My daughter was seven when I watched–something, I don’t even remember what–go past her face on the playground at the elementary school. What stayed with me was the look on her face: an utterly bewildered, helpless, I don’t get it!

I hauled her to the pediatrician’s and said, Humor me. I know you just tested her vision six months ago.  Do it again.

She sent us to the pediatric opthalmologist, who found the cataract and operated on it, explaining that most pediatricians would never see a case and could easily miss it, but that he saw quite a few.

And every now and then since then, we’ve had an occasional blip related to that eye. They saw a cyst last summer, and asked that she come home from college this week to get it checked again.  I wouldn’t mind having her home for Thanksgiving, would I?  Hey.  Twist my arm.

So today, they checked it.  A cyst?  Maybe not, now.  They do think it’s benign. Ultrasound at Christmas break.  That’s suddenly a lot longer away than it was.

I knitted away in the waiting room on a lace scarf out of the Geisha yarn left over from the shawl I gave Tina Newton of Blue Moon Fiber Arts, picturing it on the person it’s going to and looking forward to their face lighting up when I give it to them; it’s lovely stuff. As I sat and other patients and parents came and went over nearly two hours, two toddlers got antsy, and I had a Peruvian handknitted finger puppet for each of them. Both of them instantly lit up, as did their parents and everyone around them.  They put their fingers in them–a whale and a parrot–and brought them to life, dancing in their hands.

And I think things will turn out okay.

I have as many UFOs as the next knitter, and it can be very useful at times. The Barnswallows scarf that stalled because the needles were too large and my hands were aching? It’s probably been sitting in that bag for four months now; it’s 27″ long, and I can easily finish it up this afternoon. Yay! Because I know exactly who it’s for now, and the shortcut is a help this busy week. It’s often like that; I stumble across my UFOs when I need them for the person they were really meant for all along, and knowing now why I’m making them helps them fly to the finish line. Having a small stash of UFOs can be a very useful timesaver. (Why yes, I do own a lot of needles, funny you should mention it.)

But I like to think I never have TOADs. I figure if it’s that bad, I know it, and I rip the thing out and put it out of its misery. I never rip the needles out and just leave it abandoned like this.

So when I found this, it rather surprised me. Came with its own mascot, too.

Picture by permission and courtesy of Doc at www.docwalkersphotography.com .

Sitting here in our family room, these white flowers whose name I wish I knew suddenly required of me that I look up out the window and notice them. That I notice that it’s November and that they’re blooming and that there are things about living in northern California that I enjoy very much.

So I picked up the camera, walked outside–something I, with my lupus, too seldom do–but it was 3:30, the late-fall San Francisco fog had rolled in, and the sky was darkening; the exposure seemed like it couldn’t be a risk. The flash went off repeatedly as I was snapping pictures. The leaves on the apple trees are a beautiful bright yellow. The lemons are turning color to match. I picked one, and as I sat here quietly typing away again on my email, its lovely scent was on my hands, so much so that I went back out and picked more and now a lemon cake is happening in my kitchen. I will cook down some frozen mixed berries with just a smidgen of sugar to pour as a sauce over the slices after it cools.

My mother and mother-in-law were newlyweds together, friends living across the street from each other in DC proper, before they bought houses and moved their growing families to the suburbs. They both owned the then-recently-released Betty Crocker cookbook, and Mom Hyde told my mom that the hot milk sponge cake was a great recipe to try.

When I was a teenager, I stumbled across that same cookbook, 1950 edition, at a sale being held as a school fundraiser. I recognized it, and since I was about to go off to college, it seemed a good idea and I bought it.

Mint condition. Original edition. Looked like it had never been opened. I have since been told it would have been worth a fair amount had I left it like that, but like our mothers before us had done, I put it to the good use it was meant for.

And when we moved here, I pulled out that same hot milk sponge cake recipe that I remember my mom making more often than any other cake, for a treat for my kids, except, I made a substitution. And later told my mother-in-law about it.

