Kris and Mel, my potter friends, stopped by here today on their way down the coast; art fair season isn’t quite over yet.  She got her pink shawl (which came out shorter than I’d expected; rather like the original Bigfoot in the book.)  And since upcoming surgery means sleeves will be an issue for her this winter, and my shawls seemed exactly the thing she needed, ie, they’ll keep her warm and they’ll stay on without effort, I had it all planned out and I gave her this blue one too; it ran longer on her.  Variety is a good thing.

They certainly didn’t need to, but they came bearing gifts: handmade soap, and a doorknob hanger of handfelted honeybees from Plum Blossom Farm’s sheep, with beads and a little bell at the end.

I rattled the bell and actually heard it–not very loud, but hey. I heard it!  They didn’t know I grew up on Honeybee Lane; and hey, wool taking over the house all the more, I love it.  I can’t wait to tease my kids.

The handmade soap was wrapped in felted Wensleydale wool.  Again, in the they-couldn’t-have-known department: the AP once ran a one-paragraph little filler story about a woman in the British Isles trying to keep the last herd of Wensleydale sheep in the world alive, and how glad she was to get a large Japanese order for fleeces: it gave her the financial wherewithal to keep going.

I spent ten years after that trying to track down a source of Wensleydale wool.  It has had a real resurgence since that article, helped by the handspinning market, and I did find and spin some for a coat.  And here there was not only someone with some actual Wensleydale sheep in the US now, but Kris and Mel actually know her and brought this to me from her!  Along with Wensleydaled honeybees! Life draws in in small circles that surprise sometimes. Totally delightful.

Before we let them go, I had to take them in my kitchen and open the cupboards and let them see my Kris and Mel collection.  I showed them how I take my tiny rice-type bowl, mix cocoa and suger in it every morning, zap some milk in my Mel and Kris mug, and make my morning hot cocoa.  Looking at the size of the cup I use for it–it was not their coffee cup-type cup, Kris laughed, “Yeah, I like lots of hot cocoa too!”

And I’m glad I live in a climate where it’s cool every morning, y’know?

And a very, very good day was had by all. It is amazing sometimes how much of a difference we make to each other even when we so rarely get to see much of each other in person.

Or rather, shawl–quick, go tell Dorothy she needs to accessorize.

I spent an hour today carefully tinking back to a mistake from last night–apparently, I can’t reliably count to three past 11 pm–and reknitting the gray, and after I got done, did something I almost never do: I started another project before finishing the previous one.  Lisa’s Ruby in baby alpaca/silk won the yarn toss.

I love how my shawl patterns, when you’re starting out, relax out on the circular needle in the shape of a resting cat, poised here to bat at the ball of yarn.  And now that the Ruby is ready for me to jump back to as a refuge from monochromatic vision the next time I might need it, I can get back to finishing the gray.

The first few rows, I was working on this to get it done and out of the way of the other, brighter yarns waiting next to me. But the more the pattern emerged, the more beautiful it became to me in its own right, and the more perfect it has felt for the recipient as I’ve been watching it coming to be.

This will be a quiet shawl.  It’s not flashy.  It doesn’t demand attention.  It doesn’t put itself first.  It plays well with all other colors that the recipient likes, as far as I know, and as I’ve been knitting it, I’ve been remembering the real reason I picked the yarn up in the first place: this is seriously nice stuff.  It offers warmth and and a superb softness for a woman who has touched many lives for good. I can’t wait to give it to her, even if that means I have to stop knitting it at that point.

Newton’s at Stitches West last February was selling a 60/40 cashmere/merino blend that was really soft, and not all such blends are; this one lived up to its description, and to knit up a shawl in it was going to cost under fifteen bucks.   I carefully held the skeins up against each other in the light because the dyelots at that booth tend to be…random.   But not a problem with the ones I was looking at.

One was a charcoal gray.  It was clear to me that the cashmere used for it had been natural brown, and the result is slightly towards the earthy side.  Nothing particularly exciting, but I had had times the previous year where I’d needed guy colors in my stash and didn’t have them.

So.  Saturday I got a package from Lisa Souza with her Giverny colorway in baby alpaca laceweight and her Ruby, slightly subdued in how it came out in her baby alpaca/silk.  Gorgeous, both.  Today I got a package from Tina at Blue Moon Fiber Arts: Geisha in Oma Desala and Potomac.  I’m tempted to think of them as, Oma (doesn’t that mean Grandma?) Desala (of the–salad?  Of the salt?  Help me out here, Tina), and Makes-Me-Homesick for my beloved river.  Lovely, lovely colorways, and I’m dying to dive straight in to all four yarns at once.

