Concert scarf pattern, shawl-ified.  Yarn by Tina.  Swirl effect by Nathania.  Smiles by little Ellie to everybody she can see to wave hi at (unless you lean in too close, in which case she wants her mommy only, which is totally normal at nine months).

Nathania’s outfit and the print in Ellie’s are the same shade of lavendar, and it always cracks me up: they always match. Just like I used to dress my babies in clothes the same colors as the ones I had on that day, every day, without noticing for the longest time that I was doing that.  Even after I did notice, still, most often I’d be halfway through the morning before I would realize that I’d done it again.  It was as normal and natural to do as singing.  Or cracking bad puns.

(Edited to add the answer to Joyce’s question up here: the Concert Scarf is a 12+6 lace pattern +6 edge stitches. I started the (where are my notes I was sure I wrote which one down) one of the shawls in “Wrapped in Comfort” that had a 6+1 lace pattern in the yoke, and then since 12+6+6=24, fudged it by I think I added one stitch to each edge.  I did the edges of the Concert Scarf pattern at the beginning and ending of each row, with the repeating part over and over between.  Nathania and her husband met in a singing group, so I wanted that pattern in her shawl.)

(Scroll past this paragraph as desired…  Again, remember that “Wrapped in Comfort” is on sale at Knitpicks.com and cheaper there right now than the used copies on Amazon; I might have a vested interest in saying so, but hey. Signed and inscribed copies are available as always through Purlescence.  Thank you to so many of you for buying copies these past few days, as well as everybody else who has, and thank you, Stephanie!  I’ve been harlotted!)

These are Nathania’s felted wool pumpkins; I photo’d them, with Kay’s permission, at Purlescence’s knit night tonight.

What a difference a year makes.

Our last winter in New Hampshire, our older children were two and four and terrified of the weird-to-worse-looking people that knocked on the door come Halloween night.  It was unusual enough there for people to knock on the door at all; people in upper New England very seldom dropped by unannounced.  It was a cultural thing, as far as I could tell as a newcomer–but then, it’s true that there was an awful lot of snow in the winter getting in the way.

All my prepping the children beforehand as to what to expect, even the bribes of candy as part of the trick-or-treating deal just didn’t do it for them.  They shrieked and screamed and stayed far from the door and didn’t want me to open it–and they weren’t going out there either, no way.  Mom! Don’t you know what’s OUT there?!

The next year, we were here in California, and even though I again talked to my little ones about Halloween and about playing dress up for it, and remember, don’t forget about that candy part, candy being a highly unusual treat in our household, I worried how they might react this time around.

There was a tall narrow window to peak out of alongside the front door, and back then, people had to come up the walkway past the kitchen windows, so you knew when they were approaching.

My little girl said in great glee to her younger brother, as they craned their heads to try to see down the walkway, “Here come trick-or-treaters! Let’s be scared!”  Pretending to be afraid had magically, at age five, become part of the thrill of pretending for the night to be a witch.

I will be at Copperfield Books in Santa Rosa tomorrow to see Stephanie, and this time we’re not getting caught in traffic on the way.

I will be signing books, hanging out, and generally making a cheerful nuisance of myself at Kaleidoscope Yarns in Essex Junction, Vermont, on Friday, Nov. 14th, starting at 1:00 pm, and signing any copies on order as well as for those there in person.

Twenty-one years ago, after our moving van got done unloading our belongings, billing for 3333 miles for the trip from New Hampshire (a memorable number, that), the elderly retiree across the street sauntered over to introduce himself by way of saying, “I saw them taking a snow shovel off that truck.  Whaddya think you’re gonna need THAT here for?”

He was right. It made a lousy spade for our new Californian garden, and I know because I did try it once because that’s all I had. I figured, well, if it ever does snow, I’ll rent the thing out for a hundred bucks an hour.  Not a snowplow in hundreds of miles, I’ll make a killing.

My husband’s offer letter on the job here promised, in writing, “No home delivery of snow.”

I could get all wistful and say I miss real weather and that I’d be hoping to make snow angels for nostalgia’s sake while we’re back in New England, but you know?  The last time I said any such thing about visiting the East Coast, my flight was the last one allowed down at Dulles airport–five minutes ahead of the tornado that likewise touched down at Dulles airport, and we skidded sideways for a moment there on the runway.

Boring weather isn’t so bad after all.

