Do you ever feel, after finishing a big project, that you suddenly have to Do All The Things, quick! Before the next one?

The plan had been to dive right back into the grandkid afghan that’s a picture of the Big Sur coastline that I put aside to make my brother’s. It’s beautiful, and I really like it, but part of me needs an in-between something before I tackle all those intarsia strands again.

I finished a hat and went looking through my stash.

And looked again yesterday. I can’t go around without even a carry-around project! I put needles and red Rios in my purse but it protested that it was not its turn.

So, again today, feeling like I just hadn’t found–I didn’t know what, but I knew I would know when I did and I hadn’t yet.

Which is exactly what happened: there, the moment I laid eyes on it, put away in the wrong place, was a quarter pound of merino super wash from Karida at Neighborhood Fiber Co. Color: Waverly.

Seeing her is one of the things I miss dearly about Stitches West no longer being a thing. I loved her and I loved the saturation of her colors; you’ll never find white fibers at the center that the dye didn’t reach to, she got it all.

Deep burgundy for a teenage boy’s hat. Because it told me so. Even if I can only guess why so far; the yarn knows, even if I don’t yet, and it says it wants to be cabled. Oh, okay.

Man, it feels so good to be knitting the thing that needed to come to be next.

That was a first.

California requires that retailers charge a dime for a bag.

I was at my favorite LYS to round out the colors for my project.

She asked me if I wanted a bag; I said yes please.

She said, Hold out your hand.

I held out my hand. She put a quarter in it.

Now give it back to me.

I gave it back to her.

She rolled her eyes at the state’s requirement but see, we had dutifully complied, and we got a good laugh out of it.

Then I got home, sorted out the new with the old, looked at it and realized I had just changed the entire trajectory of this thing: it was not going to be bright, it was going to be more true to the fogged-in life of the coast because I had way more colors that worked together that way.

I had cast on and done a single row. That’s going straight to the frog pond. The Matisse Blue will have to wait for the next big thing.

Drying…

And some sorting and considering happened. Dragons only get to hoard gold–I’ve got all these other colors, too.

I do need to add some of the right greens before I start. Today was a five-errand day between us and I simply ran out of time to get to a LYS, and Friday is May Day, consumers’ one-day strike across the country. I believe in supporting local yarn stores, but any interaction with any big corporation including any credit card transaction is right out.

I think I can find something around here to do to hold me till Saturday.

“You have received your Royal Mail parcel from Colourmart.”

Why yes. Yes I have. Let me do the second half of this afghan from the last one from them and I’ll get right to it.

Somehow it cracks me up every time: a royal announcement that the subjects of an actual king quietly did their job with integrity and procured and delivered me, USPS willing, my favorite means of helping others feel loved. (Not quite that yarn but close to it, since mine’s now sold out.)

Atelier Yarn Marin, a week ago, my last Yarn Crawl purchase: I found a pair of 40″ Lantern Moon ebony circs in US 5 and told them happily, This is exactly the size and brand I’ve been looking for.

Nina mentioned afterwards that she did not prefer the metal cord they’ve changed to; she liked the old nylon one better. I didn’t have much of an opinion other than that I liked the look of the nylon better. And true, I do not want my needles to flash light and distract from the working yarn.

So where I’m going with this is: I found that I did in fact have an old pair of size 5 (3.75mm) 40″ ones–in that brand and with the nylon cord, no less. So I started the new project on those.

You know that twitchy scritch scritch sensation with each stitch on wooden needles that haven’t aged well? You won’t get that with the pressure-treated Holz and Steins of long ago but they’ve been out of the American market for twenty+ years. On the third row of this I couldn’t wait to get to the end so I could switch to the new pair. Thank goodness for that new pair.

Even the ever so slightly rounder tip shaping was better for the splittable yarn at hand.

I have completely cured myself of wondering why I spent the equivalent of a skein of good yarn on a pair I didn’t need. Now it’s, Man am I glad I bought those!

Day one, Bay Area Yarn Crawl: three yarn stores, three skeins of yarn.

