(Actually, looking up those two words on dictionary.com, I’m thinking I should reverse them, but then it wouldn’t be a pun in English.)

That Monterey shawl I started in Sea Silk yesterday? Um… I moved it off my lap mid-row to attend to something else, didn’t notice with the stitches all bunched up, and you don’t have to be a knitter to see why I took it off the needles. I was long past where it could be fixed without ripping. I was on row 30. Now I’m on 12. I was going to try to rush it to be finished for my kickoff booksigning on Saturday, but, um, I think my knitting was telling me to chill out. Kick back. Relax.

For those who are coming, you’ll get to hear a few details that there wasn’t space for in the book. That stroll along the canal with Karen? I didn’t mention that I fell through a canoe. Yes. Through. It was very funny, and Karen was just shaking her head, going, Some people!

See you Saturday!

I got a delightful email today from a woman who’d just knitted her version of my Strawberry Pie shawl for her nine-year-old granddaughter. I immediately thought of the sweater my mom had made for me when I was nine, and I wish I had a picture, any picture, anywhere, of it, but it’s long gone.

My grandfather once requested that my mom knit him a cardigan. Being very proper in his dress, and needing it not to look too casual, he specifically requested a very fine knit and something that he could wear easily at work–which happened to be the hallways of Congress (when he wasn’t wearing his suitcoat.)

Mom designed an allover diamond Aran, the kind of cabling that Barbara Walker would describe as right-twist and left-twist, quite understated. I vividly remember that subdued green wool yarn and that pattern as it slowly, slowly appeared on Mom’s needles: she used to knit it when she was waiting for me at my piano lessons. With six kids and little downtime, it took her a year to do. I reminded her of it once, a few years ago, and she exclaimed, “I used fingering weight and size 2s?! I must have been out of my mind!” Yes, Mom; I remember you teaching me what the term fingering weight meant. I wanted to do that someday. I remember. She had had to buy needlepoint yarn to get the look she’d wanted.

The ultimate act of motherly love is that, because I totally fell in love with that sweater while she was making it, when she finally finally finished it and told me it was my turn next for a sweater, when I said I wanted that same diamond pattern, she actually did it. She must have been screamingly bored out of her mind with repeating that same thing after so much time, but she did it. She let me pick out a rosey shade. With a zipper in front. This was radically fashionable at the time, and with a big family, we rarely went for the latest fad–but lookatmenow! She did mine in worsted weight (there are limits, after all) and I was thrilled.

You know how teenagers sometimes wish they could tell their parents how to dress before they’ll be willing to be seen in public with them? Yeah, well. In my case, I loved that sweater, with Grandpa’s diamonds altered just so just for me, and I refused to give it up. I outgrew it. Badly. I refused to stop wearing it. My mom saw me sneaking it on one day when the wrists barely went past my elbows, and that was that–it just kind of “disappeared” shortly after. I was not happy.

I asked Mom a few years ago whatever happened to it, and she didn’t remember; oh, she’d given it away, she was sure, but she would only have given it to someone who appreciated it, she assured me.

Grandpa, meantime, wore that sweater for thirty more years, until his death at 95. It was always his favorite. His daughter had created it just for him, and it was just the right weight for wearing year-round. It’s one reason why I like knitting in wool and baby alpaca; with good care, one’s work can last practically forever, without the aging tendencies inherent in a cotton yarn.

It just now occurred to me as I was writing this why my Embossed Diamonds pattern that frames these pages must have so immediately appealed to me as it appeared out of my needles the first time. A similar-shaped stitch pattern. Huh. The things we learn about ourselves when we write.

As for that grandma who wrote to me, I am delighted she liked my pattern–and I am thrilled for her young granddaughter, who doesn’t ever have to worry about wrist lengths.

(Meantime, since every good post needs a picture, I’m putting the back of the book on top of the Sky Drama shawl shown on the front cover.)

About time for some knitting content around here. This is a scarf I knitted yesterday using just one repeat of the body of Nina’s shawl. I used one strand of baby alpaca I’d dyed in a bright light blue and one of Jaggerspun Zephyr merino/silk in royal–I liked how the two colors played together, and they grabbed me and wouldn’t let go.

It wasn’t till I was nearly done that I found I’d dropped a stitch at the beginning. Normally this would be a disaster–but since the yarn is doubled, the loops from the other color running through it will help anchor it in place so it won’t run. (I will, however, go back with a mending strand and tuck it a bit out of sight there.) One stumbles, the other keeps it steady and keeps the pattern going. There is so much poetry inherent in the simple act of wrapping wool around wood.

