 45 years in Bethesda, Maryland last September.

Stitches East is coming up in October, and I as a newly-minted author am thinking about attending, if anyone should happen to want me to scribble in anyone’s book or two. I’d take any excuse to go home anyway; still got my in-laws there and many a friend to go see.

Could you just see it? Could you just see someone coming up and going, I saw a picture of my new house on your blog!…

The buyer apologized to the folks that she was planning on doing some remodelling. C’mon, those cabinets were 45 years old, they needed to be ripped out! Don’t worry about it. There’s a gap in the front steps where the ground settled and the concrete split apart. I expect that’ll be fixed up too.

Meantime, I’ve been thinking of writing a letter to her, telling her of how my husband and I have a shared earliest-memory of the day my folks moved into that house when I was three and he was four; his folks were pitching in for the day, helping with our move from a tiny warbox house in Silver Spring. Of how her kids should look around under the mayapples in the spring to see the box turtles, and to look out for the foxes and the pileated woodpeckers. It’s a gloriously beautiful neighborhood, with next-door neighbors whose boys used to sneak over to my folks’ and shovel their driveway for them when they weren’t looking.

They’re going to like it there. I think I’ll knit her a bit of lace as a housewarming present.

About five years ago, I ran into someone I barely knew, a former fellow knitter. She said she was a quilter now, and offered to give me her yarn stash! No. I knew what gorgeous work she’d done in the past. Surely you’ll get back to it someday.

No. Don’t want it. You take it. I’m getting rid of it. I’d rather have the closet space.

I finally thought, well, better me than Goodwill, okay, sure! So, soon after, Pamela came over to my house with all these fabric bags stuffed with yarn, nice yarn, good wools and the like. It was an incredible amount, and she refused any kind of payment; she was just glad to see it go to a good home. Wow.

There were twenty balls of a donegal tweed in brown (does that sound familiar yet?), and I ended up knitting them, along with a strand of a darker camelhair/lambswool blend, into a thick warm blanket. My plan was to give it back to her as a thank you for all the yarn. I didn’t know how to reach her other than her phone number she’d given me when we’d run into each other in a store.

I called. I left messages three times, eventually telling her answering machine that I had something I wanted to give her as a thank you. Eventually, I thought, well, I don’t want to stalk you, honey, I guess you’re not interested. And so I quietly kept the afghan. It sat to the side, unused and uncertain.

Last year I almost donated it to Afghans for Afghans, but, for no earthly reason I could tell you, I just didn’t feel like it.

Meantime, Sandi, my friend who gave me that red scooter down a few posts ago, opened a new yarn store last year, and started having knitting group nights every Thursday. I’ve wanted to go, but, not driving, I’ve just never made it there yet. I get to my old group, somehow, just fine. But I haven’t gotten to that one, even though it’s closer.

As I’ve mentioned earlier, I decided this year to finally give that brown blanket to Afghans for Afghans at Stitches–it felt like the right time, at last–I emailed Ann Rubin to ask her if they could handle a larger item at this time, and that whole story happened.

It was long past when I should have been allowed to make such a change to the text of my book, but I asked my editor afterwards if, now that the Barn Swallows scarf had declared whom it had been for all along, if we could mention Ann and her organization in my book before it flew off to the printer. She checked, and–I absolutely love Martingale Press–said sure. So just barely in time, that happened, and that wonderful A4A organization will get the publicity it so much deserves: a place where individual knitters can create connections to other people, create a bit of world peace, one person at a time. And my profound thanks to whoever at Martingale decided I needed my projects suddenly back, so that I had Ann’s scarf in hand in time for Stitches to give to her. When I hadn’t even known I would need it, and neither did they.

Meantime. Stephanie Pearl-McPhee has been doing some home repairs, and someone posted a comment on her blog. I read it, and immediately shot off a note to the woman: I had no idea who she was or where she lived in the world, but I simply said, I live in an Eichler home in California, meaning one where, like your house, the water lines were originally run under a concrete slab. We, like you, developed a leak under there. We knew that; what we didn’t know, was that by not immediately repairing it, the vibrations it set off ended up breaking the pipes open in 17 places. In our case, we’d been sitting for 18 months on plans to remodel our house. All the sudden, we could no longer just sit there, we had to really do something, with the result being that that remodel did happen. Meantime, (I told her), if you don’t want to jackhammer your whole slab, get that fixed right away.

I got a note back yesterday from the woman. She exclaimed, “I think I KNOW you!”

It was Pamela! All this time later, she’d come back to her needles after all. There was a knitting group meeting at Sandi’s shop, and she’d been going to it, in case I was interested in meeting up there.

If I had gone to Purlescence’s knitting nights all those times before, all those times it never quite happened, I would have seen Pamela, I would have given her her afghan and been glad of it, and that would have been the end of it. Ann Rubin would never have been able to ship it off to Afghanistan, Ann never would have gotten her scarf, and associating it with her and mentioning her in my book would never have occurred to me.

Pamela checked out my blog, saw the photo, says she missed out on a good thing, but was thrilled that that blanket is off to where it’s off to–“How cool is that!” was her reaction. Go Pamela!

And now I can finally, at last, get her yarn-holding bags back to her!

