I have a list of projects I want done and a general timeline in mind for most of them.  But all of them were calling out to me at once, and it was driving me nuts: one at a time, children!  And the one I’d planned to do next, when I swatched it last week, it just went, nahhhhh, and told me I hadn’t quite gotten the right idea for it down yet. I dithered.

It’s a relief to finally be going, okay, you, you–out of the bag. Onto the needles.  Pronto.  Let’s get you dressed and ready for school and out of here.

Meantime, over the last week I made five of these for various goings-on.  This isn’t the best-looking one of them at all–it’s one of the early efforts–but it’s the one that got its class picture taken.

I used to be on the PTA. This is to show that I, too, know how to dress a mousse.

The woman looking at the package next to us at Costco yesterday had her glasses on but they were dangling down around her chin as she was trying to read the fine print on the ingredients list. She looked vaguely like someone I knew, and although she wasn’t that someone, that probably helped me to respond as if she were, and she was frowning.  Costco on a Saturday is a crowded hassle, so that was certainly understandable.

I laughed, “I thought I was the only one who did that.”  I tend to hang my glasses by one ear dangling downwards when I want to see way up close myself.

I startled her out of her reverie, and she chuckled that she gets strangers telling her, Hey, lady, did you know your glasses were about to fall off your face?  But she’d never had anyone else say they do the same thing.

About ten minutes later, I bumped into her again and went, “There you go again.”  She burst out laughing.

I never did see her frown again after any of that.

Camelspin, shown here in Berry, is one of the softest yarns I have ever had the great good fortune to have running through my hands for hours on end.  Drapey and shimmery.  Gorgeous.  Lisa Souza‘s Merino/silk is right up there with it, but hers is a slightly heavier weight.

I originally blocked this with crisp points along the bottom edge, but the silk gradually sagged them out. I finally reblocked it in the round.  I sent a picture to my son and new daughter-in-law.

Remember this post?  I had Kim in mind when I knitted it, but then I dithered and didn’t mention that part on the blog: color is such a personal thing.  She loved it (yay!), and yesterday I finally popped it in the mail.  I just wish I could show more than the color here for right now. (The yarn I dyed to match it is still waiting its fit of inspiration.)

There’s a Peninsula to Pier Shop Hop going on this weekend, and there was an ongoing stream of carpooling knitters yesterday at Purlescence; one woman remarked to me how very different all these different yarn stores were, how fascinating it was to see what different things they offered and what they looked like.  I wanted to tell her, well, this is the best one of all.  It carries Blue Moon. It has Handmaiden.  It has Claudia.  (Plus a few others I really like, but throw in some Lisa Souza on the side, and I’m set for life.)  It has Nathania, Chloe, Sandi, and Kay.  There are other good stores too, but I have to say, it just doesn’t get better than this.

You know I had to go back over to Purlescence today.  Nathania happened to be just inside the door, ready for a hug.

I explained “Talk like a pirate” day to a customer who was wondering what was going on. There was a tv set up with Errol Flyn swashbuckling his way around, while the Purlescence-errrrrs were dressed the part: all the fun of Halloween and of welcoming the fall, without the sugar overload.  Perfect.

Kay’s holding Ellie, whose outfit says “Shiver me timbers;” Ellie got a few good “Arrrrgh!”s in for good measure as she slowly woke up.

And a very good day was had by arrrrrrgh.

I wrote this draft and expected to be able to come home from knit night and gleefully hit Post!, and I’m going to anyway, but it was Nathania’s night off and she wasn’t there.  Kay called her at home saying I had something there at the shop for her; Nathania put it to a family vote, and not surprisingly, the whatever nebulous thing it might be got voted down.  Mom time is not to be tampered with.

I said to Kay a moment later, we should have told them there was homemade chocolate mousse cake waiting here for all of them.  Kay asked if I wanted to bring the shawl back tomorrow?  No?  It’s burning a hole through your pocket?

Oh, you betcha.  So I left it there for discovery in the morning, and since I took a wrong-time-of-day bad-lighting picture before I left, I’ve got one for this post, and Nathania will probably find out the details here first.  Here goes.