Saturday I also happened to ask the next recipient on my list what colors she liked best.  It took her a moment to get what was coming next, and then I laughed at her hey, wait a minute! reaction.

Well, then.  Black.  She liked black.

I had that coming–I asked.  You over there with the bad eyes and the knitting needles, I hear you groaning too.

I had this in my stash.  And you know it’s soft enough, definitely.  Can we call this light black?  But I also have black dye, and overdyeing charcoal to get black, if it doesn’t take totally evenly, who could tell or care?  I’ve been debating between going ahead with the Jacquard Acid or asking if she’d rather I left it as is.  I guess I’ll give her a call.   Communication is a good thing.  You know that what I should have done was to dye it before I started knitting away at it.

But darn, all those new colors are communicating, too, way too loud: knit ME!  No, ME!

Waitcher turn, kids.  All in good time. I’ll get you, my pretties, and your little dog-eared pattern scribblings too.

Or at least I wish; we’re trying to figure out why the cold-water valve–the house’s, not the machine’s– suddenly started leaking.  I did do a few loads anyway before turning off the cold water, and after not having a washing machine for a week, what’s the first load you would throw in there?  Yeah, me too.

A quick glance inside beforehand hadn’t done the job.  An empty cycle-through just in case hadn’t done the job.  An extra rinse didn’t do the job.  Rachel: did you take Mr. Washie on vacation with you?  Or did he sneak off to Santa Cruz with his buds?  Did he enjoy the beach?  Next time, tell your machine he needs to rinse off his little feet in the Whirlpool or he Maytag you too with some of that sand when he gets back.  Kenmore and more of it come off if I keep running it through?

I think I’ll go rewash that underwear.  I tell you: Mr. Washie’s in hot water now.

Robin wearing her new shawl–note to the women at Purlescence: I did find my Ocean Casbah yarn…

Nina’s hands at work as we waited for our lunch.

Warren of Marin Fiber Arts checking with Frederikka Payne on the phone about the Whisper merino laceweight in his shop.  It will stay available?  Thanks!  Cast on!

In the it’s-a-small-blog-world department, there will be a Mr. Washie (yes, Dad, that’s an official knitter’s term) transplant team today operating between our house and No-Blog-Rachel’s.  No-Blog-Rachel has a blog now, although she will forever be known by her previous description given her by the Yarnharlot.

Rachel is from Vermont and now is a a member of my knitting group at Purlescence. Meantime, my daughter now lives in Vermont, and guess where I’m planning to visit?  Rachel, you want to hitch a ride in my luggage?  Just let me catch up on the laundry first, and I’m so glad the people you bought your house from left you with a superfluous washing machine.  Much appreciated.

I finished Kris’s shawl at about 11:30 last night, which, come to think of it, is the same time of day that I finished designing it Monday night.  Kris now knows about it; I’m still paying a bit for the sun exposure last week, so since Nina was at the Kings Mountain Art Fair yesterday, I called her, she told Kris and Mel, my potter friends, and we arranged how to get the shawl to them without my having to be outside.  Kris is ecstatic.  She apologized that she couldn’t pick it up last night, and I was going, no, no, that’s quite alright.  It’s not quite done.  (I can only knit so fast.)

And now it is.  And I can’t show it to you all yet, which gets really frustrating because I’m absolutely a born show-off.  But trust me, it’s blocked now and it feels like one of the most gorgeous things I have ever knit, and certainly one of the most meaningful.

I’m picturing my readers flipping through future pages and then the blog and going, wait–the original was pink? How does that work for a landscape scene?

Um, early foggy dawn?  But then, a shawl is an article of clothing first of all, and this was a good color for her.   And I am very, very pleased.

(P.S. Kris–Lisa Souza sends a hello, old friend!)

Coming home from San Rafael yesterday, it was amazing watching the fog blowing in fast and hard in the bright afternoon through the top of the Golden Gate Bridge as we were rounding the corner from Marin, and then on the bridge itself, you couldn’t see the next arch ahead.  These pictures were taken at about 3:45 pm.

More pictures when I get the time to tweak the large ones; I’m under heavy knitting deadline.  Later.

