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!

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.

Amazon has had my book listed for pre-order for awhile, but with the wrong cover. Here is what it’s really going to look like come June 11. Being the author, and not having been there during the photography, I find I want to step into the picture and tug that bottom edge just a tad, you know, adjust it to hang just a little more loosely on the neck…

Enough of that. I think this one captures the spirit of the book much better. The model has a lovely smile, and I was so glad when I saw this shot. Well done, Martingale!

Picture a jack-in-the-box: the closer you get to the end of the tune as you crank the handle round and round, the more intense the pressure building up inside, until at last the box bursts open and the clown jumps out at you.

It was like that.

I was at a party, making small talk with some fellow I’d just met; he casually asked where I lived. I named the town. “Oh!” he brightened. “Where?”

The south end of town, near Cubberley.

“Oh.” (A little more intensely.) “Where?”

I hesitated, described a little, he pressed, while I was beginning to squirm inwardly, but I named my street. That got me an intense “WHERE on …!”

I wondered what my better judgment should be saying in such a situation; in those moments, nobody else was immediately close enough to be paying any attention to any of this. Hmm. Oh, what the heck, and I told him our house number.

The jack-in-the-box exploded out into the open: “I GREW UP IN THAT HOUSE!!!”

Pleased to meetcha. Turns out his folks had sold it to the ones who had sold it to us. He’d lived in it till he’d been about eight; they’d been the original owners.

Small world. Too funny. He semi-growled something about how his sisters and he had driven past the old place just to see it, and someone had really changed the front; I grinned with a half-apology and said, yeah, we did. Sorry about that!

Fast forward a couple of years. My folks put their house on the market and moved out of their home of 45 years in Bethesda, Maryland last September.

Stitches East is coming up in October, and I as a newly-minted author am thinking about attending, if anyone should happen to want me to scribble in anyone’s book or two. I’d take any excuse to go home anyway; still got my in-laws there and many a friend to go see.

Could you just see it? Could you just see someone coming up and going, I saw a picture of my new house on your blog!…

The buyer apologized to the folks that she was planning on doing some remodelling. C’mon, those cabinets were 45 years old, they needed to be ripped out! Don’t worry about it. There’s a gap in the front steps where the ground settled and the concrete split apart. I expect that’ll be fixed up too.

Meantime, I’ve been thinking of writing a letter to her, telling her of how my husband and I have a shared earliest-memory of the day my folks moved into that house when I was three and he was four; his folks were pitching in for the day, helping with our move from a tiny warbox house in Silver Spring. Of how her kids should look around under the mayapples in the spring to see the box turtles, and to look out for the foxes and the pileated woodpeckers. It’s a gloriously beautiful neighborhood, with next-door neighbors whose boys used to sneak over to my folks’ and shovel their driveway for them when they weren’t looking.

They’re going to like it there. I think I’ll knit her a bit of lace as a housewarming present.

Joan Schrouder is often referred to on the Knitlist, I think rather to her embarrassment, as Saint Joan, because of how she answers technical knitting questions and calls for help with a great willingness to puzzle out problems for other people. Joan also happens to be a nurse. She gave me permission to post this email exchange we had this week:

Joan! Joan! I just found my book on Amazon.ca! Not on plain old Amazon, but .ca. No picture, and they hyphenated my name, but hey, they had to do SOMEthing to keep me from hyperventilating!

To which she answered:

Quick! Print this out. Take paper, fold into a tube, pinch one end shut and *breathe slowly and evenly into open end. Repeat from * until circumoral buzzing ceases and vision clears.

Seriously, congratulations! So how soon until it’s actually out on the stands?

Joan

Too funny. The answer I told her was July. Today I heard from my editor, working from home so she didn’t have my contract in hand, saying that sometimes the timing changes; she wanted to make sure I knew the release date was now set for June 11.