Nathania (scroll down to the second to last picture) went to go visit her friend Tina at Blue Moon Fiber Arts in Oregon recently and came back exclaiming over some of the new colorways Tina was about to put out, wishing she’d been able to bring some of them home.

Which led to some behind-the-scenes emailing and scheming.  I thought I’d given it away when I mentioned this Geisha yarn in Oma Desala had arrived, along with the Potomac colorway Tina had concocted for me to play with in memory of our childhood homes near each other’s on the Maryland side of the river.  But no.

At knit night last week, I pulled two shawls out of my bag to show Nathania: one was the gray, not yet gone to its recipient, the other, my Geisha yarn shawl from awhile ago, where I’d used the full skein to see how much length I could get out of it. It totally swamps me, but then, I’m a fairly small person.

Both of those were in a particular pattern, I told her, that I needed to test on various body sizes–would she be willing to try this one on for me?  Sure.

She dutifully went over to the mirror with the Geisha; yes, it’s long enough, yes, it’s wide enough. Very nice.  She handed it back to me and the old pang hit me hard that I had knit a shawl for Sandi, I had knit one for Chloe, the other two owners of Purlescence, but I had not knit one yet for her.  And she would have loved it if I had, but instead, here she was, handing the shawl back.  Ouch.

I had wanted to for quite some time, badly, but what to make and what to make it of just hadn’t come to me at all.  I had to wait to see and I didn’t know why and it bothered me.  I had been looking for a yarn for over a year that would speak to me–and all I could come up with is I just felt, no, it’s not time yet. Something’s missing.

Till she took that trip and Tina and I started talking behind her back.  What Nathania didn’t know was I was having her try on my shawl to know how long I should continue this one for her.

And I knew now. This wasn’t just for me. This wasn’t just for her. This was to bring Tina into the circle of this shawl, too, in happy anticipation and love in together creating something to make our friend happy.

And all those times I’d wondered what pattern I would ever knit for her: as soon as I had the right yarn ready to go, I just knew.  She and her husband had met in a singing group.  They are musicians.  And so, to celebrate two people I adore having found each other and having chosen to live happily ever after,  I started with the Michelle shawl, named for my own daughter and knitted here in celebration of her daughters, to the end of the yoke; from there, I switched to the Concert Scarf pattern, repeat after extra repeat across, to make a one-of-a-kind shawl but at the same time one that anybody with a copy of “Wrapped in Comfort” can follow. The only change is that you’ll need one fewer stitch in the increase row before the main body, and there you go.

I don’t usually put busy colorways with busy patterns, but here, it’s perfect: how they met and their love of music blends into the background of the overall fabric of their lives.  I’m really pleased with how this came out. And very gratified that, at last, I got to knit this shawl: to celebrate Nathania, for her close friend Tina’s sake, and to honor as well, with the pattern, the man who loves Nathania best of all and whom she loves best of all.

Hey, you guys: there’s some leftover chocolate mousse wheat-free anniversary cake waiting for you.

I got a note today from my son John, who is in Mississippi at the moment.

A year ago, the John who is the owner of Village Spinning and Weaving was selling silk yarn at TKGA that had been dyed by his local weaving group for fun for him.  I exclaimed over the price, and he grinned that yes, he’d gotten a very good deal on it.

I knitted up the one hank I bought into a Michelle shawl.  Weighing how many grams the ball was shrinking per row, I was able to figure out how long I could make it before I had to start in on the bottom edging.  I ended up with a shawl that was good for someone about my size but not a whole lot bigger.  I had not a clue who I was knitting it for; it was more like, well, silk is like type O negative blood: pretty universally give-able, allergies-wise.

The finished shawl has been sitting there quietly off in a corner for months, patiently waiting its turn. I’ve wondered who on earth it was for.  I had to wait for the moment that would tell me.

Our youngest headed off on a mission for the Mormon Church in December. They could have called him to anywhere in the world; they sent him to the one headquartered in Mississippi. (He came out okay in the hurricanes; thanks.)

