Back when I first started getting seriously back into knitting, 17 years ago, as a way of coping with my new lupus diagnosis, I went looking for–something; I wasn’t sure what. Plain stockinette certainly wasn’t going to do it for me. (The Barbara Walker stitch treasury books had not yet been reprinted.) I went to the local yarn stores and pored over what gansey and fair isle patterns I could find. I knew I could substitute colors from the ones in the pictures, but still, whatever it was I was looking for–and I wasn’t sure what it was–it just wasn’t there. Hmmm.

So eventually I headed over to the library, where Kaffe Fassett’s Glorious Knits book practically fell into my hands; I opened it to the page where he has two models dressed in his Big Diamonds pattern, posed in an amaryllis garden in Holland.

Now, you know I love amaryllises. There was no way on this planet that my hands were ever going to produce anything like the projects on his pages. (I thought.) But that garden! And (oh yeah, those too) those sweaters! I could wish,anyway.

So I checked the book out and took it home. And then renewed it. And renewed it again. Took it back, waited the requisite day or two, checked it out again, renewed it, and finally decided, this was nuts, and simply went out and bought my own copy.

You know what happens next. There was no way I could not at least try that intarsia stuff. The first project was a long mohair vest for my mom, just four colors, Big Diamonds. But now that I was past my fear of the technique, I went whole hog and made his Carpet Coat in 68 shades of wool and mohair, with the yarn carefully collected over quite a few months from many of the local stores. “These are large, but they drape beautifully on everybody…” Yeah, uh huh. I later met Fassett. The man ain’t short. My husband crowed, “It fits me better than it fits you, go make yourself another one!” Note that I am 5’5″ and my husband is 6’8″. The sleeves on his are short for him, but go ask him if he cares. I made that second coat; mine had 86 colors. So there, dude.

Mom wore her vest soon after she got it to a concert at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, and as she was taking her seat, she noticed the woman sitting behind her: who was likewise decked out in a handknit sweater in Kaffe Fassett’s Big Diamonds pattern. They looked at each other a moment, not quite believing the impossibility of it all, and then the other woman laughed, “Don’t you just love that designer’s work?”

I do indeed. He helped pull me back into knitting, bigtime. His work was what I’d been looking for, and all else followed from how thoroughly he got me hooked. I will add the stray thought that I personally believe he is responsible for the popularity of the handpainted yarns that are now on the market; for those who want to play with color for far less work, they’re a great way to go, and he popularized the idea of knitting in many colors in the first place and paved the way forward.

My thanks to Nina for playing model with me.

Before there was even a book, Laura, whom I’d met up with at Stitches yet again and was eating lunch with, was holding up her new laceweight scarf from me and crowing, “I get to say I knew you when!” I sat there laughing, going, When what?

She surprised me back recently. And when I went off to hear the recent Good Friday concert, I wrapped her work around my shoulders to wear, to keep my friend’s presence there with me on a day I needed it. I knew people would ask me about it, and I would go no, I didn’t knit it; my friend did. Which happened. Laura, just so you know, you got bragged on.

I’m so glad I knew her when!

A Dancing Queen double amaryllis celebrating the day

and a package that should have arrived on time, with silk, cashmere, and lambswool, one of the two laceweight strands dyed by me to complement the other. This is in a pattern I’d admired but never gotten around to actually trying before; it seemed to me that having your first child hit a quarter century is a good time to learn something new.

Thank you to everybody for the kind words on my book; much appreciated.

Now, to start off: I used fingering weight yarn for the most part in my shawls, trying to keep my patterns accessible to a larger number of knitters and to entice newbies into giving them a try; sometimes very fine yarns can be intimidating. But out of curiosity, I took this one pattern and used Fino, a baby alpaca/silk blend that is half the weight of the yarn in the shawl to the left, for the red shawl here, which I’ve just finished. I was afraid it would come out too tight around. It came out absolutely stunning. Yay!

Meantime, two days after Jim’s son fell off the ski lift, his wife’s mother had a stroke. It turned out not to be a bad one, and she’s doing okay, all things considered. Then yesterday Jim got word that the job he had applied for in another state had gone to someone else. …When it snows, it avalanches.

And so their neighbor Russ threw out an email to all their friends. Jim’s family isn’t moving! We get to keep them! Our corner of the world wins! Come CELEBRATE!!!

