From winding a ball of yarn Tuesday

To this

To this

To the last. Cast off!

With a comforting hat for one of the Taylors, dyed and knitted by Karin, added in, and thank you, Karin. (I’m trying not to touch it or breathe on it, but I had to get a good shot.)

The shawl is blocking now, and oh goodness, if I thought it was soft and lovely as I was knitting it, rinsing the brushed cashmere and silk and Dianne’s laceweight knit together and laying it out in its pure form now…

One thought to add in here.  I’ve knitted two strands of laceweight together before, and found it mattered to me that they be a little grabby at each other. I once sent my sister (sorry, Carolyn, but it was so pretty!) a shawl knit of a strand each of baby alpaca and of a gorgeous, shimmery silk–and before I mailed it off to her, I managed to snag the silk somehow and that stitch slid wayyyy out of there.  Working a stitch back into a lace pattern, tugging gently along its lines, is one thing; doing it when one slippery strand has gone bonkers while a twin strand has stayed demurely in its place was something else.  It took me two days to fix, and I mailed it off with a catch in my breath, no time left to reknit the project in something more sensible.

She, however, is graceful. I am a klutz.  Her shawl has hopefully done just fine there.

Won’t be a problem with these two yarns.  They’re best friends, hand in hand, for life.

I needed to immerse myself in work.  The house is cleaner now and guests were fed tonight, with Michelle and John preparing as much as I did. It did us all good.

I had two unfinished lace scarves, and considering the pair for several moments, I picked up the one that didn’t require much out of me; just a little more of my time. The one I’d thought I was going to finish Saturday night after Nina‘s birthday party, before we heard the news.

A little water and wire, now, to bring out the best in it so it can be ready to go forward wherever it may need to go.  Created with love, to be sent forward for peace.

The first amaryllis to rebloom despite last year’s definite and atypical lack of plant care, and a very bright spot in our weather.

I’d been needing to go to the post office all week, but the incessant storms were making it a nice time to sit down with a good knitting project in hand and my feet up–never mind the hearing aids, where getting wet or not is the $6400 question.

But the skies finally held their breath for a moment, Friday presented the gift of an arbitrary deadline, and at about 4:25, I finally kicked myself out the door.

Driving there, I was surprised at how high the water was in the Baylands.  It would be so easy right now to repeat the February day when my oldest was 16 and, as a certified Red Cross volunteer, had helped run the emergency shelter with my husband: a friend of mine was in there, having gone to bed the night before on one side of the room and having woken up to find her waterbed on the other side now, it having become, yay verily, a water bed.  Hovering near the ceiling.

I’d called my friend Lisa to let her know that folks had been evacuated from her old apartment building by boat.

There was also our friend Brad who’d wondered if the water might be coming up in the street and decided he’d better go open his front door to check–only to see his koi from his back yard right there, swimming past his feet.  So long, and thanks for all the fish.

It raiiiiiiiiiined as I drove.

I got in the post office with my hood over my head, got my four packages safely on their way, I got back to the car and on down the road.  There was traffic, a light, the freeway nearby that everybody seemed to be heading to or from–

–and then there was me.  On a quiet, narrow road.  Going past the side of the San Francisco Bay marshes, the sky thunderously dark in puffy soft clouds that made it hard to take the threat seriously, and right in front of them, suddenly, the sun! Bright, vividly shining as only the rain behind it in the late day can make it, with a strong rainbow arching across the water to land somewhere over…there, where, as I approached, a white egret, standing in the enlarged lake, had its head tucked down.

Hoping perhaps for an incoming koi for dessert.

Gotta throw in a little knitting content every now and then. Here’s the Michelle shawl pattern in throw-over-the-shoulder mode, just rinsed and dried so far; it will hold those endpoints crisply once I give it a real blocking.  I did it in 800 g of sock yarn from  Creatively Dyed Yarns.  Started it last Thursday, finished it Tuesday.

Meantime, Knitpicks has “Wrapped in Comfort” on sale along with all their books; Amazon has upped the price; and Martingale, the publisher, is officially sold out.

I did not know how this was going to go.  I guess I was a little nervous about it.