It took me awhile to figure out why those colors had so grabbed me: Nina herself is at Camp Stitches at Asilomar right now, at a gorgeous spot looking over the ocean. Sky and sea–and here I was, knitting the two as one without being consciously aware of why those two shades had wanted to dance together. Cool.

Meantime, my LYS got a case of 36 books in yesterday, and when I showed up for my knitting group last night each one had been sold or spoken for, and they were scrambling to go order more. Nina called to report that the LYS down where she is had sold out instantly as well. You all don’t mind if I brag happily, do you?

I signed onto the Knitlist for the first time about eight years ago, specifically to ask if anyone knew of any music-themed laceknitting patterns. I got lots of responses of no, but if you find one, let me know. (I am determined I am finally going to come up with one for my next book.)

We went to a concert a few nights ago; there were two superb pianists, one a dear friend of longstanding, the other his brother visiting him, and two grand Steinway pianos had been brought in just for the occasion. (How you borrow two Steinway grands, I’d love to know, but never mind.) The eldest very much carried off the staid, calm, older brother shtick, and Russ–Russ is a showman. Russ is someone who once demonstrated how simple it was to play Bach, at a concert I went to a few years ago, by holding three oranges in one hand, two grapefruit in the other, and playing a piece I knew well totally note-perfect. These two grew up playing in USO shows as kids, and they’re good.

So. If only there were a DVD. They started in on a Rachmaninoff piece dear to my heart: I was slated to play it at Peabody Institute in Baltimore at a Maryland State Piano Competition in the late 70’s when I was a teenager. (Something in C minor, c’mon, brain, help me out here on the title. BUM. BUM. BUHMMMM!! Yeah, that one. You know the one.)

Rachmaninoff had huge hands. If you’ve looked at pictures of me on this blog you know that I emphatically do not. An octave plus two? There was no way! My piano teacher, a onetime concert pianist and a quite-petite woman, told me, oh, just skip the notes you can’t reach.

I could not play that thing the way it was supposed to be played. I could not do that thing justice. It was supposed to sound bombastic, and the thing was impossible to do right. I argued, I practiced like crazy, and in the end I rebelled and refused to play it there.

So here Russ and his taller brother were starting in on that piece, and I instantly wondered how Russ would be able to reach those notes. The other, yes, but… Russ actually talked first about the size of Rachmaninoff’s hands, and traded some sibling barbs with his brother over the issue for the crowd.

They started off in unison, a huge sound on those two huge pianos. Then the showmanship kicked in. Russ made an act of getting frustrated over getting the BUHHHMM!s Russ’d, leaped up from the piano as his brother continued on, walked off the stage, walked back across it carrying a large wooden board and a circular wood saw–giving his brother bunny ears as he went past him–and disappeared off the stage to the other side. Sounds of loud sawing suddenly offstage; the big brother acted oblivious. Finally, Russ came back on with his board with, basically, popsicle-stick-equivalent fingers added on, and sat back down at that second piano.

It was the BUM BUM BUHHHHM! part again. Russ put that board over the keys and the popsicle stick pieces played the entire, superstretched chord perfectly. He put it quickly up on top of the piano out of the way, and continued. Back to that chord–grab the board–play!

It was hysterically funny. The older brother calmly pretended not to notice, but if it took an extra quarter of a beat for Russ to grab that board fast enough and get it down there, the brother, eyes on his own keyboard, kept right in sync with him.

I can just picture Rachmaninoff up there, going, BRAVO!!!

Try to live up to that performance! Hey wait–I get it. All I have to do is go knit a plain sweeping swath of stockinette, go borrow Russ’s circular saw, and whirr a treble clef stencil out of the thing. Done!

(Note: if you want a copy of the CD, contact Russ at skipthesefourwordsrussell@thehancocks.us , skipping, of course, the four superfluous words in the addy.)

If I had designed this, it would have had two more words added at the end, and then it would have been the utter truth, at least in my experience: the words, “for others.”

Today’s the day! Martingale is releasing my book, “Wrapped in Comfort: Knitted Lace Shawls” today. At last. I wrote it, I knitted every stitch (and then some), and they put it all together into a beautiful book, absolutely beautiful; I can’t tell you how pleased I am with what they did with it.

