See you at Heindselman’s Yarns in Provo next week! At 4:00 Wednesday, a few hours after I wave goodbye to John at the MTC. Have author’s pen (not to mention kid), will travel.

I was starting to pack for the trip, going over things and wondering: do I have any good shoes that actually have an enclosed heel? Been too long. I could just picture myself flicking Utah snow up into the backs of my legs as I walked with these. Went looking, and found a pair of uncomfortable pumps (they all are. It’s the nature of being 7 EE) that I think I’d bought for and then hadn’t worn since my grandmother’s funeral at 96…meaning, in ’96. Old.

A friend of mine came over yesterday, dashing through a storm and on up to the door, and as I opened the door, was going, “You can really tell it’s winter out there!”

I tried, I really tried–but it didn’t work, and I burst out laughing in spite of myself: “Shovelling 72″ in 17 days!” I responded. (Where we’d moved from in New Hampshire.)

“Well, for *California* it’s winter out there!”

Ah yes. California winters. Where the–well, you go look at this. Christmas lights in palm trees. You tell me if that’s nonpsychodegradeable or not.

The CT scan suggested lymph node involvement. There was none. The surgery went very well and was deemed a complete success.

Marguerite will be okay. And my intense thanks to all who wrapped her in thoughts and prayers of healing, alongside mine.

I will be dropping my son off at the MTC and then going over to Heindselman’s, the LYS there in Provo, Utah, to sign copies of “Wrapped in Comfort: Knitted Lace Shawls,” at 4 pm on Dec. 12th. Aren’t you glad to know you still have time to book your plane tickets?

You know, this is working up fast enough that I ought to finish the silly thing before snapping its picture, but here it is, unblocked: 33 stitches and five minutes to the inch. Being a very open pattern, it stretches out a lot, which means it’s good for getting as much length as you can out of a small amount of an expensive yarn (I would say go for at least 250 yards of a fingering weight with size 5.5 mm needles). This is three repeats across plus one plain stitch added to each edge, the main body of my Water Turtles Shawl pattern from “Wrapped in Comfort,” rows 38 and 40. The yarn is by Blue Moon Fiber Arts, merino/tencel in the Moonstone colorway.

Five minutes an inch. You don’t have to knit the whole shawl, a scarf from the pattern will do. So, how is your holiday knitting deadline coming along?

Some of mine just got moved up two weeks: our son John is going into the Mission Training Center in Provo, Utah, to start his mission for the Mormon Church in December. When his big brother went off, his dad took him; this time it’s my turn. I haven’t seen my folks’ new place in Salt Lake City yet, so it only seemed fair.

And I thought yesterday of how much I’ve gotten used to Californian winters, of just how cold I was going to be, and wished I had something warm. You know, like a scarf, and maybe a hat, too.

Wait a few seconds for it to hit me… DUH! Even with a few holes here and there in the patterns, yeah, um, I think I’ve got a scarf or two around here.  Now to finish this and go knit a solid one for the kid.

I want to thank each one of you who has left a comment on Marguerite’s post; there is great comfort in reading those messages. Thank you to each person who simply Thought Good Thoughts, too; caring matters. The immense message of illness is that we’re all in this life thing together, looking out for each other.

And I want to thank each person who ordered a pattern from Lynda at http://home.comcast.net/~lmmichaluk/Lilly/ and http://luna-knits.blogspot.com/ She had a problem with IE with her computer for awhile there, and Karin’s comment gave her the heads-up she needed; it’s fixed now.

Meantime, Toni has a kiwi-faced clock on her blog to show which time zone she’s in. I got a good chuckle out of it, and told her she’d just triggered my next blog post. Ergo.

It was back in the day before we were on the Do Not Call registry (which expires soon, by the way, just a heads-up that you need to renew your place on it.) Stephanie Pearl-McPhee was doing her first book tour to the Bay Area, and I bought some Blue Sky Alpacas AlpacaSilk at the yarn store she spoke at, Stash, in Berkeley. I found several balls on the shelf, and they assured me they had more in the back, but with the crowd that night there was just no way–would I mind if they found it later and mailed it to me?

Sure, no problem.

I got a very sheepish message later: they didn’t have more after all. They were very sorry, but there was nothing they could do.