Yesterday I met a fellow knitting blogger and, it turns out, an absolutely delightful person, Holly, visiting from Germany; as I walked into Coupa Cafe, a short distance from her hotel room, a woman stopped me and admired my Peace shawl, reaching out and fondling the bottom of it a little and asking if I’d made it.

“I designed it,” I smiled, searching her face, thinking, No, you don’t look the least like that tiny thumbnail photo I saw.

She didn’t seem to want to go further, so I thought, well, that answers that question, and excused myself and continued on past the patio and inside and ordered my hot chocolate. And saw my old friend Glenn.  Glenn!

Alison! How ya doin’! Let me introduce you to my colleague!

The red Peace shawl shown here? I made it for his wife Johnna. (Her computer was down that week.)

When there was a break in the conversation, I felt a gentle tap on my shoulder: “Are you Alison?”

A different woman.  Called that one right. But I bet the three of us could have sat down together on the spot like old friends.

Which is just what Holly and I did.  There was such a warmth in her face as she asked me if I were me that I felt instantly, Oh, good!, and she probably did, too.

And it just got better from there.  We swapped stories for hours, and she’d brought me sock yarns from Germany in a bag from the conference she and her husband were here for; I, having had no idea what she might like, came unprepared, a thought she completely waved away with a smile.

They will be moving back to the Bay Area in a few years. I, for one, can’t wait.

(Changed the yoke, though, to make it a one-0f-a-kind. Just because. Original pattern in here.)

This is the Venezia merino/silk yarn Sam picked out at Purlescence last Thursday.  Glass shawl pin by Sheila.

Does it count as knitting it in four days if you totally didn’t touch the needles one of the days in the middle of the five?

Does it count as an FO if you didn’t run the ends in yet? The camera battery died, the bad picture with the running ends stays, I was in a hurry to show it off!

(p.s. Happy Birthday to my sister Carolyn!  She and I used to argue as kids over whether the 12 days of Christmas started 12 days before–ie on my birthday, or that it went to 12 days after–ie, hers. She was right, but I was the obnoxious little sister who refused to concede the point.  Okay, in our old age, now I will,  so, Merry Christmas too!)

I know, it sounds like having Amazon put paper and ribbon to your Christmas presents.  I can’t believe it–it took me how long to figure this out?!

Purlescence was having a don’t-make-us-count-inventory sale New Year’s Eve, and Sam and I did that errand, too, before she left.  We walked in and people jumped up and offered us seats; have I ever mentioned it’s a nice place? (Oh, never…) Thanks, but I was there with a specific purpose in mind.

I wanted fingering weight, but color and feel rated highest. Sam picked out this one.

Venezia merino and silk, in a shade of green she pointed out just about anybody with any coloring could wear, with a nice sheen to it.  Spun quite finely into many plies then cabled together–Cascade did a very nice job with the spinning. This one shouldn’t pill.  This one kept its softness despite the rate of twist. Well done!

Worsted weight. (Oh well, can’t win’em all.)  The Rooster Rock shawl proved to me I could work with that, so, okay.

I started to knit a variation on my Water Turtles shawl, and the slip knot at the beginning of my traditional long-tail cast-on stopped me right there.  In that yarn, it was just too thick.  I didn’t like it.  I started again.

No.

Huh.

Hey.  What if…

Now, I once explained to someone that there is almost never a good use in knitting for an e-wrap.  If you cast on via e-wraps, ie simply twisting the yarn into a loop like the cursive letter e and putting that loop straight onto the needle, when you go to knit the first row, there will be a length of yarn hanging down between those e-wraps that will get longer and looonger and looooonger as you go across the row, like a dog on a retractable leash running after a squirrel.

And yet.  I tried it. One e-wrap, just on that first stitch only, just there at the start, just that very first stitch.

I had to do several rows to see how it would really play out in context.  And when I did, it was, WOW.

I have knitted over a hundred of these top-down shawls by now.  Not so many on the heavier weight ones, so I guess I didn’t have quite the motivation to go looking before, but still–a hundred shawls! And I only just now get it.  This is how they all should have started. This is how all the ones I’ll do after this will.

I guess my surprise New Year’s present to myself and the whole wide world arrived e-wrapped after all.

And then there are the days that make up for the other ones.