ALRIGHT!!!!

p.s. I just checked, and they’ve got “Wrapped in Comfort” on Amazon.com now, no hyphen, although they’ve still got it as Alison Jeppson-Hyde on Amazon.ca. Either way, it’s me. Wouldn’t want anybody to get confused, you know, looking at that hyphen, and think oh, then, well, that must be someone else…

My doorbell just rang. Ever gotten a yarn where you just want to pet it for awhile before actually diving in and knitting it up? I know the deadlines, I know I need to go through every line and every comma, and I’ll get right into that. But first, I need to get my mind bent around the fact that I actually did write an actual book. That it actually has pictures, that they’re glorious (here, can I tug at that edge on the cover, just a smidge, there you go, thanks), that Martingale did a great job, and that this really all is happening and it’s actually right here in front of me. And then I get to pick up my author’s proofs and go, Wow! LOOK AT THIS!!!!

(oh, right, um, yeah, I know, I can’t show it to you yet. details.)

I have been tagged by Fiberfanatic. Six weird things about me? Other than that goofy subject line? Okay…

1. I grew up a short walk away from the house built by Frank Lloyd Wright for his youngest son: the Llewellyn house in Bethesda, Maryland. He was in the Merchant Marines, and the house was built to resemble a boat, with the roof being the deck. I used to walk past it just about every day, but like most Wright buildings, when the trees were in leaf it about completely disappeared into its setting by Cabin John Creek. Gorgeous.

2. My dad lived in France for three years just post-WWII and then settled in the DC area and made a career of helping talented French artists gain an international audience. I grew up in a house that doubled as an art gallery. (“Don’t Touch The Paintings!”)

3. I once had a pet hamster escape for months, living off the birdseed we kept by the back door downstairs for the birdfeeder and the pipe that we didn’t know was leaking inside the bathroom wall, chewing up empty (thank goodness for that) painting boxes, and finally getting caught when it ran across my brother’s face in the middle of the night when he was sound asleep (not for long).

4. I learned how to spin after knitting my husband’s hair… The rest of that story is in my book.

5. I actually got a book accepted by an actual publisher with actual stories in it I’d actually not only written but actually lived. Lifelong dreams CAN come true! “Wrapped in Comfort: Knitted Lace Shawls,” Martingale Press, July 07.

6. As the fourth of six kids born in a ten-year span, I had at least one older sibling to look up to and mimic (or not) who was going through the throes of puberty starting when I was six years old. One of the side effects of that is that it’s real hard to tell me what to do unless it’s what I want to do. For instance, this meme said I was to name the six people I’m tagging, but I say what if one of them might not want to participate, and I would hate to put someone on the spot, or, worse yet, act like the bossy big sister telling them what to do. So–as for tagging, how about instead you give a shout-out in the comments, any one and any number, and we’ll all go click on your blog if you have a blog, or you can just say it right here. Go ahead, write the post, it’ll bring back fun memories.

See? I do it my way. And being the younger sibling, I get to add, nyaa nyaa nya nyaaah nyaah on the meme rules, and run away grinning. Oh, yeah, that’s item #7, I’ll count as high as I want to, so there–I was the fastest runner except for two boys, Brooks Hansen and I forget who the other one was, in my whole grade all the way through Seven Locks Elementary school. Gee, (looking back at my siblings closing in on me), I wonder why? And yeah, I remember Brooks was one of the two because I had a crush on him in 6th grade. No wonder he ran faster than I did.

Thank you, Mary!

Thinking about Allison’s comment. I firmly believe that every time a person shares of their creativity with those around them, they are making the world a better place. Creativity comes in forms as infinitely variable as people; it’s the giving and the opening of one’s heart and time to others that makes the difference.

The struggle is finding the balance of time and for whom. I have never participated in one of the knitswaps before; at this time of year, my knitting always became too focused on getting things done in time for my family for that, and to commit to doing more felt like it would be adding stress (I had enough of that already, totally self-inflicted) to something that should be done for joy. There was always this normal human sense of, I can never do enough.

