We are about 75 miles south of the fires raging in California’s wine country, with San Pablo Bay as a large break of water between here and there.

But the firesky sunset was intense and the clear awning over the patio glowed a deep, unfamiliar bright yellow that was both novel and startling and I could only pray for the people who went to bed in a calm night and woke up to walls of flames coming right at them, neighborhood after neighborhood. Would I have the presence of mind to grab for my hearing aids and glasses before I ran?

It is smoky and thick and smells like burning plastic outside.

Yonder Cooper’s has a tail feather coming in in the center. Like its daddy, when I needed it, there it was and it let me enjoy its presence for several minutes. It is new at that, though, and I am mindful of its skitteriness. Then it lifted to the fence and stayed a bit longer but flinched that the camera had come out while its back was turned.

The second photo was taken trying to capture it taking off. Crouch, wings out, leap! Faster than a speeding iPhone 4S!

Re the Crohn’s, today was definitely going in the right direction. Grateful for that and hoping hard.

The candy-cane-plied red and faintest beige yarn came out looking more brown the further you get from it (and when it’s wet. Which it is here.)

And… The smoke alarm just went off. Oh fun. That doesn’t mean the air is that bad…?

Six smoke alarms and a bit of teamwork later, we have new batteries and we have peace and quiet and we have a definite appreciation for how good we have it that they were not actually telling us to grab whatever we could and run.

Crohn’s flares: food becomes hard to digest and you don’t much want to eat anyway (so you try to at least make everything you do eat super-duper healthy.) Yeah, been through this before. And one of the things that happens is your muscle tone vanishes, just vanishes, faster than makes any sense.

Not this time. Not if I could do something about it, I told him last night: and so, treadmill, yes, and I was going to wind up yarn in the morning.

And that is how this 420 gram cone finally got turned into a hank. (Oops, broke a tie there. No, two. It is big.) It’s about two thousand yards and my niddy-noddy holds two at each go-round. Somehow, thankfully, it did not pop off the thing and fall into a million tangles on the floor. (You know, Alison, you really could break the yarn and make it into two or more if you weren’t trying so hard to prove you didn’t have to.)

It is scoured, as pre-shrunk as I could make it, and I may have to take a hair dryer to it. All the better to strengthen those arms with.

Those needles I freed up? They had a new project going on them and it probably would have been for the woman sitting behind me–if it had been finished.  I’d rather offer her a choice of more than one color if the one I’m presuming about is not ready to hand right over, so I didn’t say anything to her quite yet.

Three other cowls went to old friends who showed up in town for the weekend, while they were there and I could.  And you know what? It’s really hard to be mopey about what a bad night you had because of the stupid Crohn’s when friends are being totally joyful all around you like that. Hey you guys. That was great. Thank you so much.

I went right home and worked on that new project, picturing all the way the smiles on the friends who already got theirs. They were paying it forward and they didn’t even know it.

(I just moved it, here, let me straighten up those edges.)

It’s Aftober, named for my friend Afton who instigated the tradition of October being the month for finishing projects. For whatever reason. Be they new or long-dragging, pick it up, get it done, and now you have a reason to.

And that is how the black scarf got done. And today that’s why the teal silk project that had been carried around in my purse since July–well, I did about half of it today and got it over with. It had been dragging because I only bought the one skein at Stitches and I wanted it to be for me since I could not duplicate that yarn nor that color and it matches a lot of things I really like.

But I am not high on my knitting list right now.

But those needles it was dangling from… I wanted those back. And so I freed them of that soft single-ply bombyx and it is drying now. I didn’t spin it out in the washer because of that loose ply–it would fuzz out like crazy in the spinning and I prefer how it looks now, and thus I am moving it around every so often as the one part of the old drying quilt gets a little too damp.

Bombyx silk, i.e. from the silkworms that eat mulberry leaves rather than, say, oak (re tussah silk) has this distinctive smell to it when it’s wet. How much depends on how much of the siricin (silk gum) has been washed out.

It always takes me straight back to my mom’s kitchen and that little dark brown bottle way up high.

I remember asking Mom about it one day.

She told me that her mom had insisted on feeding her kids cod liver oil and had been adamant that Mom have some for her own kids.