I wasn’t about to drive the 45 or so miles through the worst traffic in northern California to return it; I just had to try to find more of that dyelot somewhere else, then. I started poking around on the web and made a few phone calls.

One place was happy to say they had it. Great! They mailed it–and it was a different one. I reported back, they checked, and went, oh no! The dyelot number stated on the outer bag was the one I’d wanted, but the actual balls inside didn’t match it. Okay, scratch that one. I mailed them back.

The next place took my email and phone number and promised to get back to me when they had a moment to go check. Fine. It didn’t occur to me to tell them where I was.

At the time, we were getting many a cold call from random hopeful newbie Wall Street stockbrokers and the like. Occasionally, you would get one that did not stop to think that there was more than one time zone in this country. Sir, what on earth makes you think I would ever be interested in your spiel about investing in your proferred company at 5 am!?

So. It was dark o’clock, and we were out cold. The phone rang–you know, it’s great to be deaf…and my husband, assuming it was a Red Cross dispatcher, woke up and grabbed it, trying not to drop the old heavy princess phone on my head as he fumbled around for it.

Then he thrust the receiver at me, grumbling sleepily, “It’s your boiler-room yarn pushers in New York City. They want you to know they don’t have your dye lot.” Busted!

At that, I finally appealed directly to Blue Sky for any help on where I might be able to find what I wanted. They had some themselves, it turned out. And not only did they send it to me, but they generously gifted me with it for my troubles.

And so I redesigned Wanda’s shawl to match their yarn as my way of thanking them, and the yarn they gave me is there in that particular shawl that is pictured in my book. And here in this post.

I rinsed this in tepid water and laid it out flat, and I could have left it at that, but I wanted crisper points at the edges to match the name of the colorway. I don’t have any rustproof pins, but I pulled out my blocking wires and used one per three points. This being my second shawl out of Blue Moon’s Geisha yarn, I’d learned that it has a mind and sproing of its own, and I carefully smoothed down the stitches at the increase row between the yoke and the main body, knowing they had the energy of toddlers bouncing around after snacktime. Shhh, children, lay down now, time to relax. And so they did.

To answer Tammy’s question, yes, I knitted this in eight days, mostly during the evenings. Actually, I was thinking it should have been finished in four or five days, max, so your comment made me laugh and put the timing in perspective–thank you for that. I used size nine (5.5 mm) needles, and it worked up very quickly.

One of my goals in using the fingering weight yarns that I mostly used in my “Wrapped in Comfort” book was to make laceknitting accessible to people who don’t have a lot of time, but who still want to make something unusual and beautiful. This Geisha is somewhat in between laceweight and fingering weight.

Weatherly Mize’s shawl pin. Goes with every color.

Kate and Deb, who laughed with me for ages at Stitches East, with the YSO occasionally dropping in the conversation when she had a moment because it was just too much fun not to. We were having a good time. They surprised me with these gorgeous socks, which they’d made together.

Amy, with her black baby alpaca shawl in the yarn from Karin in Albany.

Robin, who used to live in sight of my street here, before I came here, and then moved close enough to the neighborhood I grew up in that when I named the street she asked which house.

Afton described a dinner after the first night of Stitches, where eight women were discussing the menu with the waitress. One told her, “No dairy” (which I can thoroughly relate to–I have a daughter who gets violently ill if she eats anything that so much as touched anything made from milk.) The waitress didn’t get it, and asked what No Dairy meant. Instantly, all eight women at that table spontaneously declared in unison, “MOOOoooooooOO.” I wish I’d been there! Afton surprised me with this wool tam. I confess I have Mary Rowe’s “Knitted Tams” book and never gotten past the dream stage with it; Afton totally scooped me, and I love blues and greens together.

Colorjoy LynnH in her one-off Peace shawl, with the yoke done a little differently from how it is in the book; I like to doodle in my knitting. Granted, LynnH is the last person you’d expect to see wearing something so plain, but since I didn’t know what color would be best, I decided she would have great fun painting it, and she said she would indeed. Lynn, I’m listening to Brian’s Music Box Rag album as I type. Once I learn the pieces I can kazoo along with your husband. (Kazoo made by Lynn.)