Why, she asked me, even if it was so good, why would I want to use fresh lemon juice for most of the milk? Wasn’t that, like, hideously expensive?

She’d forgotten we had that tree.

Tart and not too sweet and the top with an intensely lemony melt-in-your-mouth texture like the filling of a fine pastry. Almost no fat nor guilt. You can have your cake here, and enjoy it, too.

Thanksgiving. A time for family gathering around: let the pun times roll!

Bilingual turkeys speaking chicken with a knitter’s accent: BlOCK, blockblockblockBLOCK!

Photos from knitting group night at Purlescence last night. Gigi and Jasmin of http://cuteknitter.blogdrive.com/ Jasmin’s T-shirt reads, “I’m blogging this,” so I had to take her up on the challenge.

The one and only infamous No-Blog Rachel, http://no-blog-rachels-blog.blogspot.com/ who actually happens to have a blog now.

Kathy, http://queenofpurpleyarn.blogspot.com/ who finished her pink socks!

Colleen pummelling Chloe with yarn. But was it merino? I mean, as long as it’s soft it’s okay…

Which brings up the thought for my family, for their own protection: come the next earthquake, where would you rather be doing your Christmas shopping? Say, Costco, with the pallets stacked up to here with crates of #10 cans hovering above your head, just waiting for that 7.5? Or a yarn store? Skip the kitchen supplies. We’re talking major safety issues here. Go directly for the cashmere. Or the new Fleece Artist Camel Spin (oooh, aah).

Colleen, Rachel, and Cynthia quietly plotting world dominknition in the back.

I tell you, if the head of Microsoft ever tried to go into yarn to take them on, I’ve got just the title for his efforts: The Purly Gates.

They’re huge. They’re yellow. They live among the redwoods. And they are the unlikely mascot for the university a bit south of here.

A northern-Californian in-joke: at knitting group at Purlescence tonight, as someone was showing off their project, we envisioned the perfect piece of handknit clothing for UC Santa Cruz women to show their spirit for their school.

The banana shrug.

Kristine at lilacknitting.blogspot.com says that she doesn’t want to hear anything more about nesting. (Her first baby is due next month.) Ah, well. Here’s her thousand words’ worth, with photo by permission of Jens Birch http://jensbirch.smugmug.com/ of Sweden. (It’s on page two of the birds gallery.)

I want to thank each one of you who has left a comment on Marguerite’s post; there is great comfort in reading those messages. Thank you to each person who simply Thought Good Thoughts, too; caring matters. The immense message of illness is that we’re all in this life thing together, looking out for each other.

And I want to thank each person who ordered a pattern from Lynda at http://home.comcast.net/~lmmichaluk/Lilly/ and http://luna-knits.blogspot.com/ She had a problem with IE with her computer for awhile there, and Karin’s comment gave her the heads-up she needed; it’s fixed now.

Meantime, Toni has a kiwi-faced clock on her blog to show which time zone she’s in. I got a good chuckle out of it, and told her she’d just triggered my next blog post. Ergo.

It was back in the day before we were on the Do Not Call registry (which expires soon, by the way, just a heads-up that you need to renew your place on it.) Stephanie Pearl-McPhee was doing her first book tour to the Bay Area, and I bought some Blue Sky Alpacas AlpacaSilk at the yarn store she spoke at, Stash, in Berkeley. I found several balls on the shelf, and they assured me they had more in the back, but with the crowd that night there was just no way–would I mind if they found it later and mailed it to me?

Sure, no problem.

I got a very sheepish message later: they didn’t have more after all. They were very sorry, but there was nothing they could do.

I wasn’t about to drive the 45 or so miles through the worst traffic in northern California to return it; I just had to try to find more of that dyelot somewhere else, then. I started poking around on the web and made a few phone calls.

One place was happy to say they had it. Great! They mailed it–and it was a different one. I reported back, they checked, and went, oh no! The dyelot number stated on the outer bag was the one I’d wanted, but the actual balls inside didn’t match it. Okay, scratch that one. I mailed them back.