The dryer was having problems. Then the washing machine died.  Glug glug clunk splat.  So I did what any reasonable knitter would do: I went to a yarn store.

And one that was north of San Francisco, for that matter, a good 80 minutes away–if you’re going to run away from handwashing yours and your 6’8″ husband’s clothes in the bathtub, you might as well really run away.   While telling myself that since I only get to Marin Fiber Arts on average maybe once or so a year, there was no point, should I happen to truly fall in love with a yarn there, in spending the whole next year wishing I’d bought it–just buy the durn thing already.  Justify that gas money.  Support that LYSO who is absolutely one of the nicest and best.

This proved not to be a problem.

Note that it was actually Warren’s day off, and he drove over despite an appointment later that was a goodly distance away simply because Robin, who’d come from an hour north while on vacation, and Nina and I, coming from the south, wanted to see him.  (And each other.)  He has a fan club.  He’s a sweetheart.  We took him to lunch and thanked him.

I fell in love with the Whisper merino laceweight and asked if it was Frederikka Payne who was the dyer?  He told me she was. Cool!  I met her in Moss Beach a couple of times, back when she had retail sales.  Um, yeah…when she was closing out a very soft superfine kid mohair for two dollars a ball I bought dozens of balls, started knitting it, realized how really really nice stuff this was and went back and bought a hundred balls more–I mean, you could make a kid mohair afghan, even knitted doubled, for under twenty bucks!  And within eighteen months I’d knitted nearly all of it.  Frederikka definitely smiled hello at Stitches afterwards…  When I asked a question about the Whisper’s ongoing availability, Warren whipped out his cell phone and asked her on the spot.  And now I have a new yarn to go play with.

And I needed something….I was hoping to find something… redwood-y. In the right texture and the right weight, which isn’t easy, because I am very picky about the hand to a yarn.  If it’s not soft enough, I’ll never get around to casting it on.  I went through the store twice before it hit me: don’t fixate on burgundys and rusts.  Look at that Jade Sapphire cashmere/silk in greens in the far corner!

I’d hoped to come home with something really nice, something that would really celebrate Warren’s shop to me.  And with those two, I did.

The good times with good friends, and new ones made, though–that was, as always, the best of all.  A special shout-out to young Gavin, who drove with his grandma-by-love for an hour to get there and then was the sweetest kid you could imagine while we all talked knitting around him.  I asked him at one point who was winning the game he had in his hands, and he smiled shyly and grinned, “Me!”

Nina and Rod joined my husband and me for dinner afterwards.  And a good day was had by all.  (Pictures tomorrow. I’ve been knitting madly, trying to finish something.  It’s late.)

I am heading up to Marin Fiber Arts in San Rafael shortly, hoping to be there noon or a little after; I have a knitting friend from my hometown who’s visiting in the North Bay, and Nina of “Wrapped” fame and I figured saying hi to Warren, the LYSO, whom RobinM of the comments and I adore, is a great way to get together while RobinM is here.  In case anybody up around there wants their copy signed.  If you can, come!

And now, for some comic relief, you have to go read this.  Would that all the bad guys could be caught by guile and gorilla like this.  And ain’t no way I could ever write something this funny.  Wow.

My friend Michelle of the Monterey shawl fame, talking to me once about high school reunions, told me she’d gone to all of hers: that at her fifth, people were still showing off.  Some showed up in limousines.  At her tenth, some people were still finding themselves. At her twentieth, they were the selves they’d grown up into.

I missed my first few, wanting to go, but being thousands of miles away, it just wasn’t going to happen. But I kept saying I was going to my 20th.  Nothing would stand in my way. I would go.  And I did.

It was worth every penny of the airfare: I got to see friends I hadn’t seen since graduation, and  I have kept in touch with some of them ever since, never again to let them disappear from my life.  And I got to see…a guy who had tormented me my first two years of high school, and then after that we had pretty much ignored each other’s existence as we went from class to class.  I was surprised our senior year to find out he was turning out to be an okay person after all, though on my part that was simply a quiet observation from a distance.

And at the reunion, there he was.  I took a chance and called him on the early-on behavior and the torment I’d gotten over the things he’d said, and he apologized.  We’d been, what, fifteen years old then? What had we known about anything?  Twenty years long of needing–well, not needing really, but only in terms of any future interaction with each other–that out-loud reconciliation.  And we got it.  I found myself delighted that he actually lived now not only in the town just north of mine here, but that his commute on his bicycle took him within two blocks of my house here every day.  Wow. Small world. And we’d had to fly to Maryland to find out we were both right here in California.