I got a note from him today, telling me about a woman he’d met who has MS and whose husband is dying.  I can only imagine what she’s going through.  He told me he’d felt prompted to say something to her that had brought her great comfort, and he wanted me to know that it was all my fault: he reminded me of something I’d once said to him that I don’t even remember saying, that he’d passed on to her, about not being in fear and about the power of love and faith in our lives.  It had made all the difference.  He told me he felt that that moment was why he’d been supposed to come to Mississippi.

And then he just happened to mention that oh, by the way, Mom, she’s not a very big person, she’s about your size, and her favorite color is bright royal blue, and, like, maybe, you wouldn’t mind knitting a shawl for her, would you? She could really use to have something comforting like that to wrap around her right now.

I think this one will do.  And I think other-John’s weaving group would like to know what one of their hanks of yarn is going to, so I’m linking to his shop so the word gets around.

(Edited to add: here’s a better picture of it, though it’s a bit darker here than in real life. I beat the post office closing time by ten minutes.  It is on its way, and I hope it helps in the small way I can from way over here.)

I did not know a bird would be willing to do that.  It hopped over to about a foot away from me through the glass as if to say thank you, munching away happily.

I’d swept out some cobwebs, and being on rather unfriendly terms with spiders, had put the long-handled duster outside to shake it off (okay–picture it more like, I ran with it and dumped it fast after I’d cleaned some of the outside webs and slammed the door), and I’d left it out there; maybe the buggies would scurry away from it for me.  Well, turns out, one did, a good-sized one.

I’ve been googling, trying to find the right combination of words to conjure up a picture and a name for the very small brown bird with the surprisingly long, sharp needle of a beak that this one had. No such luck.  The fuzziness of this shot doesn’t convey it well at all.  It did not have the short wide beak of, say, a chickadee, although the bird was about that small.  It saw that spider and whisked in to our back porch to snatch it up.

The spider was having none of it, and did the spidery thing of running into the dark, underneath a wooden box we have up on top of a few 2x4s.  And the bird followed it!  Spearing away at it and dragging it back to the light.  One leg crunched, and the spider scuttled off with the other seven.  Nuh, uh, dude, and the bird was right under there after it again and dragged it back out.  Totally harpooned the thing, and then ate one potato chip leg at a time, savoring dessert first, and then the main course of the body of the thing.

I watched, fascinated; the beak was about as wide as the spider’s legs to begin with, how was it going to get that big thorax down?  But it did.  Then it looked at me like, Got seconds?  No?  And flew around the patio, looking for more.

I needed motivation to clean off that duster and sweep the rest of the cobwebs. I think I just got it.

Having a project I’ve been putting heart and soul into but I can’t quite blog yet, and feeling a bit antsy for a little more knitting around here, I thought I’d show off my daughter Michelle’s shawl.  I have most of the fullness arranged across the back in this picture, trying to show the pattern a bit better; it is wide and sweeping and drapey and gloriously shiny and soft.  It’s a simple pattern to work and took two skeins of Sea Silk.

When my tech editor for “Wrapped in Comfort” pulled this shawl out of its bag, she immediately emailed to ask if I’d be interested in selling it to her.  Given that she could certainly knit one, too, that was a huge compliment!  And one I’ve been grateful for ever since (not to mention, I’m claiming bragging rights on it for life. Thank you, Donna!)

(Background: a brushed baby alpaca triangle shawl gifted to me by Laura in Alameda that I like to wrap around me when it gets cool in the evenings. Thank you, Laura.)

It was eight years ago that we got the call that woke us up on a chilly early Sunday morning, Thanksgiving week.  Long expected.  It had been eight years since my husband’s older sister had been told on her 40th birthday that she had non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and that it was metastasized.

The last time Cheryl had been well enough to run around and do errands like anybody else while we were visiting, and we then having teenage daughters, we stopped in at a little shop in some mall that sold all kinds of girly frills and hair doodads.  Where, among a few other things, I happened to buy a threesome of hairbands.