Lisa Souza adjusting a Bigfoot shawl from “Wrapped in Comfort” in her Jellybeanz colorway at her booth at Stitches East, and my haul of Lisa yarn.

Sheila Ernst and her friend (Lisa’s, too) Jackie in the background. Sheila makes the most incredible handblown glass shawl pins, glass buttons, glass knitting needles, you name it. The picture doesn’t begin to do it justice, but it goes so well with my airplane knitting–which is the yarn Laura in Alameda dyed and surprised me with at TKGA. I’m almost done knitting it up, and I can’t wait to wear them together.

I was quite thoroughly spoiled by my friends on this trip in far more ways than these pictures could convey, and I am so glad I got to go!

(Edited to add: WordPress is balking, and some pictures are being hidden beneath others.)

I finished it in time! This is the Bigfoot pattern, but with the variant that I continued the Rabbit Tracks pattern all the way down the body of the shawl, not just in the yoke. Since I was knitting it in black, it was way easier to tell where I was if the second pattern row was five stitches across a repeat rather than eleven.

My friend Karin (watch the e’s and i’s in this post to keep people straight) had a half-pound hank of black baby alpaca yarn she’d bought from the farmer who’d raised the animal, and she felt it needed to go to me.

I thanked her, told her I felt there were a lot of people who needed yarn more than I did, and that my eyes just didn’t like to knit black–but a few days later she came back to me with the idea, saying she just still felt it was meant to go to me.

And so it arrived in the mail awhile ago, lovely, very soft stuff, so much of it, and I was just in awe that she would offer it up like that. It was definitely black. Looking at it, I just had the feeling that I would be glad I had it in spite of my reservations, and that Karin was right, I would find just the right person for it–and it would tell me when.

In anticipation of my trip, I asked my friend Karen of the Water Turtles shawl fame what color shawl to knit for her daughter.

Black, Karen answered. Definitely black.

Now, I would never have had any black yarn in my stash had it not been for Karin’s gift. It turns out that Karen breaks out in hives if she touches wool, a true allergy, not just that the stuff is itchy, and she mentioned that her daughter was allergic too. But they have no problems with baby alpaca.

Heh. Guess what I had on hand to play with.

Karin was right. This yarn did find where it was meant to go to, and with her help it’s about to arrive there.

(Okay, back to packing.  And yes, I know I’m blowing the surprise here, but a few days of anticipatory happiness on the recipient’s part makes that worth it, I decided.)

I brought my author’s advance copy from May with me to TKGA yesterday. When people asked me to sign their books, I said sure, and asked if they in turn would like to sign mine. They didn’t have to say anything in there if they didn’t want to, but I thought it would be cool if they did.

Most who did hadn’t really seen the inside of Wrapped in Comfort yet other than a brief glance-through at the booth, and the notes were nice ones along the lines of “looking forward to knitting the patterns.” A number of old friends poured love into their words as well. (Gracie Larsen, I am SO looking at you right now. I had great fun telling everybody this book was your fault.) I told everybody pick a page, any page, anywhere that suits you. Given that that copy was the one I received before I knew how my three years of work would do out there, it was a copy of hope and of holding my breath–which I imagine is about how the people buying it felt yesterday: that it would live up to what they hoped out of it, especially given that they were paying full sticker price there.

(Heh. I noticed a certain large discount online knitting-book seller was at backorder this morning…)

I told my son about it when I got home, and that I planned to take it to Stitches East, too, that that had been just too much fun. He went, “Mom! You’ll run out of space in there!” Well, then, cool. “But they’ll have to, like, write across the models’ noses!” In my dreams, hon. In my dreams.

It was about halfway through before I realized I’d probably picked up the idea from the copy that Martingale sent me that everybody there, from the CEO down to the shipping clerk, had signed for me. A way of honoring every person’s role as being essential. Go Martingale!

P.S. The cushion? It was a valve job. It had been left open. It’s fine.

P.P.S. The backdrop? An afghan made by members of my knitting group, square by square, as a congratulations on the book coming out. Knitters are such cool people.

