Where on earth does that expression come from? “My foot!” to mean, yeah, right, buddy, uh huh, tell me another one. …Curious.

Silkie’s full name over at Blue Moon Fiber Arts–I had to go look it up to be sure–is “Silkie Socks that Rock.” You know, like how your mom yells your whole entire name, no fond nickname need apply, when she’s yelling down the block at you at the top of her lungs in front of your friends for full effect? “Come back here Archibald McNamara Hoosiername and clean that room right now!” (Thank you, Mom and Dad, for not giving me a middle name nor a nickname so my friends went through this but I never had to.)

So, just what did the Silkie do? Looks like a plain old innocent scarf to me. Socked its little sister? Never.

Specs: 73×13″, one ball Silkie, stretches easily to 16″ wide or so, Carlsbad pattern from “Wrapped in Comfort,” cast on 43 stitches, ie, one extra pattern repeat across.

Meantime, here’s one of Dad’s Christmas gift amaryllises this morning.

I’m the mom. That’s why.

Alright, Silkie, naptime’s over. Wake up. Time to finish the job.

(Pattern: the Carlsbad scarf from “Wrapped in Comfort,” with one extra pattern repeat, therefore stitch count is 43.)

Oh yeah? said the yarn. I am too.

I finished up the shawl in Lisa Souza’s El Dorado heftyish kid mohair/silk, a mix of the Julia and Constance patterns that I’d been hoping I could get ready for Lisa to hang in her booth at Stitches West this weekend. Done. I had two projects in mind to try to get done quickly after that, both of them with the best of intentions.

I have had a hank of Silkie balled up, waiting its turn, now was its turn, I knew exactly where I kept it, and why on earth couldn’t I find it? I spent a fair amount of time yesterday searching for the silly thing. I knew just who I wanted to knit it for and I wanted it done!

While I was searching my stash, this single, rather short ball of mohair that I’d bought from Karen at Royale Hare at Stitches a year ago leaped out at me. I tried to ignore it. But it assaulted my needles, beat my inner schedule up, and dragged me into knitting my Zinnia scarf pattern out of it. The color pattern is awfully busy for that zinnia, but it absolutely refused to be anything else. Flower power rules!

Yeah, my yarn bosses me around like that. What, doesn’t yours?

I just wrote this, thought, but it’s GOT to be in there!, walked in the other room, opened that bag again and searched for that Silkie where I’d searched over and over yesterday, and there it sat beaming innocently up at me. The scamp. Hide and go seek. Ollie ollie in come free!

In the world of the independents, Oregon has Powell’s Books, northern California has Kepler’s. I have for twenty years aspired to write a book that Kepler’s would want to have on their shelves. But when I talked to them over the phone a few months ago, they said they would only special order it upon request, which, when a bookstore is dealing with a first-time author they’ve never heard of before, is pretty standard.

Monday, I took a copy of my “Wrapped in Comfort” to show it to them in person. I mentioned the large first printing last June and that it had gone into a second printing last month; I mentioned the September story that talked about a gathering-together at the city hall plaza in Palo Alto. Clark Kepler asked, “A local story?” to confirm.

Yes.

His bookbuyer took my copy off to an Employees Only area to look it up on the distributor’s site, after I handed it to him with my fingers on the September page. He was courteous and polite as he took it, and when he came back, quite a few minutes later…

…he greeted me with the warmth of an old friend. He told me what a beautiful book it was. He said those shawls were works of art that ought to be hung on the walls like how they were pictured at full spread in the book. He assured me Wrapped would be in stock by the end of the week.

They had no idea the gift they’d just given me. That they’d just fulfilled a deeply-held aspiration of so many years of my life. They will not only carry it, but the one fellow who has looked it over so far is glad that they will. Now, at last, I can truly say I feel like a real writer.

Thank you, Kepler’s. Long may you prosper.

Lene’s amaryllis still hasn’t quite yawned and stretched all the way open yet. Slowly, slowly. It’s 64 degrees in that room in winter (brrr, and lots of afghans in there), which means the amaryllises grow in slower motion–but they stay blooming longer. A good spot to curl up with a good book.

At Stitches West two years ago, I bought a huge hank of alpaca laceweight from Lisa Souza in her Shade Garden. I knitted it up into two shawls: for the first, I ran it with a strand of merino in lilac for a one-off for my friend Kristine at http://lilacknitting.blogspot.com/ which you can see me trying on if you click on “My Books” at the top of this page. The other, I ran it with a strand of light blue Baruffa merino fine laceweight and knitted it in the Bluejay pattern. (Lisa has since changed to a finer-micron-count baby alpaca laceweight, and I can’t wait to look over her stock at Stitches again in two weeks.)