One went off to college with my girls.  One, nobody remembers just when it disappeared.  And the last, the plastic well aged by now but still holding up, in a color to go with the auburn my hair had mostly still been when I’d bought it, perfectly comfortable on my head and a remembrance of Cheryl that I wanted to keep close, I took careful care of, knowing I could never replace it.

But this summer it vanished anyway, and it bothered me more than I thought it should.  No little piece of plastic will ever make any real difference re my memories of Jessie‘s mom.  And yet.

So, go buy another one! Easier said than found. Why do so many of them try to be head tourniquets?  Part of me hung on to the instinctive response of a small child, of, But I want MY headband, not some other one.

Fast forward to two days ago.  It had been carefully wrapped and super-cushioned so as not to be broken by airport workers rifling through my luggage.  I was planning well ahead for my upcoming Stitches East trip, and there it was, safe and sound.  Next time, I’m going to wear it on my head on the plane: I found it! I found it!

I had an East Coast friend once beg me, “Please don’t tell me you wear socks with your Birkenstocks!”  I laughed and wrote back, “I live in California: *everybody* wears socks with their Birkenstocks!” And handknit socks especially, if they’re knitters.

When Mel and Kris came here, I meant to take a picture of our feet together, but I was having too good a time to remember to.

I have two pairs of these, one I keep for looking good, one that got messed up in some flooding, so you might as well wear them for splashing in the rain anyway.  Which is why I went back and bought a second pair while they still had them in stock–I was afraid the first was going to reek and split when they dried and that I was going to have to toss them, but no. They’re pretty indestructible.  When Kris exclaimed over how new these looked, I had to explain I was simply putting my best foot forward.

When I saw the two of them the week before at the art fair, I was surprised to see she was wearing my Birkenstocks.  But it gets funnier: she had bought the exact same shoe in the exact same color in the exact same size at the exact same store I’m sure the exact same summer, despite the fact that she lived three if not four hours north of here at the time.  She’d been in the area for a fair and had stopped by the Birkenstock outlet in Gilroy too.  And there you go. We artsy creative types, we all dress in uniform, huh?

They live in Oregon now, though, so I guess we’ll have to let them skip the socks.

Awhile ago, I knew it was going to be Sandi’s birthday, and I baked a blueberry cake and brought it in to Purlescence for knit night.

The reaction I got was not quite what I’d expected: we had five people in that knitting group who were celiac or who actually risked anaphylactic shock if she ate wheat.  I’d had no idea.  The sentiment was appreciated, the expression, not so much.

The hubby and I were at Whole Foods a little while ago with our daughter, it being a good place to shop when you have an allergic child and she being very allergic to dairy.  There are some things that have ingredients snuck in such that the only safe version she can touch is the ones marked vegan.  So. We stumbled across a cake mix that proclaimed it was free of so many things that I had to read the ingredients just to see what it DID have.  I thought of Sandi, and I bought it.

But it needed to be a blueberry cake.  I owed her one. I had no idea what a brown rice/tapioca/arrowroot flour cake would turn out like, but I threw in two cups’ worth of not quite thawed berries.

I am now under request to do that again.  And when I mentioned that lemon curd across the top would be good, too, Sandi swooned at the idea and held me to it.

I brought a little home to the hubby. He pronounced it weird and went for seconds.

The doorbell rang the day after. It was our longtime UPS guy, holding the box in his hands, standing still on my doorstep, actually waiting for me to open the door so he could hand it to me in person.

It took a second for the concept to echo around my brain.  Doorbell.  The UPS guy? A box? Normal life?  Somehow, that all seemed so very far away, but there he was, needing the human contact of seeing me receiving it from him.  Making it personal.  He knew I’d be home; my car was in the driveway.  We both stood there in suspended animation for maybe two seconds, broken finally by my saying “Thank you,” as I received the box from him.

We’d both needed that moment.

There had been an online vendor selling merino lambswool/angora blended into an ultrathin yarn on a cone, very soft; as is, I’d probably never use it, but what I did was to wind half of it off, then two-ply it on my spinning wheel.  Two-ply the two-plies.  Wash the resulting four-ply yarn roughly in hot then cold water to felt the strands together, and knit it up into an afghan for a Christmas present.

