Wait, Karin, here’s another lesson for you. I put down the hairdryer and went and blogged all that, came back in the room awhile later, and I’m not quite sure what the time lapse was, and it was still morning, but.

Let me say first in my defense that I am hearing impaired, that I am normally very careful because I happen to know that about me; there was a fan going on in the background that was hard to hear over. When I checked the shawl again after my blogging, it was hey! Bone dry now! Cool!

Maybe cool wasn’t the word. The shawl’s temperature was slightly warm. Wait a minute…I went to check the hairdryer, and burning my hand, dropped it fast. I unplugged it immediately as I realized I’d left it on the lowest setting that whole time rather than clicking it all the way to off, that I hadn’t been able to hear it was still going. The air being blown was only barely warming–no problem to the shawl. But the motor was well overheated.

Um. Oops.

But that first semi-blocking gave me the information I needed to know about how much it would stretch out, and it talked me into knitting another repeat of the pattern, so I’m glad I did it.

Risking burning down the house, not so much.

The work is done, the shawl is blocking, none the worse for any of that, I checked it this morning and even all spread out like that, the thing was still damp.

I glanced a thought towards the hairdryer, and thought, not on your life.

(Say that fast. Sorry, couldn’t resist the chance for a bad pun.)

Slipping back towards the bad old days: I made it through about a half hour at Purlescence last night. Someone brought in their dinner and I had to move quickly away before my stomach did violence to the surroundings from the smell of the food. My daughter, who’d dropped me off and gone to the nearby library, was hovering from a few blocks away and texted me that I probably wanted to go home now?

So I came home and collapsed. But not till I’d had a conversation with a fellow knitting Crohn’s patient about a new drug approved last month. There is? Really? Yay!

Hopefully, though, give this a few days and it’ll settle down on its own.

Meantime, Michelle had gone and looked up bluejays: they stay in pairs even when it’s not nesting season (I often see two) and they’re loud–until you get near their nest. Then they get quiet so as not to attract undue attention.

Oh goodness. And I’d had that thing squawk at me across the yard and finally get quiet near the apple tree after I flicked the hose towards it. I don’t think the water even reached it, but suddenly I wanted to go apologize to the baby birds. I will be the one who’s more respectful now (and curious as to where the nest is–I didn’t see it.)

To change the subject: when my husband and I got married, my parents were so happy and so glowing, you’d think they were the ones getting married! I saw the love mixed with the difference between being young and in love and middle-aged and in love, and told Richard I looked forward to the day when we too would have the time, experience, and maturity behind us like they had. I wanted to be them when I grew up.

And here, a generation later, I think we’ve done okay, and here we are looking at two of our own kids and their spouses with love and gratitude ourselves.

I didn’t take Jessie’s shawl to Purlescence. I figured it was too complicated to be an on-the-go project, especially when I was still at the stage of starting the main pattern and trying to keep track of the stitch count. After I got home, I picked it up and wondered if my fried brain could make sense of those jellyfish, Barbara Walker’s Showers pattern turned upside down.

And you know what? To my surprise, my laceknitting had become middle-aged. No angst, no worries, just do it. Why had I thought this was hard? Knowing which way to wrap the yarnover when the next stitch is a knit or purl is as natural now as breathing. Knowing what to do coming up to a double yarnover is like remembering that the green light means go. The purl through back loops of three stitches at once is a meandering knit along a beautiful country road.

I’ve always loved this pattern, and now we’re old friends, too.

Knitpicks.com has all their books on sale, 40% off; they’ve also been sponsoring a “Wrapped in Comfort” knitalong where I’ve been checking in to see if anyone needs any questions answered. Thought I’d mention.

Although, if you’d like a signed and inscribed copy, Purlescence is where to go.

I was standing in a local yarn store about two months ago, looking at the Blue Sky Alpacas Alpaca Silk. I love that yarn. I love the kindness of the women behind that brand–I’ve mentioned here before that I once had trouble matching a dye lot and got a phone call from New York City at dark o’clock one winter morning as a LYSO there called me back the next day, having no clue that the person who’d inquired was on California time. My husband startled awake, grabbed the phone so I could sleep, and then woke me, grumbling, “It’s your New York City boiler-room yarn pushers. They want you to know they don’t have your dye lot.”