I’m in a different place this year. My last kid is newly out of high school, my book was made official in Martingale Press’s catalog two days ago–“Wrapped in Comfort: Knitted Lace Shawls,” July 07, thank you, much appreciated–and I have a ton of finished projects, both beta versions here and the official ones at the publisher’s. I’ve learned how fast I can make things. I have a lot here on hand. I’m in, what is for me, good health. I think I’m finally beginning to let go of the fear that I’d end up leaving my future grandkids with no tangible bits of myself: my Grandmother Jeppson at one point knitted like I do, and yet I own not a thing she ever made. (Her ring, though, which Grandpa watched being made for her, as mentioned earlier. I treasure it.) One of the difficult things about writing my book was that I could not give away what I was making–well, actually, I did, the stories are about the friends I created my designs for, and then I went and knitted a duplicate of each for the book. Still. That’s months of work that couldn’t leave the house. And yet… I felt like I was knitting for all knitters everywhere. In hopes that someone, somewhere, might be inspired by a story or two to pick up their needles and go knit for someone in their lives. Cool.

So, at last, now was the perfect time in my life to participate, and I mean really participate, heart and soul, in that knitswap. To every thing there is a season. And so I dove into that Rabbit Tracks project, and got it done so fast that it left me thinking, why on earth didn’t I do this before? I could have! If I’d only let go of the stress. Planned a little more. Procrastinated a little less.

Like we don’t already all know that?

May everyone reading this be wrapped in comfort and wrap others in comfort this season, by whatever means works best for them.

Today, UPS rang the doorbell: my new computer, with a monitor I can actually see on. I loved that Newsweek had an Annie Liebowitz shot of Bill Gates using a monitor like the one I was using–and even more when I noticed the caption said that picture was shot in ’94. Yeah, there was a reason mine was getting hard to read.

So, while my husband was getting the new setup in place, the doorbell rang again. The yellow DHL truck, bringing me my manuscript from Martingale for my review. I’ve been going through it, and there, on one page, was what to me was a hysterically funny note: “Alison. It says on this scarf that it’s 55″ wide. It’s really stretchy, but we could only get it to 8″.”

Five POINT five. I guess if I didn’t quite see the period I didn’t notice because I was so used to not quite seeing them? I can just see the looks on the editors’ faces! Too funny!

Our front door was painted yellow. The former owner thought it would be cheerful.

Over a dozen years ago, there was a whitefly explosion in northern California, an invasive species from I forget where with no natural local predators. Gnats, you’d think something would eat a gnat, but white gnats seemed to be off the birds’ gourmet foods list–cauliflower au soleil!–and they multiplied quickly into great swirling clouds, like white dust devils twirling in a column in the sunshine. Our ash trees were emphatically not happy with them.

Which is how I came to find out that yellow is a color that is naturally attractive to insects: they’re programmed to see it as meaning “Flower. Yum.” Which meant that, until California started releasing large batches of counter-attack tiny nonstinging wasps that only ate whitefly larvae, every time we walked through our front door, we had to run a gauntlet of the little icky things en masse. One time, I got out there with a wet rag and mowed them down in strokes running down the door, just to see if I could have a clear door for even a moment. But there was no end to them. I gave up. Those wasps eventually did the job, though, and you almost never see a whitefly now.

I did get that first angora scarf overdyed green today; I’ll post a picture when it’s dry, and tomorrow the second scarf goes in the dyepot. While I was knitting it a little earlier tonight, a black gnat flew into it and got caught in the fuzz, making it an easy target to squash. Awhile earlier, I had seen another crawling up to a broken-off piece of yarn that I’d separated from the ball due to moth damage; I thought, boy, those hatched fast after I took that out of the freezer!

When that angora had shown up in the mail, the first thing I had done was to put the box in a heavy sweater-size ziploc bag and put it in the freezer to immediately kill any possible moths, before I even knew there had been any. Just as a precaution. It’s a pesticide-free way to kill them, alternating between warmth and freezing: kill the adults and larvae, then warm it up so the eggs think it’s spring, throw it back in the freezer again. I never have been quite sure how long the interludes between should be, though.

Two gnats in the angora in one evening, and I was sitting there wondering, since when do gnats eat yarn? Do I have to worry about everything biting it now? Is angora that much of a dessert in the bug world?

And then it hit me. Yellow. The yarn was bright yellow. Flowers. Yum. And I felt a whole lot better.

Pictures tomorrow when the first scarf is dry and there’s more to show off. Oh, and–our front door is white these days. But the ash trees, I’m afraid, are gone.