So, a little while ago, after trying to figure out how to knit a thank you without asking them the relevant questions, I finally sent off a note, cc’d to my two editors: Tina, you go ask Mary her favorite color for me. Mary, you go ask Tina. Color, and also shape. Don’t tell the other I asked, okay? It’s a surprise.

They told me they’d laughed and figured there was no way out of this one. (I just need to get myself to the post office. They’re done.)

One said pink. I can do pink, definitely. The funny thing is, when we went to take this picture, I didn’t even realize, when I picked up that little bunch of buds that had fallen off the bush there, that I was holding it as if to knit it. Hey, if there’s a way to knit a bush, I’ll figure it out.

Martingale didn’t pose any of my circular shawls quite like this, preferring to make sure you could see each one as clearly as possible–the shaping, how far around it reaches, etc, but this is how I tend to wear them. The smaller ones, or when the temperature warms up, I wear V-neck and open down the front.

One of the things I tried to do with the book, in giving the weight of the yarns used, was hope that people would feel comfortable using whatever brand and whatever fiber they personally have fallen in love with, rather than what I did. Take what you love and go play.

The photos: my Blue Moon Geisha-yarn shawl held up to Stephanie, sock style.  Or, at least, it’s there in my drafts.  Hmm.  Anyway.  Stephanie looking for her pattern as I put my knitting bag down; I’m wearing the Michelle pattern from my book, done in Sea Silk in the Teal colorway, which knitty-noddy.com had custom dyed by Handmaiden after I requested it. Laura in Alameda with The Sock. Stephanie arriving.

Okay, here goes. The bookstore had everybody waiting in line outside for hours, but I told them, I don’t do outside–I’m an indoor cat. Right now, my lupus goes after my eyes when I’m in sunlight. Oh, well, no problem. They let me wait inside, which was very nice of them, and all was fine.

Stephanie greeted me with a smile when she came in, and then the biggest hug when it got to my turn in line. And then several more hugs before she let me go. It was so good to get to see her again–a huge shout-out to Jasmin, who drove (three hours up, two hours back), and Nancy, who rounded out the carpool. And Patricia and later Faye, who met us there.

I knew it was Stephanie’s booksigning, not mine, but I also knew how excited she’d be: she had cheered me on during the process. So I showed her my author’s advance copy of my book, and she was exulting, YOU DID IT!!! She flipped through it, asking if her shawl was in there; it is. The Monterey one there, I’d knitted that pattern up for her; she hadn’t been allowed the time in all her booktouring to go see the Monterey Bay Aquarium, so I’d knitted the Aquarium into a shawl and given it to her. I showed her the original jellyfish-and-seaweed one in the book. She was exclaiming, Oh, cool! Look at this!

At one point a little before that, while she was signing and I was waiting for the pre-boarders to finish up, (she always lets the moms with little ones and those with physical needs go first), my friend Laura in Alameda, who’d been part of the standing-room crowd, found me. Laura is a friend that, four years ago, I knitted her a cashmere lace scarf and gave it to her at Stitches: her reaction was to crow, “I get to say I knew you when!” I thought that was so funny! But she believed in me that I would write that book someday that I wanted to, long before I completely believed it would ever happen. We’d been trying to meet up again ever since, with one failure after another. I had no idea she was coming yesterday. So here Laura suddenly appeared out of the crowd, coming over as I stood up in wonderment to greet her, and we threw our arms around each other in thrilled exclamations. Stephanie watched with the very happiest smile on her face: our happiness was her happiness. I adore both of them. And then when Laura was having her book signed, Stephanie recognized her name, and exclaimed, “You’re Laura in Alameda? I know you!”

I got to see Rosemary of designsbyromi.com, the person who, when I said I wished I had a shawl pin that looked like a treble clef, immediately created one. Guess who got the first one? And then she insisted on holding my book while I snapped her picture. Wait, this was Stephanie’s booksigning, not mine!

And a good time was had by all.

The resident geek and apprentice geek are still working at fixing this computer, and today for some reason it’s not reading pictures; I’ll add them later. I mean, these are pictures you have to see! (Okay, got’em now.)  Meantime, two friends of mine and I drove up to Petaluma yesterday to join the hundreds coming to Stephanie Pearl-McPhee at her booksigning.

It was amazing how many people took pictures of the crowd. Maybe we’re all trying to convince the subsequent venues they’ll really need all those chairs? There’s this sense of, this is our Stephanie, she is a force to be reckoned with, WE are a force to be reckoned with, now, you all take good care of her.