Diana tried the Bluejay on for me last night. She was going, “This isn’t even fingering weight!” even with the two strands together. True.  It seems to me, the finer the yarn, the more formal-looking the shawl, and that’s the effect I was going for.

See you all at Stitches! I’ll be signing books Friday and Saturday afternoons.

Technical stuff first: in “Wrapped in Comfort,” I give the stitch counts in the stitch patterns so that you can downsize and make a scarf out of any of the shawls; cast on so many repeats and go. This is one repeat of Nina’s Ann Arbor Shawl pattern with an extra stitch at each side, so, cast on 23 and knit till you’re done. This isn’t blocked yet, and even when I do, it will stay fluid and drapey in this yarn. This is one skein of Blue Sky Alpacas’ AlpacaSilk yarn, some of the very best baby alpaca out there: silky, shimmery, gorgeous, and durable enough that I couldn’t break the strand with my hands when I was done, I had to go get a pair of scissors.

I named Nina’s shawl for where she went to school at the University of Michigan, as I wrote in the book. But the look of it also reminds me of the climbing bougainvillea that was blooming freely here when we moved to California, in vivid, cheerful colors that were startling compared to the gray/white aging-winter snowscape we were leaving behind.

The first time I remember seeing bougainvillea blooming was on the trip to New Orleans when I was a teenager. We ate at the Commodore Inn, a beautiful old place that Katrina later wiped out (I don’t know if it’s been brought back; my attempts at googling it would suggest it has not, but I’d love to hear differently.) The bougainvillea climbed to the second-story balcony like Romeo impatient to see Juliet, deep green leaves and bright fuschia flowers spilling freely over the balustrade, a grand bouquet tossed at the eyes of the diners below. Gorgeous.

(Update: I thought I’d add in a photo of the current state of my amaryllis crop.  The really tall one waiting to open up?  That’s Lene’s.)

I’ve heard a few people say they were afraid my shawls wouldn’t work for plus-size types. My friend Diana’s reaction to that was to play model for me at Purlescence’s knit night tonight.

First,

she wanted to show off her blue Bigfoot shawl. Well done! I knitted Bigfoot a few months ago in Alpaca With A Twist’s “Fino,” which is a baby alpaca/silk laceweight, much lighter than the weight she used here; she tried that one on then, she loved it, and she started in on this one.  Beautiful.

When she saw the shawl I just finished, she tried it on for me, too. (I snagged a stitch badly and wrecked the blocking on one side today while fixing it. A rounded hem works fine too.) Note that this is the version of the Julia shawl with the smaller stitch count.

Thank you, Diana!

The Julia shawl blocking, the faster version with fewer stitches on larger needles because I only had the one skein of Wagtail kid mohair to try to stretch as far as it would go. Length 23″ lying flat, width somewhat scrunched up right now for the blocking process–it’ll be more of a circle than it looks here.

The closer I got, the more I wanted to finish this tonight, after having gone through the stash Monday night looking for this yarn to wind up and get started with. The ends can get woven in tomorrow, I’m turning in after I finish icing my hands. (Got a pack on right now; it does make for awkward typing.)

The thrilled gratitude on that nurse’s face gave me my knitting enthusiasm back by reminding me how much I love doing this. That it’s not all about the work aspect of it. It’s about seeing someone else becoming happy. I owe him.

(It’s not quite that late, the clock on this blog is an hour ahead of me.  Pardon me while I go adjust those wires and sharpen those points.)

No dishes. No vacuuming. No laundry. No taxes. Nothing to do, after Nancy kidnapped me and took me to Creative Hands in Belmont, but sit there, enjoy the company of other knitters, and knit. The phone rang: major accident on 101? Traffic stopped? We’ll just have to knit here a bit longer.

Having learned, via the Orenberg skein a few weeks ago that ran 250 yards short, that I can still knit a well-fitting shawlette project with the Julia pattern out of a smaller amount of yarn, I started this with a single 410 yard/100g skein of Wagtail Yarn’s kid mohair. I can’t wait to show it off at this year’s Stitches convention to the fellow who raises the animals it came from.

(Photo: my Bigfoot pattern, done as a scarf with three repeats across of the stitch pattern given in “Wrapped in Comfort,” Kidsilk Haze, size 4.5 mm needles.)