And celebrate we did. We poured into Russ’s house en masse, bringing food and company and getting a chance to tell that family how much they mean to us and how glad we are that they’re here. Saying hi to Nicholas without making a nuisance of a fuss over his injuries. After all that’s happened to them, we want to see their 7 and 8-year-old sons grow up, every step of the way. We want to buoy up their grandparents. They belong to us, all of them, and we are so fortunate to have them here. I am so grateful to Russ for giving us a chance to say that by simply coming and being there.

I did not shoot photos of the party. You’ll have to make do with the shawl shot. But believe me, a good time (and strawberries and chocolate sauce and cream puffs and tiny quiches and stuffed tiny tomatoes and–okay, I’ll stop now) was had by all.

Celebrate! Here, I’ve got some more Fino, I think I’ll go cast it on now.

Fifty-two inches long. Baby alpaca/silk calories? Let’s see, Pam, 33 repeats x four rows x 21 stitches + cast on and cast off rows = 2794 stitches/calories, plus cherries and melting chocolate. As the sign at Rick’s Rather Rich Ice Cream proclaims, “Life is uncertain; eat dessert first.”

Knit long and prosper.

Kristine says she accidentally knocked on the wrong door first, and had some woman at house number such-and-such basically say, um, I’d love to have that ice cream, but I’m not Sam and I have no idea what you’re talking about.

Since I like to think things happen for a reason, and since I can’t deliver ice cream to Vermont from California (well, not in any condition you’d want to eat…) I knitted up some Ben and Jerry’s Cherry Garcia today to send off to that wrong address. And had wayyy too much fun doing it. (I think I’ll look for a lighter-weight bowl for shipping, though.)

When our kids, who are 19, 21, 23 in June, and 25 next week, were growing up, any trip to the Urgent Care center at our clinic or the ER came with the bonus of their daddy taking them to the local ice cream shop on the way home for comfort: what Richard calls his own “Emergency Room Medicine.”

We have in our immediate neighborhood a shop, Rick’s, which is a hole-in-the-wall place that manufactures its own ice cream right there and which is a popular local summer hanging-out place. When the old fellow who’d run it for decades retired, the guy who bought it painted cows on the walls and ivy coming from the ceiling morphing into silk ivy coming out of the walls; it was very charming, but one day, I thought, you know? That main cow there needed a tail.

I had some yak hair. Not the soft, cashmere-y undercoat; yak hair. Wretched stuff, rips the skin off your fingers if you spin it too long at the wheel, won’t feed through the flyer without a struggle. When my oldest and I took handspinning classes together when she was 12, the teacher showed us some of this stuff, and I wrinkled my nose and went, wow. What would you ever DO with this stuff?

“Make a doormat,” Karen laughed in response. You know? That was just weird enough that I bought a pound of it against my better judgment, spun it up–although, not too much at any one sitting–and made exactly that. But there was leftover fiber (um, fancy that. It was a really small doormat. It was all I could stand.)

And then I saw that cow. And I knew exactly what I was going to do with that yak. I braided the roving (you don’t have to spin it if you leave it as roving!) and gave it to the guy so his cow could have a tail. I left a nice curl of the long fibers at the end, very cow-y.

The guy loved it, he absolutely loved it. He thought long and hard about it and never did add it to the decorations: he was afraid little kids would tear it apart. He’s right, they would have, but they would certainly have remembered the place and bugged their parents to go there all the more often, and I could always make another one. But instead he took it home as a souvenir of the good people who come into his shop, and that was that.

One summer, our Sam, our oldest, went in there, and mentioned out loud that she was thinking of applying for a job there.

The guy refused to hand her an application. He simply hired her on the spot.

But her schedule was such a problem!

He didn’t care.

But she couldn’t come in at this time, or this day, or…

He didn’t care. When could she start?

And so she scooped cones, and, a short while later, I made that tail.

She’s our daughter who had the ITP scare last week. I mentioned the Emergency Room Medicine thing to my friend and reader Kristine across the country, who happens to live a few miles from Sam but had never met her. Kristine’s reaction was, Say no more! What flavor?

Which is how my son-in-law came to open his door today to see a woman standing there holding out some Ben and Jerry’s, and he stood there, jaw on the ground, exclaiming, Do we even KNOW you?

Okay, I should stop and let Kristine tell the tale, but I have to tell you, she totally rocks. THANK you, Kristine!