When I was designing and knitting a shawl for my friend Lisa originally, I realized it wasn’t quite her color–and that became part of the story in my book. My friend Gigi loved that pattern best of all and, as a thank you to her for helping with the test knitting and simply for being a friend, I gave it to her and made Lisa something else. Besides, the original was a bit dark for the photography.

So I reknit that pattern in a slightly redder, lighter shade, still a bit dark but that still matched the story, and that was the shawl I sent off to my publisher.

I met Gigi and her daughter Jasmin when they took spinning lessons with my daughter Sam and me the summer our girls were 12.  Fast forward to… This past summer, Gigi and I were both facing surgery.  Hers wasn’t scheduled yet; mine had to be.

And so I was in the hospital during Sock Summit.

She just got out of the hospital last week after five weeks in: heart surgery with  complications that just seemed to drag on and on and had us all on the edge of our seats.  But she’s finally home now and recovering.

She called Thursday, to my surprise, to ask, was I going to Purlescence that night?

You’re coming?!  Oh honey you bet I am! Nothing on earth could keep me away now!

It was SO good to see her! She was exhausted but had needed to get out–boy, tell me about it, I so get that.

I sat down on the floor next to her so I could be close enough to hear over the room without her having to exert herself.  She took a deep breath and decided to tell me something she hadn’t been going to.  But she had settled it out rationally in her mind and was proud of herself, and rightly so, for her attitude over it.

She had taken that burgundy baby alpaca shawl to Sock Summit.

And someone, apparently on the housekeeping staff, had stolen it.

Many inquiries were made, a great deal was made over it, but it was not returned. And here her friend who had made it for her was in the hospital.

She was devastated, as you can imagine. She told me how her boss had liked to tease her when she flung the end over her shoulder; that one has a nice wide neckline to it and she liked to wear it as a long curving wrap. But it was gone.

She had had, I’m sure, much time to think it over during her own hospital stay.  It had helped solidify for her how she wanted to feel about it: that someone somewhere out there must have really needed that shawl. Someone out there must have needed that feeling of warmth and love, too.

I heard her, but it was still true, I told her, that nobody could have that good feeling for having taken it. But, we agreed together, maybe they could give good feelings with it to someone who didn’t know it was stolen. We can hope.

I was quietly dancing inside. I knew, I knew…

I got home. I checked. Of course it was in there. The one that had been at the publisher’s. In baby alpaca. In that pattern she’d liked so much.  And, just to remove any doubt in my mind, although she had had no idea that’s what she was doing, she had worn a pair of handknit fingerless gloves to the shop that night that were redder and pinker than her shawl had been. The shade change would work. Now I just had to get there.

Richard and I went on a date this evening, and the first thing we did was to drive down to San Jose.  Jasmin’s husband Andrew opened the door and smiled in recognition when he saw me standing there.  I immediately started caroling, to the tune of “We Wish You a Merry Christmas,” for his mother-in-law’s sake, “We wish you a happy Ramadan, we wish you a happy Ramadan, we wish you a happy Ramadan, when it comes ’round next year.”

He cracked up.

And I handed him the bag and asked him to give all of them my best and told him what it was. And I knew, seeing the warmth in his face, that he meant that thank you with all his heart.

And to all a good night, as I climbed back in our car and thanked my husband for driving me down there. He’s a good one too.

Knitpicks.com is having a 40% off sale on books in stock.

I recently learned that “Wrapped in Comfort,” after the publisher had a bad quarter, is about to go out of stock permanently.  I note that Amazon has now raised their price.

I’ve been putting off mentioning it because I bought some cases but don’t yet know the details of what is required of me re selling copies myself, nor am I sure where to go to find out–but I can say that if you buy a copy from me, it’ll be signed.

My huge thanks to my readers for a good run with it.  Onward!

I told Kathryn (sp?) at Knit Night last night it was do or die. Thirty-nine inches later, with many breaks for the hands but with the rest of the evening open, it’ll totally be done.  We see the person I’m knitting it for tomorrow, a former down-the-street neighbor from our New Hampshire days.  Water Turtles stitch pattern, an extra stitch added to each edge, cast on 33, two skeins of Manos del Uruguay Silk Blend merino/silk handdyed (thank you Kathy!) on size 5.5 mm and there you go.