How did you DO that? Nina asked.

Well, I told her, Colourmart sent out an email saying they were doing inventory and finding old cones and clearing them out and once those yarns were gone they were gone. I found 970 grams of 80/20 cashmere/silk aran weight for $116 and knew I would never see that again and it is on the way. So I already had my big splurge.

This was after a discussion of having to hank and scour the mill oils out to get gauge and softness and yarn blooming and then wind it up again and how it’s extra time but it’s worth it and she said it sounded like it might well be. (Usually they’ll do some of that for you for a fee.)

So yeah, three and three. The prettiest stuff and I like supporting the locals.

And then I got home and realized that actually, I have four because we went to four.

Thursday I got official post-op clearance to drive again.

Today I headed to Cottage Yarns. I was down to a single skein of Mecha, it’s cold and rainy and the season for making thick soft quick wool hats (read: no-looking no-brain knitting) and not being able to pick out colors in person had been bugging me.

I walked out with six skeins. That’s about six or seven weekly Zoom knitting-group meetings.

Meantime, on day 11 of the baby afghan in Rios worsted weight, I’m at 8.5 full repeats of fern lace so far out of the 15 I’m aiming for at the moment.

I need to go wind up that next skein.

(What update/why does this thing now consistently cut off the tops of my pictures while refusing to let it be fixed? Huh. Oh well, you can see the rest if you click on it and then not quite stand on your head.)

The chemo cap will go in the mail tomorrow.

Sublime brand bamboo/pearl viscose 70/30 from stash. Slippery, so I knit it relatively tightly to counteract that.

I played yarn chicken with the small ball and actually had 70″ left.  Super soft. Note to self, since I have another ball of this green: I used US 5, 80 stitches, 10-stitch fern lace after three rows of ribbing, and it stays on. I’m quite happy with it.

I have no idea if Kathryn at Cottage Yarns in South San Francisco has any of that yarn left–when I bought mine, Sublime was referring people looking for it to her and I just happened to luck out. Pearl chips made into yarn!

(Blouse by MargoEmbroidery in Ukraine on Etsy. I special-requested it in long sleeves and a blue cotton/linen 50/50 blend that they call homespun because it’s woven in Ukraine, rather than the polyester shown in her photo, and I love what she made. Even if I flipped the tassels out of the way for making dinner and forgot about it till just now.)

Bay Area Yarn Crawl shenanigans, round two.

So we have now been to eight yarn stores. Most of them had sock yarns and chunky yarns but the first four had no or nearly no worsted weight yarn, much less a superwash merino like Rios. It was so strange. Today’s gallivanting found more, but only Imagiknit San Francisco had it in more than a half-handful of colors. Most of what I did find was non-superwash, which is fine, but if you’re going to do the kind of massive intarsia afghan project like I like to do you want to know it will survive what non-knitters will do to it in the laundry.

Granted, there have been a lot of knitters missing their Stitches West fix swooping down on these guys. But I mean, you plan for that, right?

We’ll see what the sister store Imagiknit East will be like on Saturday because we’re both curious, but meantime I bought more at the original one than I’d intended just because by store #6 I wanted to make a statement on behalf of my favorite wool that I use so much of. Plus it was–this is the point of getting your customers into your store–so soft and so perfect in the colors I was hoping for that I wanted it in my yarn library. I threw in the one skein of Mecha at the top for Zoom hat knitting.

Plus that shimmery skein of Ecola Worsted merino/silk at Firebird Yarns, and yeah, that will have to get knitted up for someone who’s willing to hand wash it but it’ll just be one small thing, not three months of my time on the line.

Cottage Yarns really has had me spoiled because if it’s Malabrigo, they have it. (They are not on the BAYarn Crawl list.)

How does a yarn store not have worsted weight superwash wool?

The Bay Area Yarn Crawl starts this Friday. If we can’t have Stitches West anymore, we can make our own, said whoever pulled this idea together and got it started last year. Can’t wait.