Nicholas’s dad sent a link to photos of what had happened. There was one showing his wife gently holding their son’s hand, with his fingers curled towards his mother’s, as the rescuers worked on him.

When I was in critical condition at Stanford four years ago, when they were infusing me with a then-experimental med that would either finish me off or save my life, they had every vital sign being monitored, and my blood pressure fell to 64/44 and was headed down. A nurse looked at the monitor and noticed. She reached for me and held me with one hand, saying, “You okay? Hang in there, honey.” She quickly snapped out orders to the other nurse (there may have been two others, it gets a bit blurry at this point) while she held onto me, never letting go. She never knew how much she was keeping me here by that simple touch and those words. She had no idea how strong an effect it had on me, how much I held onto it as my life raft.

I saw that picture of those two people I love and their hands together as that child lay in that snow under that ski lift.

And used my hands to work on a matching hat for the little brother whose big brother fell such an unbelievable fall. *I* needed to hold them gently, too.

Never a dull moment.

I think there need to be a heck of a lot more dull moments right now.

Merino (and the only Superwash I could immediately find in my stash), for softness and warmth, you want wool, not acrylic, for playing in the snow: this is to convey the message that Nicholas would get out in the snow again, and not to be afraid of going back. Hand-dyed yarn from my friend, so that all the more hands would be participating in the endeavor and outcome. A hat: warmth and cushioning all at once. Alright, let’s put it baldly, it’s the closest I can come to knitting the kid a helmet.

Our friend Jim was our kids’ organ teacher, and when our older son was 16, Jim got him invited to play the Mormon Tabernacle Organ in Salt Lake City on a weekday as a guest. Jim’s a good one, and his wife was the first person I knew to greet me when I checked into Stanford Hospital last fall for testing; she was working in that department that week.

They’ve always juggled their work schedules so that one of them is home with the kids, which means that sometimes during lessons I got drafted to hold the baby. I remember one memorable time when my other kids and I got Nicholas giggling so hard he started hiccuping and burping, his laughing coming out interrupted and loud, and Jim came running to make sure his baby was okay. Good times.

We got a horrifying email today. Nicholas yesterday lived every childhood fear of heights of mine, falling out of his ski lift, at least 25 feet. He’s alive. No paralysis. No head injury. A few broken bones, and they’ve got him in the ICU to monitor his spleen, but all the could-haves that didn’t happen…

A warm hat. I had to do SOMEthing! I can just picture him asking his daddy, with his wrist in a cast, when can he play piano again?

This is not what I’d planned on knitting today. But you can see why it was suddenly imperative that I go dig this ball out of my stash and knit this.

Robert, this was from the rest of the Lisa Souza dyelot that your hat was knitted from. I was always going to make you a matching scarf. I won’t have enough now, but you understand.

First of all: (trying to keep it quiet for her, sort of)–happy 21st, Michelle!

I love working with fingering-weight baby alpaca: it is soft, it is drapey, it is just wondrous to work with. You’d think laceweight baby alpaca would be the same, only even lovelier, if possible, as it makes even finer stitches. You’d be mostly right. But. The extra twist per inch in the laceweight of that long-fibered crimpless animal… The result is a livewire of a yarn. It does not hang docilely as you knit; it wants to jump off the needles and go play with its buddies, while you insist like a schoolteacher that the recess bell has not rung yet. Sorry. You just have to wait for the castoff before you can run off and play. Hold still!

Yeah, well. So I made a completely stupid mistake over at least 50 stitches, and didn’t notice it till quite a few rows later. Just a sideways shift and back–the kind that emphatically doesn’t pass the galloping horse test.

What I should have done then was to rinse the shawl, still on the needles, laid it out for the night, picked it up in the morning and THEN frogged it back and picked up the stitches again. What I did, of course, was to immediately put it down and go do that right now.

Had it been rinsed, it would have laid there as sweetly as a fingering weight. No stitches would have run, no yarnovers would have dropped. Since I didn’t, the bell had rung! Yay! Let’s go play! You and you, we’ll be teams, ready get set GO!, while I frantically tried to herd them back onto the needles.

Four hundred stitches per row (roughly), frog four, tink two. I did it. But it would have been a whole lot easier if I’d added a little water and patience to the process. I guess I was a bit tired of knitting this color and was trying a little too hard to get the silly shawl finished so I could work on that really cool green silk over there.