He’s apparently moved back to Maryland since then, but one of his brothers was here in the area too.  I found out because today the headline screamed about the Cisco executive, such a nice guy, with such a sense of joy in his life, on a business trip to Detroit: shot and killed.  A city street, and, apparently, a life for a wallet. The face in the paper looked vaguely familiar. The name did too.  When I read “grew up in Potomac, Maryland,” I gasped: that would be MY high school!  I turned to see if there was an obit with more information. There was.  He was.  The family’s names.  Oh goodness.

And the only reason I have any right to do what was imperative for me to do under such horrendous circumstances, to reach out with a quiet note of condolence that is going out tomorrow to a widow with two small girls to raise unfathomably alone now, is because I made peace with her brother-in-law eleven years ago.  Even if she could never have known anything about any of that.  I did.

Going to that reunion had given me the right, now, to care out loud.  The note is written and ready to go.

I had no idea, when I was booking that ticket.

This yoke idea and that lace in the main body. They were supposed to go together.  All the time I spent over several days  hashing out the yoke pattern,  sure of what was going to come after, I had another idea that kept nagging at me to do next instead, saying all the reasons why it was the right one and why I should ditch the one I was so bent on.

And I kept saying no, no, be a good little lace pattern, go away.  While carefully counting stitches.

But then the one I thought I wanted to use didn’t work.

Upper and lower just didn’t fit together.  What on earth?  I counted stitches again, fifteen ways from tomorrow and it just.didn’t.work. It made no sense.  It was late.  But still.  I couldn’t believe it, and I made some mutterings about math.  And then protested, when I got teased, “But I’m GOOD at math!”  But after spending most of the day yesterday in front of the computer, knitting, writing, editing, frogging, deleting, knitting, writing, editing, frogging, deleting, knitting, writing, editing, frogging, deleting, rinse, lather, repeat, my brain had bugged out and that was that.

That other little pattern, patiently biding its time, pounced on me.  “You know you only want to show off with that fancy-schmancy. You know I’m the right one.  And you know why.  The symbolism is so obvious.”

I do. It was right. It looks wonderful.  It IS wonderful, in a way I can’t describe without instantly giving away who I am knitting it for to that person.  And I can’t believe I even argued with myself over it, it’s so obvious now that I’ve started knitting it.  And it’s a fair bit of fancy-schmancitude itself.

But the killer?  As soon as I decided to go with what is now so patently obviously the right one…

…I saw exactly where my mistake was and how easily the yoke would indeed fit in with the pattern I no longer wanted and that I am really really glad now I didn’t put in there.  Of course they match up!  Piece of cake. Not that that matters now.

You know how I once said my knitting was not the boss of me? You hear it snickering back there?

I’ve been knitting all day and I am thisclose to being finally finally past the swatching stage. I’ve never before tried to do what I’m trying to do, and one more round and I think I’ll have it.   I feel like I’ve earned my keep on this one.  But I am taking a break and showing off Kris’s fish bowl that ate a fish while I flounder around.

Speaking of which, this must be a young one: it hasn’t moved its second eye to this side yet.

Okay, time to go dive back in.  Tuna in next time.  Same thyme, same sturgeon.  Staging.  Frog that pun and pass the fishyswasse soup.

My friend Phyllis called yesterday: “Alison! Your favorite potter is at the art fair here, come see her! She’s at the corner of…”

I asked what time the thing ended. Six?  Sure, I can do that towards the end of it.  I went.

Kris saw me and was thrilled: “I was hoping you would come!”  She knew I would understand, besides the fact that she just plain wanted to see me.  She stepped into the shade for me–she’s a good friend–and we talked.

She had a dear friend who was a regular blood donor.  The friend was cooking dinner for her guests coming one day about seven months ago when the phone rang.  (I think Kris and her husband were to be the guests, but I missed part of it there and didn’t want to interrupt to go back and ask.)  It was the hospital, in desperate need of immediate O negative blood, would she come?

She dropped everything, hoping her guests wouldn’t mind the delay, and ran.

The trauma victim who’d lost half her blood was Kris.  The transfusions and superb medical care saved her life.

The hospital had Kris’s friend’s phone number only because she’d donated, and donated often.  One good choice after another led to a lifechanging good moment where it all came home.