I cast on a new project fairly late last night, in order to have a good carry-around project to work on today. This morning I threw a second 229-yard ball of Kidsilk (aka Cracksilk) Haze in my bag; you never know. Debated throwing in a third, and decided that would be just too pessimistic. But it was a good thing I had that second one, definitely.

John told the nurses wryly that I was going to blog his hand. It is indeed a most impressive shade of orangey-yellow, although it was his shoulder they were working on. That was the most coherent thing he’s said so far.

They assured us that anesthesiology has come a long way since the kid was 11. Still, it was another day of watching other people come in after us, get operated on, recover, leave, while we waited for ours to wake up at all. Anne’s comment was right on, and I am strongly resolved to have all the pertinent information on hand now for any next time for any of us.

He wasn’t supposed to happen.

I had major problems getting our third child here. We got her here safe and sound in the end, to everybody’s profound relief, but the doctor sure didn’t want me to risk that again. My blood pressure had been so low. This was years before my dysautonomia was diagnosed, and he thought it was specific to pregnancy–which it seemed to be, at the time–but, whatever, never again!

But we just strongly felt we were supposed to have one more child. We did what we do: we prayed hard about it. And then we went ahead and did what we felt was right for us personally, and we had our son John. Easiest pregnancy of all my pregnancies, piece of cake, and what we got for it! The nicest kid you could ever ask for. How many teenage boys drive their moms to yarn stores and cheerfully hang out with her friends?

I once upon a time stumbled across Robin and Russ (now defunct) selling baby alpaca at a dollar a ball on closeout; the undyed brown in fingering weight just hadn’t sold well. I bought enough to knit it triple-stranded into big, warm afghans for each one of my children. Some of it, I dyed.

Three years ago, I was knitting up the balls I’d dyed in crimson, and John across the room put down his book, came over, grabbed the bottom of that afghan, and started rubbing it against his cheek, enjoying (ed. note: I wrote “swooning at” and he read that and exclaimed, “MOMMMM!!!! Swooning? SWOONING?? On your BLOG!??” and retyped it as “enjoying”) the softness. That particular afghan instantly became his.

So today’s his birthday, the day he’s officially old enough to have his papers in to go be a Mormon missionary for two years–first, though, he’s having shoulder surgery tomorrow and will need a bit of downtime afterwards. But meantime, today is a day for me to reflect again at my great good fortune that he made it into this world, and how much he blesses our lives every day. He’s a good one. I’ve already knitted that afghan, so I don’t know how to say it any more powerfully than this, but–John. I love you.

And I admire you, too.

One day last year, a new couple had just moved into town, and I held the door open for the dad as he pushed the stroller in the front door at church. The wife asked me, “Excuse me, where’s the cloakroom?”

I laughed, and told her, “Californians don’t know a thing about cloakrooms!” And then it was oh, where are you from? Where are YOU from?

And then we both stood there, jaws on the ground. You’re Cameron’s sister! And Brent’s daughter!! –You’re the JEPPSONS’ daughter!!

We grew up going to the same ward (congregation) in Maryland. Her dad had interviewed me as part of my application to go to BYU, 31 years ago. I think my little sister used to babysit her.

P’s sister was here visiting on Sunday; she was not quite the baby anymore who was born while I was away at college, either. I sent her off with the navy scarf. She told me she had spent “about a year!” knitting a scarf, and couldn’t believe that it had only taken me about three hours to make this one. (Hey. It was a bulky brushed-alpaca yarn, and lace is airhole space as much as yarn; throw in size 7mm needles, and how much time can it take?) Three hours, huh? I could see the wheels turning; maybe knitting was doable with a little practice after all!

Still being subversive over here…

A few years ago at Stitches, towards the end of the day, a tired friend asked if she could hang her bag on the back of my electric wheelchair. Sure, no skin off my nose; go ahead!

If only there were a video. I was tootling along, and had no idea that between her bag and my chair, somehow the back snagged someone’s rollaboard luggage they were using that day for their purchases. I saw a few people’s surprised expressions, having no idea why, and then all the sudden my 250-lb chair was popping a wheelie! That woman had seen her bag suddenly going airborne, had grabbed for it hard, and I guess you don’t come between a knitter and her new yarn.

So here I was at Stitches again last week, and as I’ve mentioned, my chair was dead. I ran into my old friend Sandi. It was her first time being there as a vendor; she’s one of the co-owners of Purlescense in Sunnyvale. We talked wheelchairs a moment, and she said she’d inherited a scooter she didn’t need and hadn’t been able to find anyone that did need it. My electric chair was dead? Did I want this other one?

This is like asking, do you want some cashmere yarn to go with your stash?

We finally got down to San Jose to pick it up from her. Wow. Thank you, Sandi! I have to tell you, we need to replace a car, and one of the issues holding us back was that we didn’t want a big one anymore, and we couldn’t see buying one where we couldn’t haul that monster chair around. It seemed like we were stuck with my big minivan with the seats out. This scooter, Richard simply lifted it up into the car. It folds. It splits into pieces for transport if need be. He can fit it in the trunk of his ’01 hybrid Prius. We can replace my van with another Prius. The scooter isn’t as fast, it’s certainly not as turbocharged, it puts me very low to the ground–my husband, who is 6’8″ to my 5’5″ wryly commented that that was certainly not a new thing–but for me it does everything I really need. Wow. Thank you, Sandi!!

(Now, I just have to figure out how to put a finger puppet on this thing somewhere somehow.)