Busted.

When I told Blue Sky, they promptly checked, found they could match it themselves, and mailed me two skeins and insisted it was on them for my troubles.

So here I was thinking how I have such positive associations with that yarn, and I felt, buy the white. You’ll be glad you have it. Buy the white. I had nobody in mind, just a strong feeling.

I was going through my stash (again!) looking for just the right yarn for Jessie’s wedding present, and that Alpaca Silk leaped out at me and I thought, I am SO glad I have that! And then it hit me that that matched the thought I’d had in the store.

So did I immediately cast on? Was I satisfied? I confess no. I argued. I had cones’ worth of plain baby alpaca, less impressive looking, perhaps less soft, but already balled up and ready to go. I had this, I had that, and the Alpaca Silk would require prep time and I was tired. I went and watered my baby plum tree, it being about 8 pm, no UV to speak of, and then the apple trees. I splashed at the bluejay that scolded me that this was its territory (and it actually, for the first time in weeks, shut up. It’s been keeping my daughter awake at night, and it actually stood there on the branch above me, looking at me, opening its beak a few times and then not chattering anything. I do believe it finally gained some respect.) I avoided the yarn some more. I wrote a note to a friend.

It’s the writing that did it–when in doubt, write it out. It hit me that thinking that that was just the right yarn and then not using it because I didn’t want to roll it up into balls and I didn’t want to have to splice them were just such dumb reasons not to use a yarn that I knew felt right. Get real. And I only had to ball up the first for the night, the rest could wait.

I can’t tell you what a relief it felt to get going with what was then sitting in my hands, going, See? See? I told you so! at me.

I didn’t want to make a Wanda shawl from my “Wrapped in Comfort” book in white and have Jessie’s exactly match my sister Anne’s. I wanted her to have something more unique. I spent some time hashing out lace pattern ideas and swatches, noted the wedding date–uh, ain’t a whole lot of time there, folks–and decided I’d have to leave room for ripping and redoing and redesigning for later on on that one. The result is this:

I cast on and started following the directions for the Constance shawl, but in size 6mm (10) needles. (As always, remember that I am a very loose knitter.) Then row 6, I knit plain. Row 8, I omitted. For the yoke, I did the seaweed pattern of the Monterey shawl, and will continue with the Monterey from there; the original had 361 stitches across the body, this will have 292 (three more than the Constance because the jellyfish pattern is a 12+4 whereas the Constance is a 12+1.)

Got all that? Good. Basically, this gets you a less-full Monterey shawl on larger needles, fewer stitches, and less time taken, but in a wonderful yarn. It will have 13 stitches more across than the Wanda shawl in the Wanda yarn, and the Monterey is a mesh-type stitch with a great deal of give to it. It is emphatically NOT a beginner’s lace; it’s complicated and requires lots of attention, it aggravates occasionally especially when you’re not used to it, and it comes out absolutely exquisite in the end, especially knitted up in a yarn like this.

Which is why it feels like the perfect one to knit for newlyweds. Not to mention, it looks like they’ll be taking a job here. I can’t wait to show them the Aquarium in Monterey.

I wrote this a few days ago, and waited permission to post it:

We went to a celebration tonight, one like no other I have been to. She’d told me, when she’d called, that she wanted to “take a page from your book,” but she wrote her own here and I love her penmanship on the page of our lives that was written tonight.

After my hospitalization, I’d thanked my doctors and nurses individually, with knitting. She brought hers home en masse.

Marguerite had invited her medical team and just a very few close friends who had played roles in supporting her in her ordeal to come to her home as the time of her treatments came to an end. This was for the doctors, the nurses, the woman at the clinic who scheduled her appointments: she felt she owed much. She wanted to give back. She wanted to thank each of us for playing a role in sustaining and affirming her life in the face of her cancer, to have us celebrate with her her last week of radiation. Her teenage son snapped pictures of the small crowd, keeping record.