I was a bit late getting to Knit Night.  I glanced out the window before leaving, and, for the first time, there were two baby black squirrels!  And then a third!  The last and largest clearly had some gray squirrel parentage showing, and the three were in dark gray, charcoal, and black, in descending order of size to match their coloring;  I guess they’re all out of the nest now. They tended to keep close to each other.

There’s nothing quite like a baby animal.  I watched one doing the familiar semi-leapwalk squirrels do, except that, just for the sheer joy of it as far as I could tell, this one leaped a bit sideways each step forward, like a bouncing ball with a spin to it, just because it could.

Note to squirrels: you cannot climb windows.  Where there is a will there is NOT a way up.  Sorry. I decided Feederfiller had better make an appearance to discourage coming too close to the house.

One took a flying leap to the center bottom of a tree trunk–and missed!  Oops. It scrambled and grabbed the side of it at the last second–a save on that play! And the crowd goes wild!

I kept it short. I wanted enough yarn left to make a matching pair of socks of the merino Jasmin spun up for me: after I started with one pattern, I realized that at the size it was coming out to, I could switch and do it a la Water Turtles, a very open, stretchy lace, and not have to use up lots of yardage. I think my final stitch count was something like 241/row in the main body, only seven Water Turtle repeats long, and it’s plenty big enough for me. (Pardon me while I go run in those loose ends…)

This is the yarn Karin just surprised me with to replace the shawl I surprised her with to replace the yarn she surprised me with.

This is the baby squirrel near a towhee, to give a sense of scale.  It has already learned it is not to climb the awning support pole so temptingly close to the birdfeeder, not from me but from the other squirrels–and it was highly amusing to watch it and a gray squirrel this morning. They were staring at it longingly, twitching towards it and away and towards it and away in fierce repetitive tiny motions, not daring to but oh it’s fall!and you have to squirrel away food!!andandand!!!

All I did was unlatch the door and the two careened into each other while trying to run for the hills.   Guilty!

The baby squirrel tried to climb the fence yesterday and found itself sliiiiiiiiiiding back down the wood. Oops. Made it on the second try, though; it’s getting better at this quickly.  Yesterday the fence, tomorrow that pole, bwahaahaa. (If that big feederfiller isn’t looking…)

We’ve all had days like that–being new at something, trying again, and the sense of satisfaction at getting it right.

And one more thing.  My usual daily dose of hot cocoa?  Mom, this is for you: today I broke just a small piece off the end of a Valrhona 85% bar and grated it into the mug (and got tired of grating and just broke up the rest of it and threw it in).  Add the milk, nuke the milk (you don’t put solid chocolate into hot milk, they have to warm up together to keep the chocolate from seizing), and then I added the cocoa and sugar.  Skipped the usual dollop of cream.

Wow.  Things will never be the same.

I’ve hesitated to post this, because the last thing on earth I want to do is sound in any way like I’m trying to make a buck.  And yet, the whole subject means so much to me: it’s not about the book.

My first thought on waking up this morning:  I’m so glad for the life of my younger brother.

His subway into Manhattan was late.

My second thought was: And for my cousin David’s, who from his office watched the first, then the second. And made the long trek home on foot, with some shopkeepers somehow taking the personal risk to stay on the scene to be able to hand out water to the stranded walkers.

May the heartfelt coming-together of people of many faiths that I wrote about in my book, the experience that propelled me to do that work–all the writing, all the knitting, all the hours and months and even years involved, because I wanted that one particular story in print and out there in the world if I never wrote anything else–grow and be and become the triumph indestructible, a testament to the world.  “May America always be like this!” one man there exclaimed that day.

Amen.

Second Sock Syndrome: a good excuse for avoiding sitting down and re-teaching myself (for the umpteenth time) how to do kitchener stitch. (To the non-knitters, that’s the method of grafting the toe stitches together on a well-made pair of socks.)  Rather, dive right on into that second sock, quick!, before you lose your momentum.

You know, I reverse-engineered the flower for my Zinnia Scarf so that the coming and going sides would look pretty much the same, even though they would look exactly the same if one were to knit the thing in two pieces and kitchener the middle.

Which is how I originally wrote and made it.