Meantime, I took this picture this afternoon, with the needles curling over and hiding the third jellyfish and the first half of a turtle.

Then I kept at it till I’d finished the rest of its eighteen rows (head, shell top, back legs, upper front leg) because I wanted to see it!

Oh. It looks like I missed a stitch yesterday connecting the lower front leg to the body; I didn’t, but it looks like I did. I think I’ll embroider maybe just half a stitch there, maybe a whole, let me think about it overnight, we’ll see.

But the next row is definitely going to start a new fish to the left of that orange trio.

I did not plan on placing them all in diagonal lines; they just swam to where they wanted to go and waited over a month for me to notice.

Had to run some errands and was going to be within a half mile of a local yarn store that I seldom step into. I know what I like, I know they have some nice yarns, and I know that what I buy the most of, they only carry a little of.

But they do have a few colors of Rios, and checking online first they had Whales Road in stock. Worth a look. I didn’t need it, but one skein in a lighter morph if possible for where the coral is closer to the surface could be a nice touch. (Turned out theirs were darker than mine.)

I don’t think I’d ever seen either employee before.

One of them was wearing a sweater I instantly recognized–that was a Caitlin Hunter pattern. Caitlin knits Alaskan motifs and I have two grandkids who were born there and I love her stuff.

So I asked her, Is that the haddock pattern?

She looked at me a moment. Another heartbeat. Then said, Yes.

It wasn’t till I went to go look it up this evening so I could link to it here that I had my forehead-smacking moment.

Halibut. Not haddock. Right. I knew that. It was a gorgeous sweater.

But either she was humoring me or she was blanking on the word, too. I’m guessing the former. I’ll just have to go back sometime so we can have a good laugh over it together.

Cottage Yarns (they have more Malabrigo than anyone I know) is a few miles down the freeway from San Francisco Airport. I dropped Michelle off and then went to go make up for the fact that I ran out of Mecha yarn for Zoom mindless hat knitting at Thanksgiving and had not been up to making the drive in all that time. I could now.

Three future hats came home with me. I resisted so much temptation. But that Mecha is part of my usual Sunday evening Zoom knitting group: I can read the captions and be part of the discussion and knit at the same time.

I glanced at my email after I got home and there was the tail-end of a discussion that had started New Year’s Eve’s Eve, fellow knitters promising not to buy any more yarn for the rest of the year because they had enough in their stash. Then today, someone so proud that she hadn’t bought any yarn this entire year so far! (Keep the joke running!)

I laughed–and then suddenly went, wait a minute. I did!

And then was surprised that that surprised me.

And yet. It wasn’t online nor impersonal clicks. Face time with friends you know and love and want to support doesn’t count towards one’s skein count. Right?

That was the question I wanted to ask.

So.

That third of a ball: in the sunlight, it just wasn’t enough of a match.

(Tap tap tap.) Yarn store number one in that color: zero inventory.

Yarn store number two: three skeins. It was a long way to go to check dye lots for that little of a chance.

Yarn store number three, and the one I’d most want to go to anyway even though it’s a trek. I knew I would have to call to find out, but Kathryn has a lovely deep voice that is easier to hear than most on the phone.

Rios in Ravelry Red? Wait just a minute while I go check. …Lots!

So I gathered up my project, my last skein attached, and headed to Cottage Yarns. Where they don’t have space for classes or gatherings because there’s just too much yarn to squeeze them in. Wasn’t it Mae West who said, “Too much of a good thing is wonderful”?

They had a full bag all ready for me when I got there. I explained that mine was a couple years old and I knew Malabrigo tends to shift the shades slightly from year to year so it was a bit of a long shot.

They were a bit too pink. Mine was more on the orange side.

How about this bag?

Oh, much closer, and I almost bought two of those but then Kathryn’s husband found three skeins that had found their way into a bag with another color altogether (so that they would stand out and could be found while staying mothproofed) and once again stepping out into the sunlight and back under the store lights for comparison, that was what I wanted.