She didn’t speak very long, just a few words that said much; she let the music, and the very act of playing it, convey the rest of it for her. Her husband Russ was on his grand piano and two friends and one of her doctors joined in with their own instruments. Joyful music, lively music, a touch of jazz here, of Bach there, music that acknowledged the grief, music that returned to the underlying joy. Music that showed life honestly and in true celebration.

I can’t tell you how much it meant to me. To life!

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!)

Dad Hyde asked, as he wrapped it around his arm, “What is it?” I answered, “My mom calls them yarn necklaces.” This is a scarf out of Ellen’s handpainted merino-silk from Half Pint Farm in Vermont, bought at Stitches East last fall. One of those little projects for stuffing in the purse and carrying around that somehow, to my surprise, actually got finished when I wasn’t paying much attention to it. (When the yarn’s gone, it’s done.) Just add water and block it–except, um, maybe not now.

The silk and cashmere shawl in Constance’s shawl pattern (with some playing around with the yoke) continues only slowly; I’ve got company. Richard and Kim have internships for a month in DC and are staying at my in-laws’ house; my in-laws are doing various jaunts to keep themselves out of the way of the newlyweds. They’re camping out here for ten days.

Camping out is more of a description than we’d intended, as we wait for the sewer services folks to show up this morning. My pipes are barfing. These things never seem to happen when there’s nobody around to enjoy the excitement but us. I think I’d rather go to the Aquarium if I want to show them an interesting day.

Thank goodness we live in a time and a place when such things can get fixed pretty fast.

Introducing Kim, my new daughter-in-law, in her wedding ring (except for the reinforced neck edges) shawl, the Nina pattern in laceweight Fino baby alpaca/silk. A wedding ring shawl is any one that can be pulled through one.  My son emailed me this last night.

She liked it! Hey Mikey! Jade Sapphire cashmere in lavendar, fingering weight, four skeins, the Bigfoot pattern.

So would this be Niagara Falls as seen from the Canadian side or the American? (No, no, that’s not where my son and his bride are going on their honeymoon–at least not as far as I know!)

Meantime, back in knitting, last fall at Stitches East in Baltimore, I bought some merino/bamboo/nylon yarn from the lady at Maple Creek Farm; she had a whole long rack of hanging loops of hanks, ready to be fondled by passersby, color after color after color, like a tapestry on display half-imagined, half done. This is the start of the smaller Water Turtles shawl, and my two skeins will get more length than I need. The yarn is a little thicker than my usual, although it doesn’t appear heavy like some might, so a shawl with a somewhat smaller stitch count was just right–and that pattern to me is mindless knitting, which is definitely a plus this month.

Meantime, here’s my attempt at photographing the MOG shawl. (No, that’s not the dress).

The one-skein Casbah Julia shawl is sized for the petite; two skeins and, say, the Constance pattern on size 11 needles would be a good choice for a larger person. I showed it off to Nathania and Sandi at Purlescence yesterday, and traded them my getting to hold Nathania’s baby for an hour for letting them put the shawl on display for now.

Stephanie tells of Stephen and WonderMike taking her to Millenium for dinner after the Maker Faire, and writes, “Go there now. After a month of hotel and airport food Stephen and Mike can both verify that I almost wept into my dinner out of sheer relief and joy.”

Amen amen and amen. (Having once lived off hotel food for a month, too.) I’m not a vegetarian, but if I could eat there every day, I very happily would be. We took our vegetarian daughter and vegan son-in-law there for dinner a year ago for his birthday, and oh goodness, I have never tasted such gloriously good food. Our daughter explained to us what “biodynamic” in the description was all about, the back-to-the-land intensity of mindful farming. We don’t drink, so I can’t say a thing about that part of their offerings, but I can tell you their biodynamic grape juice was to die for.