But I didn’t want people to have unfinished scarf halves sitting in their closets…

It’s been six years since I finished a pair of socks, not to mention eight since I started that last pair.  My fingers know how to do that final step: it’s just when my brain butts in and starts asking questions that they throw up their hands and stop.

Written before Knit Night at Purlescence:

I wasn’t expecting any packages… Channon?

Anti-windowsmacking bird panels. A magnetic bookmarker.  A bluebird enameled pin. A–get this–tiny bobbleheaded bluejay that went straight to the top of my monitor.  I love it.  Thank you, Channon!

And today, as I knit madly away on the cotton candy, there was a loud smack against the window. Oh, ouch–I turned around to see if the bird that had hit it was hurt.  No sign of a little bird, but I found what it had been madly racing away from: there, five feet from my face, was a huge hawk staring in the window.  (If that thing had hit that window there wouldn’t *be* a window.)  I, doofus that I am, yelled to Michelle, “Come SEE!” forgetting that even if I can’t hear, other things can; it took off for a nearby tree.  Michelle came over just in time to see the redtailed hawk with about a four foot wingspan whoosh out of the tree and away.

Wow.  Michelle pronounced, “So that’s the real reason you have a bird feeder!” Thinking, I’m sure, of the golden eagle I’d once seen perched on the neighbor’s roof.

No, but, my stars, what a gorgeous bird. What an experience!  Think it’ll come back if I parade around with a decoy of an enamel bluebird? Because I’m going to.

(p.s. The shawl? That pink rinsed blob thing I tried to get all the water out of? Uh, yeah, I finished knitting at quarter past three, later walked past the room where it was blocking, did a doubletake, thinking, wait, where is it?, walked back, and of course it was right there.  It was so gossamer fine that it had simply blended in.)

Written after Knit Night:

Jade surprised me with some exquisitely soft Malabrigo merino from Sock Summit.   She knew how much I’d wanted to go so she brought some of the Summit back to share.  Again, my thanks; I am so going to have fun playing with it!

Oh, right.  The shawl. Yes, it was dry in time for showing off tonight–if I’d had to stand over it with a hairdryer it was going to be dry in time! But I didn’t have to. Not at that thickness.

Cast on 24, keeping stitches 1/2″ apart on size 6 (4mm) needles.  Two skeins Cascade baby alpaca laceweight at 400m/437 yards each.  It has the plain stitches near the neck of the Nina shawl, the yoke of the Kathy’s Clover Flowers (slightly tweaked at its last row), the body done in a variation of Carlsbad, with a bottom edging of the Water Turtles pattern.  All of those are 10+1 lace stitch patterns.  If it weren’t for the reinforced neck edge, it could qualify as a wedding ring shawl, ie, one you can pull through a (preferably large in this case) ring.  Done!

(Dear Dr. S’s wife, if he was wrong and that’s not your color, I have more yarn. Promise.)

Thinking back to the first pre-op appointment: there was a parade of people, from a medical researcher hoping to sign up a new subject to a physician’s assistant to a younger woman who came in after the doctor with forms in hand, asking my permission to let her be a part of the surgical team as part of her training.

I liked her on the spot and told her yes.

When she greeted me just before the operation last Wednesday, I looked her in the eye, smiled, and told her in a tone that I think affirmed that I believed she would, “Do a good job.”

She stopped by often afterwards to check on me, and Sunday, from my hospital bed, I reminded her that I had said that. And then I told her: “When I was brought into the recovery room, I saw your face.  I knew that you knew you had.  And you were proud.”

I got to see her beaming proudly all over again.

I’ve been thinking for a few days, and it seems only one yarn will do.  There’s enough for a good scarf yet.  If you’ve read the story of the Bluejay shawl, shown above (with most of its fulness at the back of the chair), you understand why the leftover yarn I have from that project would be the perfect yarn for a young colorectal surgeon.  A beautiful outcome from a situation rather less so, and… Yeah. That one.  My way of saying thank you.

And, like every patient–and doctor or nurse for that matter–that skein of indigo baby alpaca, so unusually custom-dyed, is a one of a kind. As far as my dyepot adventures are concerned, having no desire to, say, scatter suet or peanuts or birdseed on my wet hanks and wait for the moment, there will never again be anything quite like it.