The next place took my email and phone number and promised to get back to me when they had a moment to go check. Fine. It didn’t occur to me to tell them where I was.

At the time, we were getting many a cold call from random hopeful newbie Wall Street stockbrokers and the like. Occasionally, you would get one that did not stop to think that there was more than one time zone in this country. Sir, what on earth makes you think I would ever be interested in your spiel about investing in your proferred company at 5 am!?

So. It was dark o’clock, and we were out cold. The phone rang–you know, it’s great to be deaf…and my husband, assuming it was a Red Cross dispatcher, woke up and grabbed it, trying not to drop the old heavy princess phone on my head as he fumbled around for it.

Then he thrust the receiver at me, grumbling sleepily, “It’s your boiler-room yarn pushers in New York City. They want you to know they don’t have your dye lot.” Busted!

At that, I finally appealed directly to Blue Sky for any help on where I might be able to find what I wanted. They had some themselves, it turned out. And not only did they send it to me, but they generously gifted me with it for my troubles.

And so I redesigned Wanda’s shawl to match their yarn as my way of thanking them, and the yarn they gave me is there in that particular shawl that is pictured in my book. And here in this post.

Written Saturday, waiting to be able to deliver it.

So much to say on this one, as I wait for it to dry.

The first day I was at Stitches East last month, we got to the end of the first row of booths, something soft-looking caught my eye and I went, “Ooh, I need to touch that.”

Karen and Amy wheeled me instantly over to it. I was just going to stroke it and be satisfied with that and go on; to me, it is a given that you never ever buy the first yarn that catches your attention at a Stitches event. It’s Disneyland for knitters with major sensory overload and you have to kind of scope out the place before you can make any decisions with any kind of sense, even if that means you miss out on a few things that other people snatch up before you can get back to them.

But it was their first time going. Cashmere? It was exquisitely soft, some of the best I had ever felt. I liked it? A good price? They weren’t letting me leave till I got it.

There were three to choose from. The dove gray was emphatically not my color. That shade of vivid orangey red is exactly what makes my balance go bonkers. No way. There were only two skeins left of the white, so I thought I was safe–no luck here, okay, let’s move on.

But no, they were telling me I would find just the right person and I would be disappointed later if I didn’t get it and I had to buy it and that was that. I argued and we went the rounds for several minutes.

Now, that’s unusual enough, coming out of those two, that when my inner feeling was, okay, just go with the flow here, I finally counted up how many balls I would need, took a deep breath, and bought a half a pound in that red. One or two for a scarf didn’t seem to cut it: I needed enough for a shawl. But I wondered why; I kept picturing a particular friend it would look great on, but hey, I had other yarns already in my stash I could knit up for her (part of why I kept trying to put Karen and Amy off). How many ages was that red going to languish in the back of my stash, I wondered, as I signed that credit card slip. It was so much not my color.

Fast forward.

My friend of twenty years, Marguerite, let it be known at church last Sunday that she’d been diagnosed three weeks before with breast cancer.

But. But. She’s too young! She… Her kids…

I wondered whether I should knit an afghan for her teenage children and husband to wrap themselves up in when things got just too hard, or whether I should knit her a shawl, or maybe eventually both. Knowing what I know and what my own family has gone through, I truly felt for them. I had to knit–something!

I walked over to the bag of yarns I’d bought at Stitches and thought at it, If I’m supposed to knit her a shawl, tell me which of you it’s supposed to be out of. Just, please, tell me, and I sent up a prayer to that effect. I opened the bag, poked around–

–and that red cashmere leaped into my hands the instant I saw it. I held it in front of me, going, Of course! Nothing else could possibly do–this was it! This was why! YES! I did a mental count: it had been three weeks since I’d bought that cashmere. And she was exactly the person I was thinking of as I did so. The only person. Even though I know plenty of other people with her coloring, certainly. But she was the one that I’d argued with myself over. It all made perfect sense now. And that red! For someone of Chinese ancestry! It was perfect, and Karen had been right, if I hadn’t bought that I would have been sorely disappointed now.