Meantime, while I was focusing on that, the shop’s phone rang.

He went off to wind the two balls for me while she was answering the call, which didn’t take long.

They wanted to know, she told me, trying really hard not to laugh because everybody’s a beginner at the beginning and sometimes non-knitters buy presents. Did we have any red yarn?

Just, red yarn.

I thought last month that I’d bought enough, even though something nagged at me that it wouldn’t be.

It wasn’t quite.

But I didn’t want to infect them, either.

Today was so much better. I washed my hands and put on a mask to be on the safe side for them and went back to Uncommon Threads. Thirteen rows of seed stitch for the upper edge: I’d run out at four.

They were in the middle of a well-attended class with the owner and I got someone else to help me find my yarn; the previous time, Rios in Solis had been tucked away in a storage bin behind where one of the attendees was sitting and I would never have felt I had permission to just go open it/oh ‘scuse me/shove/just, no.

The employee went right to where it was hanging on the wall this time. Oh okay.

While it was being wound up I waited for what seemed a good moment and then asked the owner if I could show off?

Everybody loves a good project.

One woman asked if it was to be a wall hanging or an afghan?

I said, That depends on my brother and his cat.

Ohhh. Cats, she nodded. Yes.

I came away thinking, you know, I’d been wondering for awhile if I should ask him if I should add a doubled-over loop across the upper edge for him to slip a narrow rod through.

I’d also wondered how much the weight of all that wool might stretch the piece out if it were left hanging like that.

But what actually had stopped me was, as the children of an art dealer who’d helped keep the 600-year-old Aubusson tapestry weaving guild alive, we grew up with hand-dyed hand-spun hand-woven tapestries on the walls and my sweet little bit of knitting, I mean, come on….

But somehow that moment clarified it for me: sure I expect he wants his afghan to be an afghan, but why don’t I just ask him what he actually thinks? (Duh….)

I think I have enough yarn…. Actually, probably not. I think I’d have to loop back there.

I learned something cool!

Did you double-check? he asked. Just because you read it online….

The great Google Deep Dive later, site after site after site said the same thing. Some called it ferrous oxide, some called it rust, one spelled it out: ‘ferrous oxide (rust)’.

I had wondered for some time why old barns were such an iconic red and how, no matter where you are in the country, they all got to be about the same shade (with fading on the older ones, sure.) Having read “No Idle Hands: a social history of American knitting” I knew that red in Colonial times was the least colorfast of colors. This is still mostly true.

And that in George Washington’s day, women riding properly sidesaddle into Valley Forge with rescue supplies nearly got shot because their red petticoats were showing and someone had to yell at an overeager soldier that no you idiot the Redcoats (British) aren’t coming, it’s our wives and girlfriends! Who had apparently freshened up the dye job on those underclothes to look pretty.

But I digress.

So: your barns held your entire next year’s food supply and it needed to be protected. The wood planks the barns were made of needed to be free of decay, they needed not to let fungus or moss grow on them in the rain, and they needed to last year after year and hold up against the weather. Things needed to stay dry inside.

Linseed oil from crushed seeds from their flax plants mixed with rust created a kind of varnish and the rust turned the oil red while killing off the stuff that would damage the wood.

Sometimes limestone was added, sometimes milk (which makes one wonder about the smell on hot days but never mind) but the basic recipe was those two things. The effect was not only useful, it was pretty, and it made it really clear from a distance what that building was and where to find it.

My friends at Cottage Yarns today found just the right colorway for a slightly faded barn with specks of brown in Rio’s Jupiter dye to finish the look. I bought it, Kathryn’s husband went to go wind it up for me–and then I saw the Cereza. A single skein. It was brighter but not too bright. It was that perfect shade of red, with a steadier hand on the dyeing–not monochrome, but a bit heathered rather than a mixture of colors coming together. Bought it too.

I spent a lot of time today under every kind of lighting I could get while the sun was still shining.

And then I went with the Cereza.

The moment it actually went into the afghan it settled right in there like it had been looking for this all of its life.