Mom dutifully got that bottle and put it up there… Nothing else medicinal in that cabinet, just that. (Maybe where Gram would see it?) It had been there as long as I could remember, unmentioned and untouched as far as I knew.

Mom got it down and opened it up and let me take a whiff.

EWWWW!!!! Gram made you EAT that?!

Just a spoonful.

Mary Poppins and her spoonful of sugar wasn’t going to help that stuff one little one bit. Gag. I winced that Mom had had to go through that. It was clear she appreciated my horror.

You know how grandparents and kids traditionally team up against the parents? On this one, it was me and Mom together, absolutely. Mom chuckled and put it back up there where it could do no harm.

And no the silk doesn’t smell just like that, but there’s just a hint of reminder of it, somehow, to me, anyway.

Never mind that. Nice, soft wormspit around your neck. It’s what’s good for you.

I wanted a bit of victory over something. Something that came out right.

And so the black not-an-afghan-anymore got another repeat knitted, which made me feel better about it, and is soaking in hot sudsy water as I type.

For a moment there as I aimed the camera before the scouring it looked like a seahorse to me.

(Edited to add second photo. It shrank from 12″ wide to 8″ and is 68″ long.)

The GI doctor could see me today or in ten days but not in between. I should have called Richard from work for a ride but it just didn’t feel imperative and I didn’t.

I spent too much of the night kicked awake, remembering all the times…hoping this would be nothing.

Let’s not. Let’s just really not. (Was it 17 projects, I think was the number, tumbling out of that grocery sack with a list of people I hadn’t found yet but I knew he could, and the surgeon exclaiming, I get to play Santa Claus?! He thought that was so cool.)

A week from Monday hopefully my good doctor and I will have a laugh and a phew! together and that will be that.

I broke my own rule recently: I started knitting straight off the cones without scouring first. Two strands together. I didn’t want to hank/scour/wind all that fingering-weight yardage for days, I just wanted to knit, even if it wouldn’t be as soft in the hands yet nor be preshrunk. Eh. If I wanted to finish an afghan in any kind of time I had to get started.

That can work–if both yarns are the same kind of fiber, and they probably are. But I got one of them at a particularly steep discount because it no longer had a label stating for sure that it was cashmere like the other, rather, there was a question mark after the word just in case they were wrong.

And so I spent a day making all kinds of progress.

The more I worked with it the more I let it hit me that if the uncertain one might actually be merino, it would be a good, soft merino that I still paid a very good price for. The twist rates were different so it felt different in the hands and that’s probably all there was to it. But…merino would shrink like crazy once the hot water hits it and you need hot water to get those mill oils out. The definitely-cashmere would shrink, too, but not as much. So we could make some pretty interesting fabric here. Inadvertently.

Swatch? What swatch?

And so it sat there waiting for me to decide how I wanted to go on.

Today it said enough already, let’s get to it.

One side of me noted that there’s probably not enough of the smaller cone to start over and still make a full afghan. Scarf? Blanket? Blanket. Keep going.

The other side said, you made that decision when you went full speed ahead without even having any idea what the dimensions would be after you finished knitting and washing. It’s not like there aren’t lots and lots of people who’d love a charcoal cashmere cowl, nothing on those cones could go to waste, once you break the yarn you can finally wind off that yardage like you should have.

And so, still trying to decide, I finished the repeat on the needles and got it to about 9×60″. I could widen it with another repeat or two (shrinkage, remember, shrinkage) and that would be good–but those ninety minutes were enough of the splittiness and the not-s0ft-that-should-be-soft for one day.

So it’s finally settled. Scarf. The shrinkage will determine whether it will be a classic long scarf or one with the ends sewn up for a double-looped cowl. All I’d had to do all this time was knit on it a little more to know what to do, just let my hands feel it and do the deciding, and they did.

And then I got halfway on a new, soft, white silk/cashmere cowl project because I guess I just needed that contrast.

Update: all four grandkid pumpkin hats knit. First attempts at add-on face pieces ripped out. But at least I got a pun out of it!

I know someone who loves someone who lost someone and I bet just about everybody else can say the same.

Clean, straighten, organize, laundry, clean sheets… When you can’t do anything you have to do something. One man. Nine rounds a second. Ten minutes.