But I committed a faux pas there. Okay, let me back up. My son-in-law had created me a pair of knitting needles that were really nifty and a bit large, and I had given them a test drive in the passenger seat on the way up the freeway to Millenium, casting on just after we got in the car. Forty-five minutes north and time spent look for parking. I had Knitpicks Suri Dream going in a lace stitch, so that half of what I was knitting was air spaces. Very soft, very fluffy, very fast, very natural-fibers, very gratifying. I cast off as we searched for where to put the car, got the ending yarn worked in across the cast off stitches, and stuffed it in my purse quickly.

That dinner was like nothing I have ever tasted. I have been fervently wishing for quite some time that I could remember the name of that place, and when I clicked on Stephanie’s link just now and saw the picture, it was an instant rush of, that’s IT!!! YAY!!! THANK YOU!!!

The waitress we had was young, loved what she did, loved the food, loved her customers on the spot, and was just the best. Hey. I had a scarf. So when we were done eating, I called her over and said I had one more thing to ask her.

Yes? Was the food okay?

The very best! But here: (unzipping the purse): was this a color she liked?

Run grab a spatula out of the kitchen, she’s lost her jaw there, folks.

She was gobsmacked. “For ME!?… You knitted this? You knitted this ON THE WAY HERE?!?” It was so soft. It was a bright color, a red on the orange side, and it suited her perfectly. She loved it.

A moment later, as we waited for our check, I asked her back over. It had hit me: I was in a vegan restaurant, and I had just given an alpaca fur scarf to their employee. What if… Sheared from the happily living animal, but some vegans don’t go even for that. I asked her, “Did I just commit a faux pas? Will your boss have a fit if you wear that?”

She told me she had to tuck it away for now, but it was okay. She glanced nervously in the direction of the kitchen and added in a whisper that I didn’t hear but my family filled me in on after we were safely outside, “I’m wearing leather boots. Don’t tell my boss.”

I just spent five minutes outside at 10:30 am, talking to the guy working on my roof, and my left eye sight was starting to get wonky. It’s a very good thing we didn’t try that walk to the Faire, however badly I wanted to.

This faster-version Julia shawl took about eight hours to do, and it’s a good pattern for when I only had a single skein of Casbah merino/cashmere/nylon 80/10/10, because it repeats every right-side row: so you can stop at whatever row you need to and still have it look right. Since it’s a superwash-treated yarn, I’m thinking of it as the Eight Hour Mom Surprise (I’m suddenly picturing Elizabeth Zimmerman fans pelting me with small leftover balls of yarn.) Celebrate the mom as well as the baby, with something that won’t get outgrown. I do feel every new human that enters the world ought to have something created just for them, but I also know how much it can lift a mom’s spirits to have something pretty but that doesn’t require babying–she’s got enough on her hands. Although I would put it in a pillowcase before throwing it in the wash, definitely, and no dryer.

Meantime, yonder elder son is flying home shortly, but the letter just beat him to it. I was shaking my head, going, how can they summon a kid at university in the middle of their studies, when they’re a thousand miles away? How can they require the kid fork over for the plane ticket? He told me the real reason he was flying home now was, he was coming home to play with his mom for the little time we could have together and to “drive you to your little yarn stores and take you to see your little knitting friends.” Kid. 6’9″ you may be, but, I used to be bigger than you…

The letter came. He had me open it and read it over the phone as he waited. Dear… You are hereby excused from jury duty.

I guess they agreed that sequestering him during his honeymoon was going to be a bad idea.

(Jasmin gifted me with yet another pair of socks as a total surprise Thursday. I didn’t get to hold Stephanie’s sock today, so Jasmin’s pair is filling in as a Pseudo Psock Picture. Note the artistic photographic rendering of an actually perfectly lovely pair of Blue Moon Socks That Rock socks. It amuses me.)

When your plans are castoff (why, yes, that is the Casbah Nathania waved at me Thursday night that I cast on late Friday afternoon in the faster-version Julia shawl pattern and am half done casting off Saturday evening–it should block out to about 20″ and tie in front quite nicely)

and are left adrift

what can you do but knit

to give someone else (not to mention me) a lift.

