When our kids, who are 19, 21, 23 in June, and 25 next week, were growing up, any trip to the Urgent Care center at our clinic or the ER came with the bonus of their daddy taking them to the local ice cream shop on the way home for comfort: what Richard calls his own “Emergency Room Medicine.”

We have in our immediate neighborhood a shop, Rick’s, which is a hole-in-the-wall place that manufactures its own ice cream right there and which is a popular local summer hanging-out place. When the old fellow who’d run it for decades retired, the guy who bought it painted cows on the walls and ivy coming from the ceiling morphing into silk ivy coming out of the walls; it was very charming, but one day, I thought, you know? That main cow there needed a tail.

I had some yak hair. Not the soft, cashmere-y undercoat; yak hair. Wretched stuff, rips the skin off your fingers if you spin it too long at the wheel, won’t feed through the flyer without a struggle. When my oldest and I took handspinning classes together when she was 12, the teacher showed us some of this stuff, and I wrinkled my nose and went, wow. What would you ever DO with this stuff?

“Make a doormat,” Karen laughed in response. You know? That was just weird enough that I bought a pound of it against my better judgment, spun it up–although, not too much at any one sitting–and made exactly that. But there was leftover fiber (um, fancy that. It was a really small doormat. It was all I could stand.)

And then I saw that cow. And I knew exactly what I was going to do with that yak. I braided the roving (you don’t have to spin it if you leave it as roving!) and gave it to the guy so his cow could have a tail. I left a nice curl of the long fibers at the end, very cow-y.

The guy loved it, he absolutely loved it. He thought long and hard about it and never did add it to the decorations: he was afraid little kids would tear it apart. He’s right, they would have, but they would certainly have remembered the place and bugged their parents to go there all the more often, and I could always make another one. But instead he took it home as a souvenir of the good people who come into his shop, and that was that.

One summer, our Sam, our oldest, went in there, and mentioned out loud that she was thinking of applying for a job there.

The guy refused to hand her an application. He simply hired her on the spot.

But her schedule was such a problem!

He didn’t care.

But she couldn’t come in at this time, or this day, or…

He didn’t care. When could she start?

And so she scooped cones, and, a short while later, I made that tail.

She’s our daughter who had the ITP scare last week. I mentioned the Emergency Room Medicine thing to my friend and reader Kristine across the country, who happens to live a few miles from Sam but had never met her. Kristine’s reaction was, Say no more! What flavor?

Which is how my son-in-law came to open his door today to see a woman standing there holding out some Ben and Jerry’s, and he stood there, jaw on the ground, exclaiming, Do we even KNOW you?

Okay, I should stop and let Kristine tell the tale, but I have to tell you, she totally rocks. THANK you, Kristine!

(Picture: Michelle Reilly’s Lincoln lamb fleece bought at Maryland Sheep and Wool a few years ago by my parents, who watched it being sheared and bought it on the spot, plied with mohair.)

I followed my stat links to discover a comment I’d left on someone else’s blog two years ago. I offer it here with a few tweaks for clarification, since it’s out of context, and with additions to the original.

One comment for people who’d like one of my favorite shortcuts: I’ve found that if I spin separately and then ply together two different fibers–merino and mohair, or even two different breeds of sheep–and then dye the plied skeins, each of the fibers will take up the color at a different rate from the other, and you get a mild barbershop-pole effect, knitting up into a heathery look. Silk takes up dye quite a bit more slowly than animal fibers; I was given some Kidsilk Haze that needed to be a deeper, brighter color than the original dusty lilac, and when I overdyed it, the silk just sparkled in the background, being quite a bit lighter than the mohair fuzz. Much prettier than the original unicolor yarn.

I have since then bought silk/animal fiber blend yarns in light colors a number of times simply for the joy of experimenting with them.

I once snagged quite a few pounds of an undyed light brown cashmere at $15/lb from a wholesaler I knew. The catch was that it was extremely thin and single-ply and too fragile to knit up even as lace; it had to be plied on a spinning wheel. Well, guess what I have. Hey. Ply, dye, felt the hanks with some merino, perhaps, for a little extra strength–I can manage all that.

I have made three afghans with it so far. My mother knitted some into an exceedingly elegant aran sweater. And I have five pounds, half of it dyed into all these colors (we are still working on the camera thing), all waiting to be made up into the next afghan; I’m picturing a windowpane quilting pattern or some such, the undyed skeins framing the blocks of color.

But it’s been sitting in the closet, ready to go, for several years. I’ve been thinking lately that I’m going to Stitches in a couple of weeks, that the new stuff tends to push the old stash further back in the lineup, and I’d really like to see this yarn finally grow up. So. I pulled it out and looked it over.

It stopped me, just like it has every time since I dyed it. Some of the colors came out brighter than the others. Swatch swatch swatch, and yet, I don’t believe I can really know how they’ll all play together as a whole until I’ve gotten a piece done that’s way bigger than a swatch. If it were an even balance of bright and subdued, but it’s not. It’s odd; I mean, they’re all overdyed on top of this same light brown, you’d think…

So the past few days, I’ve been thinking: my hearing loss makes it so I don’t hear some things, but, I notice things that other people sometimes miss, because they’re too busy hearing the whole words while I’m focusing on the nonverbal aspects of the conversation. So. I wonder… I have a friend a few blocks away whose husband is colorblind. The walls in her family room are yellow. I wonder, if I took that stack of balls over to them, if he could tell me better than I can see how the color tones/values mesh? Since he’s missing the distraction of the reds and greens, akin to the consonants I tend to miss. I wonder if it would be clearer to me myself, if I put them in the context of the yellow walls? Or if I put it on top of her white grand piano with the white living room walls as a backdrop and looked across at them rather than down. Curious.

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!

Blogger has been refusing to post that other picture. Let’s try this one, of the finished skein. 

I was thinking about posting about the uncertain lung x-ray that called for a repeat, putting off the repeat, finally going and getting that done a couple of days ago, and getting the report that all was cleared up now. I was thinking about posting about the half pound of cocoa powder I managed to drop across the kitchen floor this morning–but it made the kitchen smell SO good that I had to celebrate with a mug of hot cocoa (from the other tin, thank you very much). I was going to mention…

And then I remembered this bag of brown cashmere fiber I’d found yesterday while cleaning up. I’d bought it via Ebay, very cheap, because, according to the description, it was full of noils.

I haven’t spun in ages and ages. I spent from January to June where I tried a few times, but just couldn’t manage the three limbs going at once thing without finding myself breathless and so exhausted, after doing one bobbin’s worth, as to need a nap. But I liked spinning! The only way not to be frustrated with the loss was to push it far from my sight so as to concentrate on my knitting instead. Focus on what you have and be glad for it, let the rest go.

I’m doing far better now. I finished cleaning the cocoa and pulled out that bag. I made one small skein just now, plying it with a never-used-up half-bobbbin’s worth of baby alpaca/silk in a lovely gold that had been waiting its turn on another bobbin.

Noils was the least of it. No wonder I’d forgotten this stuff. You want natural fibers, hon, this is definitely au naturel: a few guard hairs mixed in, uncombed, short haired, the occasional bit of straw, noils and neps and slubs and sudden thin spots as I spun. All the charm of spinning dog fur. Tell you what, if anybody wants the rest of this–it is very soft, after all–give me a shout out at spindyeknit@nospamgmail.com (skip the no spam part) and it’s yours, first come first served, winner take all. It gave me what I needed: it got me back to my spinning fibers again, and made it clear that I can. Yay!!