One of the things she mentioned was how her brother-in-law, who works for Medecins Sans Frontieres/Doctors Without Borders, sent her an email gushing over what a good job she’d done when she got her fellow knitters to raise $15,oo0 awhile ago. Uh, well, we eventually did better than that: when she decided she wanted to double her total that by then had gotten to $120,000, she asked us all to consider how well off we are–no matter how poor we may be by our neighbors’ standards–and to help take care of those with far less.

She met that goal in 72 hours. Seventy-two hours, $120,000, and it kept going. Her brother-in-law, then, stunned, went, how do I…how do we replicate…how?…

And she said, when we knit, we are doing a small thing, one single loop after one single loop, and seeing how it adds up to the whole. We see the power of those individual loops, we live that, over and over and over. When it comes to donating to Medecins Sans Frontieres, we don’t give up, thinking the problems are just far too much bigger than what we can do anything about; we each add our little bit in, and it adds up and up and up.

I have said it often, I will say it again here: there are no small acts of kindness.

And go, Stephanie!

Several years ago, we were having some work done on our house, and one morning I noticed that Chris, the contractor, had his dog sitting in the bed of his pickup while he was working that day. We have a fenced yard, and I asked the guy if he’d like to let the dog run back there and stretch its legs? Sure, he would love that! While he was working, he saw me working at my spinning wheel and asked me a few questions about it. You really spin your own yarn? Yes. So the next day, it being summertime, he surprised me with a small bag of very soft white fur he’d combed that night from his Samoyed. Very cool!

Chris had two small daughters, three and four years old. I spun the fur up into a ball of 2-ply yarn, went out, bought a pair of small teddy bears, and knitted up soft, white, fluffy teddy bear sweaters for them.

But. One of the things you do when you spin is rinse the skeins to set the twist, and I went to wash any doggyness out as well, although, Samoyeds make an exceptionally clean yarn that way. But when I got the yarn wet!

“Chris!” I asked him when I saw him, apologetically, but, um, there was a problem. “Did your dog get skunked?”

He was mortified. “Yes, but it’s been a couple of months. I tomato-juiced her, I…” Poor guy. Totally put on the spot, when he’d been trying to be so nice. The dog hadn’t smelled when he’d combed her, he’d made sure of that!

“Just don’t let those teddy sweaters get wet,” I chuckled, and sent him off in great hopes that his little girls would treasure their surprises.

I was googling the other day, looking for a local supplier of cocoa in quantity. I’m no longer interested in buying it by the 50 lb bags like I once did–that’s a blog post in the future–but 5 lbs, sure. We do enough chocolate decadence tortes and hot cocoa from scratch around here.

Somehow C&A Builders of San Carlos came up on that cocoa google. Huh? Hey! That’s Chris! So I shot him an email saying hi, and he in return emailed me a picture of those two teddy bears side-by-side. He mentioned that his girls were teenagers now. (How on earth did they get that old?!)

I can’t tell you how much it meant to me that they’d still hung onto those bears. The dog passed away a few years ago, and her fur is still there to remind them of a great dog and friend of their childhoods.

And if you live in my area, and want a contractor who’s a nice guy, who takes great pride in a job done well and in great honesty, I know just the one.

So life had other things going on, and I finally sat down and picked up my needles. At last.

Ever have one of those moments when you suddenly listen to the elevator music going on in your head, ie, what’s been humming along in the background noise of your brain that you haven’t really been paying attention to? It’s kind of like waking up in the dream process, where you try to figure out how you came up with that one.

But honestly. Pop Goes the Weasel? What on earth?

Maybe for colors that pop out at you? (We’ve been working in the background on overhauling the site and blog, getting ready to move off Blogger.) But still. My overblown sense of dignity is affronted, I tell you, just affronted. Bag the weasels. Turn on the music! Let the needles dance!

The measure of a true klutz: being able to fall backwards into an impossibly tight spot in such a graceful, semi-slow motion as to look choreographed. Your kid reaches down and gives his mom a hug, lets go, and then she does this dance.

John ran for the icepacks. Richard, from across the house, ran for the noise. And then stood there speechless, not daring to laugh till I gave him the huge silly fake grin that the situation so much needed.

That was last night, and icepacks notwithstanding, I’m typing gingerly. The knitting probably won’t go on strike, but it might stage a slowdown for a day or two to show management who’s boss.

And yes, it was very funny. And no, there are no photos. Thank goodness!

(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?