And then–annoyed at the whole thing–I picked it back up again to knit at least one row, to give myself a sense of triumph over the mess. And lo and behold. Everything was now perfectly in place. The baby alpaca felt gloriously lovely to work with as it ran through my hands. Ah, I remember now why I bought so much of this yarn in this beautiful color…

I have a number of last year’s amaryllis bulbs whose re-starting times I staggered this past winter, trying to have my favorite flowers for as long into the season as possible. Amaryllises in April. Kind of a flowery metaphor for teenagers sleeping in till noon (not that we know anything about that.)

Meantime, someone asked the Knitlist if she could make a scarf with 250 yards of yarn. Here’s what I did this weekend with about 125 yards, size 9 needles, fingering weight baby alpaca, and about three hours’ worth of time. Length: 56″.

We have a photo somewhere of me, taken the summer after we got married. I had found a baker’s supply place that was selling Hershey’s cocoa for a dollar a pound–providing you were willing to buy it by the 50 lb bags. Well, YEAH! I consulted with my officemates and friends, bought two bags and a scale, and spent a Saturday afternoon measuring and divvying. A fine brown mist settled all over my small apartment’s kitchen and all over me. It was the first time I’d sneezed chocolate.

I gave 15 lbs to my sister-in-law when we moved away and had to make space in our beat-up old car as we moved from one grad school to the next; most of what we’d kept had been declared nonessential, but not by me. Years later she told me she’d finally run out and that it was a shock to have to go to the grocery store and actually buy some. She loved chocolate but her family not so much, so it had taken her a long time to go through it all.

She had been fighting her cancer for several years by that point, so I went looking for a declaration of life and longevity. I found her a 5 lb bag, which I gave her that Christmas with a promise to buy another one as soon as she used it up. She never got to, but it was my declaration of life and of not lacking for the things that make it more pleasant. She appreciated it.

So I’ve been buying those 5 lb bags off and on for awhile, enjoying my morning large mug of good homemade hot chocolate while reading my email. Somehow, though, it’s been harder to find those bags lately, and it seemed time to explore some other brands anyway. What that really means is, it would be Scharffenberger every day if I were rich, but I’m not and I have kids in college.

The end result was a package that arrived with a label that totally cracked me up. I don’t have any Colonial Rosewood knitting needles to pose with this 2 lb bag of Colonial Rosewood cocoa, just some similar-looking Holz and Steins straights, but the picture will do.

Knitters know knitting and chocolate go together, but who knew that the chocolatier did?

I went off to the knitting group at Purlescence Thursday night; when I was there two weeks ago, one of the owners had just gone into the hospital. Last night, after she’d had a five-day stay that had involved IV antibiotics and all kinds of fun stuff, she was there at the store (yay!), back where she belonged. Thank goodness.

For those who remember the post about Noel at Stanford, I know how much you need to laugh to keep your sanity in the face of the sorts of things she’d just gone through. A few side comments from me, such as, “They flushed the IVs with saline?” was all she needed to hear to know that someone had a good idea of what it had all been like. It helped. Then, to keep things on a lighter side, I told the tale of mooning the Lifeflight chopper, and of my roommate who absolutely could not sleep unless the TV was on, which was of course on a platform well above the curtain dividing the room. I pleaded with the nurses: She’s asleep now! Can’t you turn that thing off? No, she has the right to have it on (but they did turn off the sound.) Picture a bunch of interrogators randomly flashing bright lights directly in your eyeballs all night–oh joy.

The night nurse, without turning on the lights, told me that maybe she had a solution. She went out of the room for a moment, came back, and I felt rubber bands being placed behind my ears and something soft going across my face. Okay, whatever. It’s dark, that’s all I care.

I was beyond exhausted, and slept completely through the mostly-male doctors’ rounds in the morning. And woke up to find…a feminine pad across my face.

I bet the chopper pilot put her up to it.

So we all laughed over that, a good time was had by all, and then I came home.

…And walked in the door to the accusation, “You forgot your phone.”

I did?

“Yes!”

Okay, you know if this was an issue something happened. What?

Platelets at 10. Five units in the hospital.

Our daughter with ITP got to go home that night, late, and is now much better.

I got her permission to post this thank you to every person who has ever volunteered as a blood donor. I owe you my daughter’s life.

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.