Such a weird reaction to a common cold. Autoimmunity is always an interesting variety show, and so, I found myself in sudden pain last night and in the eye doctor’s this morning. Lupus inflammation leading to a tear in the cornea, drops for three weeks.

I had never seen that doctor before. She was gentle, she was thorough, she asked questions, she gave me lots of details and she asked for any questions from me after giving me enough information so that I had some idea of what to ask. This is the eye that went blind on the left half for three weeks a few years ago; I don’t trust it to behave. (Stomp my feet, demand, “But I’m too DEAF to go blind!”) But in her competent hands, I came away with a sense of grateful relief. It’ll be okay? I see.

It’s not just the technical competence of a good doctor, although that’s essential, it’s the caring that conveys the strength I need to let all this stuff just be background noise so that I can tune it out.

Back to my merino wool and 4mm needles. I can already see it more clearly than I could last night.

I almost didn’t go to my once-a-month knit night at Commuknity last night; it’s a big group, there’s always an exposure risk, and it’s a bit soon since my big bug. But I needed to see my friends–I had no idea what was coming–and I’m so glad I went!

There was someone new there, Becky, sitting behind me, who’d brought my book and was working from it. When it was her turn to show off, she said she was doing a shawl from “Wrapped in Comfort.” One guess as to who everybody pointed at. Oh! She said she’d looked at me, she’d looked at the picture in the back of the book, she’d looked at me… It WAS me!

They had decided to hold a “show your Alison” night: Diana, Lisa, Susan, Jocelyn, Julie, Lyn, Vera, Nancy, Margaret, Candace, Cris, Fae, and Chris had all made or were making shawls from my book. Catie wasn’t able to show up, but sent word that she was working on one, too. At the point a few years ago when I didn’t even have a publisher yet, Catie tried on my Kathy shawl and told me emphatically to hurry up and get it out there because she wanted my patterns! She gave me her thoroughly quotable reason for vastly preferring the circular shaping on my shawls vs. the more typical triangle ones: “I don’t need an arrow pointing at my butt.” Her much-needed vote of confidence helped keep me going re trying to get published, and I loved that it looked great on her: it showed me how well those shawls could fit a variety of body shapes.

Susan had been one of my test knitters. She signed a page of the Kathy’s Clover Shawl, which she’d knitted. Susan is about to move away, and my heart about broke with love and aching when I read what she’d written. You can’t tell a friend Please Don’t Go, you can only wish them the best on their journey. (Hey. Susan. Please Don’t Go.)

Chris surprised me with socks she’d made using Cat Bordhi’s new book. Which happened to match what I was wearing and fit perfectly–actually, even though I avoid knitting socks, I have some handdyed sock yarn that has stubbornly refused to be knit into anything else, which means it’s just been sitting there. I wanted socks in those colors. It’s really close to Chris’s yarn choice. She’d nailed it.

You know, I could get a little too spoiled. Thank you, everybody!

(Sorry for the wrinkled-towel background; it was the color I needed, and for today it has to do.)

I have a nearly-finished silk scarf for my daughter I need to get done and mail, but it’s staying safely inside its ziploc bag and away from me, germ free. I have a shawl I want to photograph before I mail it off, and, ditto. Even if other people don’t get Crohn’s flares when they catch a bad cold, it’s still a bad cold.

Today is the first day I feel like I could actually hold up the needles for awhile, meantime, and the knitting bug is getting to me. I wanted to show something: in person, the Kid Seta (the bigger ball) and the Orenberg handspun “kidd/silk” from Russia are a little bit off from each other, the one more to the brown side, the other more to the vivid pinkish-purple. But knitted together, they’re absolutely stunning. They were so made for each other.

I bought the Kid Seta from Warren at Marin Fiber Arts http://www.marinfiberarts.com/ last summer while I was doing my second booksigning. I adore Warren. Every yarn store owner should be like Warren, not only as kind a soul as you could ask for, but his yarns! Chosen by how good they feel, as far as I could tell: wonderful. At the time, I just bought two balls, thinking I’d do a scarf or two, nothing major, a souvenir of my coming to his shop. But every time I went to go work with it, it just felt like, nah… It hadn’t found what it wanted to be yet.

My friend Margo Lynn totally surprised me with the gift of the Orenberg about two weeks ago, just to make my day, which she very much did. I pulled out Warren’s yarn, curious, and instantly knew. Yes! This is what it had been waiting for!