Stanford Blood Center canceled a staff meeting and kept their doors open longer. Las Vegas didn’t need it from them yet but with over 500 people wounded it’s way too soon to tell. My thanks to all who have been the heroes–and Jimmy Kimmel is one.

I met one once…

After a good head start and then four two-hour sessions of Conference, this is where I am.

I didn’t get that last hat started before the last session began and so my attention wasn’t on it during the one part where it needed to be. Which is how I got to rip it all out after the first row four times. (Note to self: wait for the Tabby Choir to sing. With them, you already know the words.)

Hat number three doesn’t have a stem. Yet. I wanted the orange cast off this time before adding that.

A certain grandma looked at the calendar and guffawed at herself for having willed the visit with the grandkids to be weeks closer than in real life, so it looks like I’m going to put the add-ons on myself, ship’em off so they can have as much time as possible enjoying them, and let the kids negotiate where or if they want decorative parts changed or moved when we see them. And as for that third stem, I think I just didn’t want to do that really fiddly part while trying to listen to the speakers.

I am just a bit pumpkinned out for now. I’ll knit that last hat tomorrow.

A completely random delightful stumbling-across while reading something else: an instrument that is “a hybrid of elements from a harpsichord, an organ and a viola da gamba” –and, they missed this part, a spinning wheel. That is totally a single-treadle spinning wheel’s mechanism.

A Polish man studied Leonardo Da Vinci’s dream of a horsehair-stringed treadled keyboarded new thing and spent three years studying and trying and failing and succeeding and at last turning it into reality. And then he got to demonstrate what had never before been. It looks a little bit folksy and sounds a whole lot of gorgeous–wow did he succeed.

Have a little concert. I so hope he records albums on this.

No bottom ribbing on this one. At least for now.

So I tried to do a three by three stitch cable across a fourteen-stitch stem, just to see how I could make it twist, and I don’t think I’d try it that way again. Still. It’s fun to play around and see what comes of it.

And then there’s always the inside-out version and the surprise at how much wider and straighter it is.

On to hat two.

Update: I posted this and then went, wait–did I drop a stitch in that stem? It’ll run all the way down. Rip. That’s okay, the top of the orange came out way too loose anyway.

Wait–did I skip closing the arches on the second needle that time? I did. Rip.

Okay, NOW it’s done. The top orange is tightened up a lot and the stem makes a lot more sense.

Update on the update, working on the next hat: suddenly realizing that oh wait. These two circs I’ve been working on. One is a seven. The other is an eight. They’ve been mismatched all along. (Finds another seven.)

Don’t tell on me.

Finished the blue cowl, and after a trip to Cottage Yarns yesterday for some of Malabrigo’s Glazed Carrot merino, started one of several pumpkin hats to come.

(I think I’ll add a sideways 1×1 two-colored brim at the bottom afterwards–this one’s coming out big brother sized, not little sister sized.)

Looking for jack o’ lantern motifs tonight, I stumbled across something I’d never heard of. Richard, looking over my shoulders, figured out on the spot how to write a program to have your yarn machine-dyed to do this, to which I said, But she actually thought it up–and she actually makes this: self-striping sock yarn that knits up into jack o’lanterns. (Ravelry link.) And sushi. And snowmen, complete with scarf. The ones I like most appear to be sold out for now, but AbiGrasso (link to her own site) does fabulous work and I can’t wait to see what she does next.

Meantime, back to the Halloween motif. With four to do I can learn as I go. For the first I’m knitting it with wide ribs and in plain orange: I can make face pieces separately, run the ends through to the inside, tie loosely behind the scenes and make it so they can undo the ties and pull the facial features off come November first to be all ready for Thanksgiving. So they can use them for more than a month. (The thought hits) –actually– I could make a bunch of pieces and let them have fun creating faces and then run the ends through for them or stitch them on so that they can be part of creating their own hats. Hey. I like that!

(New photo added at 10:15 pm.)

I had a good, honest mechanic and his brother for twenty-eight years. Who just retired.