Besides.  I wear Birkis now.  Snow angels in Birkenstocks is just too Calif—well, now, wait a minute, this IS Vermont we’re talking about…

I’ve done a number of booksignings around here where people knew me well already and it mostly seemed an excuse for friends to come see each other, where I didn’t do the typical author read-from-the-book thing; it would have meant interrupting lots of conversations to get started and people were clearly having a fine time already, which to me is the point of any get-together.  So we kept it informal.

Last night at Green Planet (where I utterly forgot to pull out my camera, this is an older photo), Beth introduced me and it was a more formal set-up this time. I both keenly enjoyed it and felt I rather flubbed it; I tripped over myself, forgot names, was a bit of a ditz…but I have to say that it was definitely great fun.  With my deafness, I kind of wanted to ask Beth afterwards whether the questions asked and my answers had had connections to each other often enough.  Heh.

Beth had draped a shawl across the back of each chair and encouraged people to try them on.  One woman asked, when I said I’d knitted one shawl for a friend and then a duplicate for the publisher, over and over, “How do I get to be your friend?”  I was totally charmed, and thought, well, hon, that was a real good start.  And what was your name again?…

Except, today, don’t expect anything any too soon.  I hit my left hand on the edge of the metal towel rack on the shower door this morning, hard.  I’m usually pretty impervious to pain, but wow.  The doctor told me to gently exercise my hand, demonstrating hand-moving motions, and I immediately chirped hopefully, “Knitting?” She laughed; she got it.  She has knitters in her family.  She allowed as how it would set back my recovery if I did too much of it, and she will call me with the x-ray results when we find out if I broke it or not.

You know I had to go back over to Purlescence today.  Nathania happened to be just inside the door, ready for a hug.

I explained “Talk like a pirate” day to a customer who was wondering what was going on. There was a tv set up with Errol Flyn swashbuckling his way around, while the Purlescence-errrrrs were dressed the part: all the fun of Halloween and of welcoming the fall, without the sugar overload.  Perfect.

Kay’s holding Ellie, whose outfit says “Shiver me timbers;” Ellie got a few good “Arrrrgh!”s in for good measure as she slowly woke up.

And a very good day was had by arrrrrrgh.

I wrote this draft and expected to be able to come home from knit night and gleefully hit Post!, and I’m going to anyway, but it was Nathania’s night off and she wasn’t there.  Kay called her at home saying I had something there at the shop for her; Nathania put it to a family vote, and not surprisingly, the whatever nebulous thing it might be got voted down.  Mom time is not to be tampered with.

I said to Kay a moment later, we should have told them there was homemade chocolate mousse cake waiting here for all of them.  Kay asked if I wanted to bring the shawl back tomorrow?  No?  It’s burning a hole through your pocket?

Oh, you betcha.  So I left it there for discovery in the morning, and since I took a wrong-time-of-day bad-lighting picture before I left, I’ve got one for this post, and Nathania will probably find out the details here first.  Here goes.

Nathania (scroll down to the second to last picture) went to go visit her friend Tina at Blue Moon Fiber Arts in Oregon recently and came back exclaiming over some of the new colorways Tina was about to put out, wishing she’d been able to bring some of them home.

Which led to some behind-the-scenes emailing and scheming.  I thought I’d given it away when I mentioned this Geisha yarn in Oma Desala had arrived, along with the Potomac colorway Tina had concocted for me to play with in memory of our childhood homes near each other’s on the Maryland side of the river.  But no.

At knit night last week, I pulled two shawls out of my bag to show Nathania: one was the gray, not yet gone to its recipient, the other, my Geisha yarn shawl from awhile ago, where I’d used the full skein to see how much length I could get out of it. It totally swamps me, but then, I’m a fairly small person.

Both of those were in a particular pattern, I told her, that I needed to test on various body sizes–would she be willing to try this one on for me?  Sure.

She dutifully went over to the mirror with the Geisha; yes, it’s long enough, yes, it’s wide enough. Very nice.  She handed it back to me and the old pang hit me hard that I had knit a shawl for Sandi, I had knit one for Chloe, the other two owners of Purlescence, but I had not knit one yet for her.  And she would have loved it if I had, but instead, here she was, handing the shawl back.  Ouch.

I had wanted to for quite some time, badly, but what to make and what to make it of just hadn’t come to me at all.  I had to wait to see and I didn’t know why and it bothered me.  I had been looking for a yarn for over a year that would speak to me–and all I could come up with is I just felt, no, it’s not time yet. Something’s missing.