Neither yarn alone had enough yardage to do a shawl, but together they could. I thought, let’s see, I got two shawls out of 1000 yards of Lisa Souza’s fluffy Kid Mohair (the turquoise Julia shawl in the book), and the second one was pretty long, at least for me. Two balls of 230 yards of the Kid Seta, and the label says 50 g and approximately 600 yards on the Orenberg–yeah, that’ll do. I’ll just have some Orenberg left, that’s all.

It’s not working out that way. Handspun is of course variable, but the Orenberg appears, calculating by the weight of what’s left of the Kid Seta, to have been about 350 yards long. But oh, such gorgeous yards. And yet–I think this thing will still be long enough to keep me happy. And I’m thinking that silk has a tendency to stretch over time, which couldn’t hurt. I’m just glad I’ve got a scale in grams so I can see if I can get one more row, and another, out of it, and one more after that. I’m so close to being done.

Design-wise: I chose the smaller-stitch-count Julia to try to stretch the yardage as far as possible using 7mm needles, but past the yoke, I ditched the Julia stitch pattern for a different 6+1, doing the pattern from the main body of the Michelle shawl from there instead. I’ll show you when it’s blocked.

I can’t wait to see!

Okay, I think I’m ready for a nap. Knitting later.

So. Handmaiden’s new Camelspin yarn, wherein my fingers thought they’d died and gone to heaven–till I went back to Purlescence and discovered Handmaiden’s cashmere yarn. There are many grades of cashmere out there in the world, some of them apologetically asking for quotation marks around the word, but this is right up there with Lisa Souza’s handspun. Wow.

Silk yarns have a tendency to collapse and go limp and long as you wear the thing; this is 70 silk/30 baby camel, and I wasn’t quite sure how it would behave. It’s the perfect kind of yarn for one of my circular shawls, which hang in such a way that they stay on the body effortlessly and the stitch patterns stay open and beautiful. But even if I’d been willing to spring for two skeins, there was only the one in the shop. I didn’t know, then, if this would pull into a hopelessly long scarf, or, if I stopped it now, it would be hopelessly too short to be worn as a shawl stretched open across the back. Width or length. Which is it gonna be.

Only one way to get a good idea: do what I’ve told countless newbie laceknitters on the knitting lists to do. Rinse it gently in tepid water and lay it out on an old white something or other overnight, still on the needles. Not a true blocking, but it does show how the pattern comes out.

And then take a bad picture of it that doesn’t show the colors well so that the intended recipient won’t really quite see it before Christmas.

Stitch pattern: the instructions to the main body of the Michelle pattern in my book, plus one plain stitch each side. Fairly quick, very easy, 45 stitches, fingering weight, size 5.5 mm needles. Merry Christmas!

My sister should have it by now. This is the Wanda’s Shawl pattern from my “Wrapped in Comfort” book, in Blue Sky Alpacas Alpaca Silk in an unusually bright and clear white. I wrote that it takes five balls, to make sure nobody runs out, but I used every last bit of four balls for this and had enough.

Got to my folks’ place last night, and woke up to a wide view of the mountain covered in snow, right there outside the window. The pine trees are holding up armfuls of soft white and it is truly gorgeous. I’m not sure yet how to get a photo in from here, so I’m posting a saved one of that shawl. Okay, time to go rejoin the folks. More later.

I know, I know, you’ve heard the phrase before: “for those who’ve read my book…” you get to meet someone just a bit more.

I got an email last night from Nathania at Purlescence, saying someone had brought in a gift for me, would I like to come pick it up? So this afternoon John and I went over there, wondering what this was going to be about; walking in their door, I exclaimed to her, “Your amaryllis is gorgeous!” thinking, cool, they’re decorating the store with my favorite flowers! Or maybe someone had brought it in as a pre-baby present–Nathania’s only got a few weeks left before she and Kevin get to hold their Christmas baby.

“That’s your gift. Do you know a Sue B?”

I was boulevers’e. Well YEAH!!! That’s the Sue whose story starts my book off, the waitress we love so much who can tell you what our preschooler used to order for dinner twenty years ago!

There was a thank you for her baby alpaca lace scarf in handwriting that Steve Jobs ought to take note of and preserve as a font. What she didn’t know, was, her gift made it so John got to come into the shop and have all these people he knew there congratulate him on his mission and wish him well, a chance for them all to say goodbye to each other for two years. The timing was absolutely perfect, and they totally made his day there as well as the flowers themselves.

So now I get to take Sue’s gift and share it with everybody here. (Sorry I took them away from you, Nathania, I’ll make it up to you, I promise…) These are gorgeous, Sue, and I love that you did this–thank you!