For my brother and his wife, who taught high school in New Jersey.  Where a terrible number of the children had lost a parent in the Towers the day before John the UPS guy handed me that box, some of them both parents.  My brother himself had been on the subway: he’d called home to say, “Mom. Dad.  My subway was late.  I’m okay.”

The enormity of it all was not something to dissipate anytime soon, and I knew, as I picked up my needles once my yarn was spun, dried, and ready to go, that I needed to keep it very simple.  I needed comfort knitting. I needed it to be something I could knit without its requiring much attention out of me.

It wasn’t till I was very nearly done that I spread it out, with its 7×1 ribbing, and then it massively hit me: I’d been knitting a representation in yarn of one of the Towers, with not a clue I’d been doing so.  To wrap them and comfort them in softness and love from me.

You know, that header really needs a celery stick in the picture to finish it off, but we’re fresh out.  The charcoal shawl, she is finished.

I wrote a draft last night that I will finish when I finish the project it goes with.   A blog stash.  I can’t wait!

Last Thursday at Purlescence‘s knit night, I was feeling very broke, having just paid college tuition and college rent and the first half of my new hearing aids.  I took a good look around the shop, as I always do: looking at yarns is the best way to come up with new ideas.  Colors trigger memories, memories trigger patterns…

And so I noticed just the most drop-dead gorgeous new color ever over that-a-way, in a yarn from Claudia’s Handpaints that for right now was just plain out of my reach.  One look at it and I knew exactly whom it should be for.  Nothing else would do.  I hoped it wouldn’t sell out.  It was just so exquisitely THE color. (Okay, I’m suddenly stuck with Barbara Streisand singing “Misty watercolor memmmmmmoriesssss…” in my head. Shhh, stop, get out of my post!)

Sandi, one of the LYSOs, came over, checking up on me–I’d had a sudden severe bout with my dysautonomia two nights before, and I wasn’t going to mention it, but one look at my worried face and she’d decided to ask what was up.  Those bouts are when the brainstem and the blood pressure and the heart and lungs forget to all stay connected to each other for a little while there.  It had been rough.  I’d reacted to it with the thought, Tina Newton and Lisa Souza both just sent me yarn out of the goodness of their hearts and I am NOT going to die with it sitting in hanks in ziploc bags! Those are going to become LOVE first! BREATHE, you stupid body, BREATHE!!!

A little adrenalin goes a long way, and the body did this, Right-o, old chap, carry on.  And I was fine.  And that was that.

Sandi was hesitant to say it, so I did outright for her: knitting for others helps keep me alive.

And she handed me that Claudia silk I’d been admiring, and said, “Take it.”

Ohmygoodness!!!

And now I have a blog stash and I can’t say… yet. But Sandi–you’re a peach and I adore you.  Knit long and prosper well.

Barbara-Kay says she’s only ever met two truly ugly yarns. I’m curious to know what they looked like.  But now I’ve got to tell you about one someone once gave me: I’ve been looking for it, but I have some vague memory of passing it on to someone who saw it and really liked it.

Back at the height of the furry-feathery yarns craze, I got a visit from a friend from another state who happened to be coming to California anyway and wanted to stop by.  She was someone who knitted up samples for yarn companies and she had a leftover skein she wanted to share with me, partly because she thought the thing was just too funny.

We’re talking a very thin nylon strand connecting lots of soft puffs of white and brown, chenille-y and very touchable.  Scattered here and there was a small accent of bright red.  In just the right shade.

Which is why she giggled as she handed me the yarn, confessing she called it Roadkill.

On that note…  Lawdog kindly put together all the links to his serialized Ratel (an animal also called the Honey Badger) story, saving me the effort of hunting them down, talking about some of his experiences growing up in Nigeria as the son of an American oil-industry worker.  And then there’s the furious furry tennis ball attacking the python.  I love his dad’s calm words: “Boys? Try to stay away from anything with an appetite, mmm?” Maybe they needed some Roadkill to distract it.  Here you go.