Till she took that trip and Tina and I started talking behind her back.  What Nathania didn’t know was I was having her try on my shawl to know how long I should continue this one for her.

And I knew now. This wasn’t just for me. This wasn’t just for her. This was to bring Tina into the circle of this shawl, too, in happy anticipation and love in together creating something to make our friend happy.

And all those times I’d wondered what pattern I would ever knit for her: as soon as I had the right yarn ready to go, I just knew.  She and her husband had met in a singing group.  They are musicians.  And so, to celebrate two people I adore having found each other and having chosen to live happily ever after,  I started with the Michelle shawl, named for my own daughter and knitted here in celebration of her daughters, to the end of the yoke; from there, I switched to the Concert Scarf pattern, repeat after extra repeat across, to make a one-of-a-kind shawl but at the same time one that anybody with a copy of “Wrapped in Comfort” can follow. The only change is that you’ll need one fewer stitch in the increase row before the main body, and there you go.

I don’t usually put busy colorways with busy patterns, but here, it’s perfect: how they met and their love of music blends into the background of the overall fabric of their lives.  I’m really pleased with how this came out. And very gratified that, at last, I got to knit this shawl: to celebrate Nathania, for her close friend Tina’s sake, and to honor as well, with the pattern, the man who loves Nathania best of all and whom she loves best of all.

Hey, you guys: there’s some leftover chocolate mousse wheat-free anniversary cake waiting for you.

Awhile ago, I knew it was going to be Sandi’s birthday, and I baked a blueberry cake and brought it in to Purlescence for knit night.

The reaction I got was not quite what I’d expected: we had five people in that knitting group who were celiac or who actually risked anaphylactic shock if she ate wheat.  I’d had no idea.  The sentiment was appreciated, the expression, not so much.

The hubby and I were at Whole Foods a little while ago with our daughter, it being a good place to shop when you have an allergic child and she being very allergic to dairy.  There are some things that have ingredients snuck in such that the only safe version she can touch is the ones marked vegan.  So. We stumbled across a cake mix that proclaimed it was free of so many things that I had to read the ingredients just to see what it DID have.  I thought of Sandi, and I bought it.

But it needed to be a blueberry cake.  I owed her one. I had no idea what a brown rice/tapioca/arrowroot flour cake would turn out like, but I threw in two cups’ worth of not quite thawed berries.

I am now under request to do that again.  And when I mentioned that lemon curd across the top would be good, too, Sandi swooned at the idea and held me to it.

I brought a little home to the hubby. He pronounced it weird and went for seconds.

You know, that header really needs a celery stick in the picture to finish it off, but we’re fresh out.  The charcoal shawl, she is finished.

I wrote a draft last night that I will finish when I finish the project it goes with.   A blog stash.  I can’t wait!

Last Thursday at Purlescence‘s knit night, I was feeling very broke, having just paid college tuition and college rent and the first half of my new hearing aids.  I took a good look around the shop, as I always do: looking at yarns is the best way to come up with new ideas.  Colors trigger memories, memories trigger patterns…

And so I noticed just the most drop-dead gorgeous new color ever over that-a-way, in a yarn from Claudia’s Handpaints that for right now was just plain out of my reach.  One look at it and I knew exactly whom it should be for.  Nothing else would do.  I hoped it wouldn’t sell out.  It was just so exquisitely THE color. (Okay, I’m suddenly stuck with Barbara Streisand singing “Misty watercolor memmmmmmoriesssss…” in my head. Shhh, stop, get out of my post!)

Sandi, one of the LYSOs, came over, checking up on me–I’d had a sudden severe bout with my dysautonomia two nights before, and I wasn’t going to mention it, but one look at my worried face and she’d decided to ask what was up.  Those bouts are when the brainstem and the blood pressure and the heart and lungs forget to all stay connected to each other for a little while there.  It had been rough.  I’d reacted to it with the thought, Tina Newton and Lisa Souza both just sent me yarn out of the goodness of their hearts and I am NOT going to die with it sitting in hanks in ziploc bags! Those are going to become LOVE first! BREATHE, you stupid body, BREATHE!!!

A little adrenalin goes a long way, and the body did this, Right-o, old chap, carry on.  And I was fine.  And that was that.

Sandi was hesitant to say it, so I did outright for her: knitting for others helps keep me alive.

And she handed me that Claudia silk I’d been admiring, and said, “Take it.”