Marguerite and her husband used to live in Ann Arbor. I started with my Nina’s Ann Arbor shawl pattern, scaling it down in size to fit Marguerite better, and, because I only had so much yardage. As I wrote a few days ago here, I began, but then I frogged that first yoke. It wasn’t right this time. Not with this yarn. I replaced it with fern lace. Ferns are soft and airy looking, but they have the strength of ancient wisdom: there were ferns on this planet in the days of the dinosaurs. They seemed to convey longevity to me. Cheerful survival. And they are lovely to look at.

Marguerite and her mother are master gardeners, and her mother often shares her floral arrangements with the church. Bougainvillea, I thought, as I knit those red arbors. Or brilliant autumn leaves for Marguerite to enjoy, fall after fall. It was my speaking to her of autumns to come, my inner feeling, wrought in cashmere, that she would go into remission–for how long, I do not know, but she will go into remission. I feel that. I strongly do. And I knitted those feelings into life with this shawl.

Karen and Amy were thrilled to find out what an essential part they’d played. They live 3000 miles away and have never met Marguerite, but now how she does is important to them, and their prayers are added in with mine, befriending her from afar, whoever she may be, no more strangers but fellow travellers in this life. They had intervened for her sake without even knowing it, and now they do because they know it.

……

I wrote this last night. I held off posting it; I wanted Marguerite to have her shawl first, and I wanted her permission.

We compared notes today: it was October 9th that she was given her diagnosis. It was October 12th that Karen and Amy talked me into buying that cashmere. Marguerite said, “I hadn’t told anybody yet. Not anybody.” And yet there I was, thinking about her, thinking about how good that color would look on her and letting myself be talked into buying that yarn.

And after I knew, nothing else could possibly do.

“Lost in thought.

Send search party.”

My old friend Lynda at http://lilypadknits.com/ has some darling patterns, from felted baby booties and hobo bags to a “Big Top” multicolor hat that makes me think of the day when…

We were in Washington, DC ten years ago, visiting my folks and my husband’s and showing the kids the sights we’d grown up with. Our kids were 9, 11, 13, and 15. It was July, but it was rainy and chilly most of the time we were there. Good. Show those kids what a real storm is supposed to be like, a good Eastern thundershower.

So. We were standing in line to do the tour of the US Mint, and it started to drizzle on us. Where we live in northern California, it rains from October to March or so and then stops till the next October. We hadn’t packed raingear. We simply hadn’t thought of it. Dumb, I know; my husband and I were just plain out of practice.

There was a street vendor right there hawking his wares to the captive crowd: he had the ubiquitous DC tourist t-shirts, and–umbrella hats!

Picture a half a vivid beach ball, connected to a cheap, rickety umbrella apparatus with an elastic band at the bottom. (I’d photograph it for you, but it has come up missing in my searches for it the last few Halloweens.) Open it up, put on that headband, and you are ready to be the talk of the town or audition for a Frank Baum book.

And they were two bucks.

And I wear hearing aids that I can’t let get wet.

“MOM! TELL me you’re NOT going to buy THAT!” Even my husband didn’t want to be seen with me if I had that on my head. Heh. It was mine. It was later that I found the delightful Elizabeth Zimmerman quote that people will put anything on their heads, and hey, why not? Besides, it was useful. Think of it not as spending two bucks, dears: think of it as saving several thousand in necessary electronics. Besides, it’s my job as a parent to mortify my teenagers and teach them not to sweat stuff that doesn’t matter, but to have a sense of humor about it.

My friend Lynda has that Big Top hat pattern, and yesterday I bought it. Her colors were subdued and lovely, but I pictured it in vivid red and blue and yellow, with a circus animal or two added on, maybe a fingerpuppet ready to be taken off and handed to a small child bored in a line somewhere. There was no way I was going past that pattern without buying it. You, too? Go have fun.

(p.s. Lynda’s husband just got laid off. Humor me. Go help her out a bit here, if you would.  Thanks.)

When life gives you neps, make slippers.