P.P.P.S. (Technical stuff alert): To the woman who asked me if you could use laceweight with my patterns, a question that had so many answers that it all came out garbled: I had just been in Gracie’s Lacey Knitters Guild booth, where they were calling Jaggerspun Zephyr fingering weight. Zephyr is, I’d say, a heavy laceweight. I’ve used yarn as fine as that on the larger patterns and it worked out to a lighter, different effect than my more-typical fingering weight shawls, but it looked and fit fine.

Friday bright and early I will be at The Knitting Guild of America conference at the Oakland Convention Center in Oakland, CA. I’ll be signing books at 2:00 at the Pacific Meadows Alpacas booth.

So. Sunday night we got an email from Dave, familiar to those who’ve read my book as Dave-and-Wanda Dave. He was going to be in northern California on business and wondered if he could stop by Thursday night for a visit on his way back to the airport? Well YEAH! I asked him if he would mind going and asking Wanda her favorite color?

Note that the original shawl I knitted for her was in a color that was a total guess on my part. Blue is a pretty safe bet for most people, but there are all kinds of blues. White would have been good, too, but at that particular point in my life I couldn’t bear to knit any more white stitches for awhile.

Purple, he emailed back a few minutes later.

I did not have enough purple yarn in the right weight. And every single store in the Bay Area that sells Blue Sky Alpacas AlpacaSilk (which is an exquisite yarn) was going to be closed Monday. Every one. My stash and I were on our own.

I had some lightweight baby alpaca and what was once a full pound of Jaggerspun Zephyr silk/merino (thanks to my friend Karin, who used to own The Periwinkle Sheep.) Together, those would give me close to the same weight, and I could dye it when I was done. I did have purple dye in the stash. And so, as I blogged, the race was on.

I showed a picture of some of those rows I frogged. What I didn’t say was that after that I made another brainless mistake and had to frog it again. So I started 11 pm Sunday night, but in effect I might as well have started Monday.

I alternated knitting with icing my hands and was able to keep on going, hour after hour, Monday all day, Tuesday all day, then Wednesday I was the speaker at a lupus support group meeting and didn’t get to my needles till mid-afternoon. At about 7:30 pm the shawl came out of the dyepot.

I figure, Wanda knew what I was up to the moment she was telling Dave purple. And that’s fine. I love the way the silk in the Zephyr took up the dye a little more slowly, and so came out a little lighter than the baby alpaca and the merino fibers: it shimmers against them. I love it. White is nice, but purpleifying it brought out the best in it.

And I got to give it to him in person. That is SO cool.

(Now, did anyone get my visual pun on that metronome? Given what Dave did for us in the story I wrote in the book, I had to reference the piano while anticipating his coming.)

First of all, I want to thank everybody. Being one who believes strongly in the power of prayer, I want to thank everybody who added theirs in for me or who simply Thought Good Thoughts. There’s power in that–and last night I had no problems breathing whatsoever. I can’t tell you how wonderful that feels. Thank you, your efforts did me immeasurable good and buoyed me up, and I’m praying the same for your own days, each of you wherever you are.

Okay, the post for the day: I goofed. I was at Stitches West this past February, stopped at the Pacific Meadows Alpacas booth, and bought the most gorgeous deep red. Now, vivid, orangey reds make my balance go bonkers, but this was a calm enough shade that it seemed okay. (I discovered this past week that a friend with a brain tumor gets dizzy if she’s around too-bright reds. It felt wonderful to not be the only weird one, much though I wouldn’t wish it on her; mine is the after effects from a car accident.)

I’m curious to see how Johnna’s silk and I get along together when it’s finished and I’m not sitting down and holding still knitting it, but it’s worth it; it’s a gorgeous color, and she and I love it.

So. There I was, I picked out this deep red, and it wasn’t till I got home that it hit me: this wasn’t fingering weight! They had only ever sold fingering weight at Stitches, but this was sportweight, and I hadn’t even noticed! So instead of buying more than enough, I’d bought less than enough, maybe, and the weight of it and the look in a shawl would be way different from what I’d been planning. I hesitated to start with it.