(I was SO going to finish that shawl during Stephanie’s talk and hand it to some random person at the Maker’s Faire and give them an impromptu lesson on shawl blocking in the spirit of the Faire. Whatever random passerby was wearing the right shade of teal, especially if they said something complimentary about knitting. If only the guard had been willing to move the gate to let me be dropped off near the entrance–although, with a thousand people or so stuck trying to go what was, for us, 1.1 miles in over two hours, I see his point at not letting just one person in. But no. I’ll just have to find some other victim.

I’m sure it’ll be tough.)

Remember the twins? They were triplets!  The last blossom opened yesterday.

I hadn’t bought Stephanie Pearl-McPhee‘s latest book yet because I wanted to get over to Kepler’s to support my local bookstore. Then she announced she was going to be in San Mateo at the Maker Faire tomorrow, and I pictured a mad scramble of knitters across the Bay Area looking for copies for her to sign.

Jasmin scored me one at Borders and brought it to Purlescence last night, after checking and finding out our Purl Girls were out. Thank you, Jasmin!  Nathania did her part: she waved some new Casbah at me in the most exquisite shade of deep teal, just to make sure I’d have a good portable project for knitting while waiting for Stephanie.

So. I went home, I sat down with Stephanie’s book, and I didn’t go to bed till I’d finished it. I went to bed laughing and knowing exactly what I was going to be blogging about today.

If you go to page 33 of my own book, “Wrapped in Comfort,” I describe running back to the (late, lamented) Rug and Yarn Hut after finding I was short for the project pictured here. Immediately after they opened for the day, there I was, throwing the door open and yelling across the long expanse to Kat, the only person in there just then, “Nobody touch that alpaca! It’s MINE!!!”

Kat will be telling that one on me for years.

So here I was, blissfully minding my own business, reading Stephanie’s book, and suddenly burst out laughing. On page 153, she warns her readers not to dither about that 50% off alpaca or Alison would “swoop it up with the precision of a strike missile.” Note that most of the projects in my book are in baby alpaca. Yes, I’m not the only Alison she knows, but I am totally claiming that page for my own with great glee. Why yes, I do have an ego.

Stephanie, you’re wonderful. Now, how long since you wrote that sentence have you been waiting for me to read it!

(I told you I had an ego!)

I was going to blog about the silk shawl yesterday. The one I’d started Monday afternoon–I was going to finish that last purl row, do the cast off, and block it Thursday night and brag about it the next day. But I didn’t. I did take its unblocked picture Friday when I did cast off, but it stayed in the camera. Nancy sent me her amaryllis photo so I could post it, and thus, yesterday I ended up talking about her turtle instead; her turtle had always charmed me. You had to look carefully for it every time you walked into her house through the atrium, thus, every visitor was invested a little bit in its well-being. Cactuses just don’t have that same hardshelled charm; I miss it now that it’s gone. Fifteen minutes after I put its story up here, Nancy, not knowing I had, called me out of the blue and told me more about it, and that last line got added to yesterday’s post.

A friend of a friend lost her friend to an untimely death, and I followed the link to go offer my condolences. Nobody should have to suffer such a great loss alone, and it doesn’t matter if she knows me or not–I knew what that kind of pain is like, and that is enough. It behooved me to speak up, however briefly.

She followed the link back to my blog and was gobsmacked. She wrote to me about her friend’s having gone out of her way to rescue a turtle in the roadway. She told me she herself had seen a turtle in the roadway that morning, at a place she never would have expected, thought of her friend, and had rescued it, grateful for the chance to put it out of harm’s way.

And here I was writing about Nancy’s small box turtle. She took great comfort in that. It had somehow survived, it had been taken in, and it had continued long and well loved. I imagine it was as if her friend were wrapping her arm around her shoulders going, here, read this. It’s okay.

We’re all in this life thing together.

Meantime, this is noise by comparison, but, here’s yesterday’s photo, short and bunchy straight off the needles, and longer and smoothed-out and blocked, above. It’s the Michelle pattern from Wrapped in Comfort, in a 7/2 kind of crunchy-feeling handpaint silk, downsized and knitted on size 7 (4.5 mm) needles.