Ohmygoodness!!!

And now I have a blog stash and I can’t say… yet. But Sandi–you’re a peach and I adore you.  Knit long and prosper well.

The dryer was having problems. Then the washing machine died.  Glug glug clunk splat.  So I did what any reasonable knitter would do: I went to a yarn store.

And one that was north of San Francisco, for that matter, a good 80 minutes away–if you’re going to run away from handwashing yours and your 6’8″ husband’s clothes in the bathtub, you might as well really run away.   While telling myself that since I only get to Marin Fiber Arts on average maybe once or so a year, there was no point, should I happen to truly fall in love with a yarn there, in spending the whole next year wishing I’d bought it–just buy the durn thing already.  Justify that gas money.  Support that LYSO who is absolutely one of the nicest and best.

This proved not to be a problem.

Note that it was actually Warren’s day off, and he drove over despite an appointment later that was a goodly distance away simply because Robin, who’d come from an hour north while on vacation, and Nina and I, coming from the south, wanted to see him.  (And each other.)  He has a fan club.  He’s a sweetheart.  We took him to lunch and thanked him.

I fell in love with the Whisper merino laceweight and asked if it was Frederikka Payne who was the dyer?  He told me she was. Cool!  I met her in Moss Beach a couple of times, back when she had retail sales.  Um, yeah…when she was closing out a very soft superfine kid mohair for two dollars a ball I bought dozens of balls, started knitting it, realized how really really nice stuff this was and went back and bought a hundred balls more–I mean, you could make a kid mohair afghan, even knitted doubled, for under twenty bucks!  And within eighteen months I’d knitted nearly all of it.  Frederikka definitely smiled hello at Stitches afterwards…  When I asked a question about the Whisper’s ongoing availability, Warren whipped out his cell phone and asked her on the spot.  And now I have a new yarn to go play with.

And I needed something….I was hoping to find something… redwood-y. In the right texture and the right weight, which isn’t easy, because I am very picky about the hand to a yarn.  If it’s not soft enough, I’ll never get around to casting it on.  I went through the store twice before it hit me: don’t fixate on burgundys and rusts.  Look at that Jade Sapphire cashmere/silk in greens in the far corner!

I’d hoped to come home with something really nice, something that would really celebrate Warren’s shop to me.  And with those two, I did.

The good times with good friends, and new ones made, though–that was, as always, the best of all.  A special shout-out to young Gavin, who drove with his grandma-by-love for an hour to get there and then was the sweetest kid you could imagine while we all talked knitting around him.  I asked him at one point who was winning the game he had in his hands, and he smiled shyly and grinned, “Me!”

Nina and Rod joined my husband and me for dinner afterwards.  And a good day was had by all.  (Pictures tomorrow. I’ve been knitting madly, trying to finish something.  It’s late.)

I finished it!  And I can’t really show it off yet, which runs totally counter to the instincts of a blogger, but never mind.  Don’t miss the caption–it’s true!

Continuing the food theme, I saw these and had to try them once. The idea of green beans being potato-chipified was well into the nonpsychodegradeable category.  Um.  Hubby, day one: “Gaack!”  Hubby, day two: “There’s some left?  Sure, I’ll have some more.”

Make sure there’s plenty of water nearby to help you swallow–trust me.

Meantime.  I told this story last month on my blog, but a lot of people at Purlescence’s knit night on Thursday didn’t know anything about it.  Mary was there for the first time in awhile, so I decided to tell on her generosity a bit and say what she’d done.  And I did want to know if her shawl fit okay.  I told her, if she wanted more length, she had the rest of the dye lot: after the shop had gotten their shipment in from Handmaiden, she had shown up that Monday morning to buy a new skein to replace the one she’d given me. I, not knowing that, had shown up an hour or two after her to buy two skeins to knit her a bigger shawl to replace, you got it, the skein she’d given me.  They’d sold out of the periwinkle fast.  Heh.

She loved it, told me it had been a complete surprise, and that it did fit.  Good! That helps confirm my idea that for a larger size, starting at a wider neckline (row 2 in most of my patterns) and adding length works best.

But the group laughed when I admitted I had two more skeins of Casbah somewhere and I couldn’t find them for the life of me. I knew I had them. I knew where I would have put them.

“You’ll just have to buy more!”

“Twist my arm!”

Next shipment… Maybe I should knit a shawl in the Blackberry colorway, long as we’re talking food here.