On a strong recommendation, I took the car to someone new today for routine maintenance, with a sudden low-pressure idiot light on a tire as extra incentive. I hadn’t particularly wanted to go there; I liked being able to walk from and to the garage and there was no way with this one. But I knew nothing about the folks who took over my old guy’s place–except that a big corporation wants to redevelop their site, the neighbors are fighting it, the city council looks like they’ll approve it, and the landlord is seeing the dollar signs. So they might not be there very long.

The guy asked me if I wanted a ride home or to stay in their waiting room, stocked with newspapers and the kinds of book you could pick up a great recipe from or browse through, thoughtfully chosen pick-up-put-downs of the kinds that you’d want in such a circumstance.

A ride home and then a return pick-up later? Wow. It would only be an hour, hour and a half? Hey. It was early morning, I had my hot cocoa in a thermos with me and my knitting in my purse–I was all set.

I glanced at the local daily and read up on city politics as my hands worked. The old mechanic had never had a place to wait in. This was great.

The guy stepped into the room and looked like he was about to ask me how I was doing when he saw the blue yarn and the needles. He got a wonderful smile on his face and asked if I were knitting a gift? He was highly pleased that yes, it was. One of his young employees stopped by what was also their break room and he too was delighted and asked me what I was making.

They got the car done in a bit under an hour and it was time to pay.

Wait, what?

(He wasn’t sure what the problem was.)

No seriously, seriously?!

Well, he joked, I could move the decimal over for you if you’d rather.

Since when does someone spend that much time on my car and only charge me $43? Last time I checked on the going rate on mechanics around here, and that was at least ten years ago, it was $60-70/hour.

And so now I have a new place to happily knit when I need to be there.

Usually Colourmart will twist a very thin yarn into a thicker one for you for $5 a cone.

But this one? No way, too twisty, they’d tried, don’t ask, it didn’t work out.

For what it was (a mill closeout of cobweb-weight 93/7  14.5 micron black ultra-ultra-fine merino/vicuna) and how much it was ($18/150 g ppd), I was willing to find out how hard it would be to do on the wheel. Pure vicuna yarn ran $400 an ounce last time I checked. I had bought a cone of the 2% vicuna, was amazed at what an incredible yarn that 2% made it into, and then this one showed up on their site. I didn’t buy it all, but I bought enough to make into a usable yarn on the third spinning-wheel bobbin.

So here’s what I learned today. Yes it kinks back on itself in a heartbeat. It will literally throw your yarn for a loop. Once you start plying that wheel has to keep going until you’re done, with one hand holding the strands slightly aloft like a distaff, bringing them together and keeping them from snagging on your clothes, and the other hand controlling the twist as it feeds onto the bobbin.

If you stop and wind it around the knob to place-hold it and come back, you’ve lost your slight tension on that multitude of strands. Suddenly thinking, wait–if I’d put a book on them next to me on the seat before getting up it probably would have been okay? One time the mess was bad enough that I broke it off right there and declared it done: those strands were not willing to straighten out individually. At all. I felt for the woman at Colourmart.

My finished first skein, held in the air, twisted slightly at the bottom. Given the cobweb’s original twistiness, I think I improved it. I think.

But oh my goodness there is no way to describe how soft that yarn felt running through my hands as I aimed for a knittable thickness, and that was with the mill coating still on it. It was like there was almost nothing there to feel, it was so light and so extremely soft.

I’m glad I bought it. It will take a lot of time to ply all those cones (4703 yards each) and ply again, two done S twist, then Z twisted together to balance. Scoured and preshrunk, it came out with a slightly nubbly look. It is not a perfect yarn.

But oh the vastness of that softness… Even Richard squishy-squished it. (Okay, yes, I asked. “Soft,” he duly pronounced. Thank you, honey!)

Yeah. So. Unless there are a few in someone’s cart, where they’re allowed to stay for a month, that one is sold out. But the 16 micron merino with 2% vicuna (direct link fixed) that started all this? Amazingly soft, smoothly and commercially spun, and good to go–it’s 4-ply. Knit it doubled makes fingering weight, double that, worsted weight, no spinning wheel needed. Oh, and: right now everything on their site is 20% off.

As I told my sweetie re the 7%, I’ll probably never get a chance to knit with a yarn like this again. Knowing I’d have to do all that work, it was worth it.