I once bought a Rambouillet fleece from a New Mexican rancher who bred her animals for the fineness of their fleeces, trying to create the softest of the softest; she sold them by micron count. Oooh. Nice.

But I made the mistake of shipping it off to a mill that did not, at the time, have the equipment to deal with so fine a fiber, which I did not know, and they cleaned it and combed it into roving that was full of neps. My fleece! Working at my wheel with it was like spinning rubber bands with chicken pox. It wanted to sproing back into its pre-stretched state, with those little nubbly bits peppered here and there.

My daughter had a high school biology teacher at the time who so inspired her that she wanted to go into the field, and is now working on a microbiology PhD herself. At the end of that school year, I took that fleece, spun a bit of it up the best I could, gave up hope of knitting socks out of it (see, I did knit socks, once upon a time) and instead gave in to the thickness it wanted to be spun up at and knitted that teacher a pair of cozy slippers.

I told her, as she opened the package, that I wanted to thank her for inspiring my daughter to want to walk in her shoes.

Sockweight or not, you certainly couldn’t ask for anything softer, and I wanted them to be handspun: biologists live with a love of the workings of the life of this planet, and I wanted something as close as possible to the animal that got the haircut. I actually had a picture of that individual sheep, too, courtesy of the rancher, with the lovingly poetic name of #1235, or some such number. (Ah, well.)

The teacher was thrilled, which thrilled me. I did not know that day that she was going back to Stanford after that school year at the high school ended, so I’m glad I didn’t put it off till my next kid got to that grade level.

Meantime, someone on the Knitlist casually mentioned awhile back that wool roving is great for stuffing around your feet inside your shoes when you’re doing long hikes; it keeps blisters from forming. Hey! The local Boy Scouts were about to do their annual 50-mile hike! So some of the fleece went to that good cause.

Still. That sheep produced a fair-size ball of wool. I have this really soft, really long white rubber band, and occasionally it asks me what I’m going to do with it. For now, I’m ignoring it–again–and going back to that red shawl.

It didn’t matter how much I wanted that to be right. It wasn’t. And if I’m going to spring for pure cashmere, and if I’m going to knit it for that friend, I am going to do it right. End of subject.

That and the fact that I was having a hard time making myself go back to it and keep knitting it–that was message enough to myself that I would never be satisfied with it the way it was. Stop. Out!

So Monday’s work got thrown out and it felt awful but awfully wonderful and freeing to be done with the dilemma and doing it right. A knit/purl combination at the yoke in pure cashmere just didn’t do it for me: I wanted her husband to be able to stroke her shoulders without the speed bumps of the purls. The lacy stockinette side of the reknitted yoke just plain feels better for running your hands across. It matches the yarn better.

The full story later–I have to finish this first.

I rinsed this in tepid water and laid it out flat, and I could have left it at that, but I wanted crisper points at the edges to match the name of the colorway. I don’t have any rustproof pins, but I pulled out my blocking wires and used one per three points. This being my second shawl out of Blue Moon’s Geisha yarn, I’d learned that it has a mind and sproing of its own, and I carefully smoothed down the stitches at the increase row between the yoke and the main body, knowing they had the energy of toddlers bouncing around after snacktime. Shhh, children, lay down now, time to relax. And so they did.

To answer Tammy’s question, yes, I knitted this in eight days, mostly during the evenings. Actually, I was thinking it should have been finished in four or five days, max, so your comment made me laugh and put the timing in perspective–thank you for that. I used size nine (5.5 mm) needles, and it worked up very quickly.

One of my goals in using the fingering weight yarns that I mostly used in my “Wrapped in Comfort” book was to make laceknitting accessible to people who don’t have a lot of time, but who still want to make something unusual and beautiful. This Geisha is somewhat in between laceweight and fingering weight.

Blue Moon Fiber Arts’ handdyed Geisha kid mohair/silk/ nylon yarn, Backstabber colorway. Ready for blocking.  Kinda looks like a psychedelic octopus sketch from the ’60s.