Kay just called from Purlescence: the long-awaited Casbah shipment finally came in!  So that means I can knit Mary’s skein up, they can put it on display, probably when I come to next Thursday’s knit night if not sooner, and that shawl will be a sample of skeins they actually have in stock.  Everybody wins.  Again.

I love knit night at Purlescence.  I was going through serious knitters deprivation while we were on vacation and then they were too for awhile there.

So here’s the scene: I asked if I could have the shawl back that they had in the window, the Julia pattern from “Wrapped in Comfort,” a little one made out of one skein of Handmaiden Casbah on big needles to stretch the yardage as far as it could go.  It’s softer than the blue Bare one I’d been working on, and softness was something the circumstances really needed.

Kay not only gave it back to me, it had been held on the model with a shawl pin made by a local artist, which she put in my hands and asked that I send it with the shawl to the woman whose husband Marc is so very ill.

Wow.

I regretted not having the Casbah to knit the shop another one; they have it on backorder, and it hadn’t come in.

At which point a woman across the room, Mary, who’d been quietly spinning away at her wheel, and who I hadn’t even known had heard any of that, reached into her knitting bag, stood up and walked over to me, and asked how many skeins it had taken to knit that shawl that was now in my hands.  One?  Good, then!  And she held out a skein, a beautiful blue, Casbah no less, and urged me to take it.

It took me a moment to sink in.  Wow.  I could knit it up and gift it in turn to the dear friends who own that shop.  And that’s what Mary was hoping I would do.  She was giving me her Casbah and blessing all of us in the face of the loss that this other woman that none of them had ever met was dealing with.  We were all in this life thing together.

I was fighting tears.  Wow.

Cast on.

Now is it easier to see? The Constance shawl, after I listened to the galloping horse whinnying “Neigh!” Reknitting from the double-wound tube was enough of a tangle when I first picked it up yesterday that I knew I had to get past that point before I put it away in the ziploc again for the night. So I did, with no problems after that initial moment.

Nancy’s penguin trying to claim credit for the blue ocean of Bare yarn.

Diana trying on my mother-of-the-bride Camelspin-yarn shawl at Purlescence’s knit night last night. The pattern has memories of strawberry picking with my family, growing up, and the wide, flowing Potomac River knitted into its stitches. I have a tradition of always dipping a toe into the water along the banks of that river every time I fly home. Now I can take it with me without having to crash through the canoe.

The pelicans we saw going to the post office yesterday.

“Is it fragile?” the clerk asked.

“Lemons from my Meyer tree for someone who misses California,” I answered her. She loved it.  We just hoped the box doesn’t start leaking juice before it arrives. We put it inside one of their all-weights-fits-one-price box (good thing!)

The last amaryllis of the extended season, a Picotee–the last bud just opened.

Mom and I went to Purlescence tonight, where I showed her off, got to hold Nathania’s baby (this is a picture from about a month ago that I finally got to work) and tried to make friends with my shawl project again, which kind of sputtered out in the wedding preparations. But when we got home, I ended up pulling out my drum carder. This box finally came yesterday, after the post office had lost it, and I wanted to play with my new toy.

Nancy and I had gone in together on an order of Seacell/merino 70/30 mill ends: wonderful, soft stuff, and cheap. But what you don’t pay in price, you pay in time and effort, this being not smooth roving but the stuff that didn’t quite make it that far and got put aside. Well, about time I put that drum carder to good use. (Are you still sure you wanted to sell it to me, Laura?…I can always mail it to your new house if you change your mind…)

I’ve never seen undyed Seacell before, much less spun nor dyed it. I am going to find out. (Tomorrow, as I glance at the clock. Or maybe next week, as I glance at the calendar.)

“Begin: the rest is easy.” Don’t remember where I read that in high school, but it’s stuck with me ever since. And now I have.

Planetary excursion: the hubby and I went to Green Planet in Campbell on Saturday to check out the newest yarn store around; I wish Beth, the new owner, great good fortune, and she’s off to a wonderful start. She has big enough chairs for my sweetie to sit in comfortably–this is rare, for my 6’8″er–with WiFi, to keep the non-knitting Significant Others happy. He approved. Houston, we have a positive on that trajectory.

Go to http://littledee.net/ , scroll down a bit, and see the author of my favorite comic strip and what he’s got in his hands. So tell us, Chris, is it merino? Is it superwash to survive what your characters will put it through? Vachel wings and Dee knee-highs next?