But curiosity got the better of my hesitation, and I finally did. I knew I’d have to do a shawl with a lot fewer stitches than most of mine: for one thing, so it wouldn’t look like a bulky afghan on, and for another, there just wasn’t the yardage. I cast on the Constance shawl, one of the ones with the fewest stitches and that goes best with a heavier yarn. I got it up to about 22″ long, and then didn’t have enough yarn for another 10-row half-diamond. So I added this: on the next right side row after the last pattern repeat, I did, k1, *k1, (yo, ssk) twice, k1, (k2tog, yo) twice, k2, repeat across. Next right side row: K1, *(yo, ssk) twice, yo, sl1-k2tog-psso, (yo, k2tog) twice, yo, repeat, end k1. That gives you a continuation of the zigzag pattern that kind of adds an exclamation point to the bottom of the last diamond; I quite like it. Enough that I’m going to add it again whenever I knit this pattern.

So I thought I’d pass the idea on.

Note: I will be signing copies of “Wrapped in Comfort: Knitted Lace Shawls” at the Pacific Meadows Alpacas booth at 2:00 Friday September 28th at TKGA in Oakland, and I will be at Lisa Souza’s booth to sign books at 1:00 at Stitches East in Baltimore on Saturday, Oct. 13th. I plan to be at Stitches East both Friday and Saturday. See you there!

Been a long time since the man-eating plant got into the blog. ‘Bout time. Photographing projects there requires that I stand in the sunlight: I can do that now. Not for too long, but hey, cool, progress.

When I put my zinnia scarf in my book, I did it first in a very bright, soft, fluffy, reddish-orange yarn, because the story was about a four-year-old African-American child; that was exactly the kind of thing I imagined she would have reached for first. I knitted it originally in two pieces, kitchenered at the top. Now, I don’t kitchener-stitch often enough to be as breezily comfortable with it as I’d like to be, and I kept coming back to the thought that a lot of people wouldn’t attempt it, or would have the finished halves as terminal UFOs in their closets.

So I tossed that idea aside, finally, and reworked the motif as bottom-up and top-down, figuring that anybody who preferred the sharper bottom-up version and didn’t mind kitchenering would know enough to be able to work out the idea of knitting it in two pieces if they wanted. But I wanted to offer a way out for those who sit there, computer screen or book on one side, project in hand, trying to figure out how on earth do you do this grafting thing just right, and why is it hard to remember from the last time…? (One could also do a three-needle bindoff, but it would add a somewhat flattened-out sideways line.)

The computer program I’m typing on is refusing to accept “kitchen” with any suffix added on as a normal word. And I’m finding it highly amusing.

In the book, I mention that for my top-down circular shawls, I double the strand for the cast-on. Now, the thing is, I figured out about halfway through the book production process that I needed to do that, having already knitted dozens of shawls. (I made duplicates: one for the friend, one for the publisher, one for the friend, one for the publisher. Picture pulling the petals off a clover: she loves me, she loves me n…oh wait, never mind, doesn’t apply–Martingale is absolutely wonderful.) I did not specify to their photographer which were the New Improveds, so there were closeups of the single stranded necks as well as the doubled ones.  So I wanted to reassure those who haven’t been sure how well that neck would hold up that if you *do* do that doubled strand, and then weave the doubled-strand ends through the back of every purl stitch on Row 1, it gives you a braided effect that works out particularly well.

Meantime, yesterday I received a large skein of Lisa Souza’s baby alpaca laceweight from lisaknit.com in Jellybeanz, to match the handspun socks Jasmin gave me from Lisa’s roving. The pink will have to wait its turn, because, right now, my needles are loving the Jellybeanz more. I’ve never had handknit socks to match a shawl before. Too cool!

If anybody wants a signed copy of Wrapped in Comfort, they can order it from purlescenceyarns.com and I’ll come into their shop and inscribe it. This Thursday evening, though, I’m going to do a little more; I’m going to show up with a whole bunch of shawls for an official booksigning and trunk show event there. Please, no sniffles, for those coming; it would be highly appreciated.

This shawl is done in Blue Moon’s Geisha line (which they carry), a non-furry kid mohair/silk/nylon blend. My only problem is, I love the colorway. But how do I–I mean, can you imagine a more intense disconnect… I like to write about the ways knitting helps create connections between people and how giving of our handiwork can forge friendships. This colorway is called Backstabber. I would love to know the story behind that name!

Maybe I’ll have to keep this one?