Lisa asked if I knit other things besides shawls.  I have, I did, I…

My Kaffe Fassett phase is described here.  Discovering his “Glorious Knits” helped really push me back into the world of knitting after a half dozen years’ absence.

I made a number of cabled sweaters, including a KF-inspired pullover with each half of each cable a different color.  It was a little like the time I made homemade tofu, just to say I had and could.  I knitted an aran for a friend’s son as a high school graduation gift, only, the knitting loosened up as I got more and more comfortable with the pattern and so I was unconsciously knitting faster and looser, and one sleeve, doing the same number of cable twists and the same number of rows as the other, came out, um… I cut the cuff and a bit above it off, reknit a new cuff downwards, and then turned the cut part into a small baby bonnet, chainstitching little ties on.  I took great delight in embarrassing the heck out of that then-18-year-old by telling him I was saving it for his first baby to wear someday to match its papa.

The kid is 27 now and got married this past May, a week after my son did.  I’m not sure if he remembers that bonnet.  (Although I’ll bet he does.)

I thought I didn’t want to learn how to do lace.  But it bugged me that here was a part of knitting that was beyond me, when I thought I was pretty skilled, overall.  I went looking for how-to materials, finding extremely slim offerings in the bookstores and finally driving way up to Lacis in Berkeley with specific ideas in mind.  The Barbara Walker stitch treasuries from 1970 or so finally got reprinted at about that time. They were hugely helpful.

When I started, I thought all lace had to be on size 3 needles or smaller by definition.  It took me awhile to let go of the idea that if it comes out all in a tight wad, that just means you didn’t block and stretch it hard enough. Not so.  It’s the universe saying, yo.  Use. Bigger. Needles.

So at first I made quite a few wedding-ring shawls, airy lacy rectangles that could slide through your ring.  They were and are glorious.  There were a few larger ones that, um, try to find a large male and borrow their ring for a moment if you want to slip your shawl through–and try not to flip the band across the room as the thing zips through.  Ask me how I know.

Little by little, bit by bit.  I got this little website going, in part because my younger daughter took a high school webpage design class. She put a few patterns up here. And then, after the Strawberry Pie shawl, I found myself wanting to improve on the design. I wanted something that would hang straight on both sides, which that one doesn’t–it’s more a boomerang shape.  I spent a summer working out some ideas and the basic template, knitting, not knowing how the crucial upper areas would look with the weight of the lower till they were done, and gradually I came up with the top-down circular shawls that became the basis for “Wrapped in Comfort.” The how-to-knit-lace instructions in there are exactly what I spent so much time trying to find, years ago.

I spent months and months knitting shawl after shawl: one for you, one for the book.  One for you, one for the book. No, not that color, knit another one for the book, no, that one.  In all, I mailed Martingale I think it was 29 projects and told them to pick out their favorites; each one I had knit at least twice if not four, five times, obsessed with accuracy.

After that, I was quite ready to go do something else for a little while.  I wanted instant gratification. I wanted people gratification rather than having to knit it and throw it in the closet like I’d been doing for two years.  I wanted to knit to give NOW.  I started doing a lace scarf here and another one there, and before you knew it, I was where I knew I had to knit one for every single woman at church so that nobody would feel left out.

And I did it. I knitted for every woman (except for the two who moved away in the middle before I got to them, and the blind woman who did not own nor want to own a scarf, to her seeing-eye dog’s intense disappointment as I took the proffered baby alpaca away from near its nose.) My favorite part of that 18-month-long marathon was Jo.  She’s a peach.  She’s still at about the same place as she was when I wrote that post.

I got awfully tired of those scarves. I know I need to knit more of them; we live in a university town and new people are coming in all the time, and who doesn’t need a welcome like that when you don’t know a soul? But for this particular moment, I’m back on a shawls binge and playing with new lace patterns. When you knit someone one of those, you’ve really knit them something. They are substantial.  They look wonderful. They pronounce of the wearer, “I am well loved.”  And I have to tell you, that never gets old.