I know I said I pictured this with a mom with her baby in a highchair. What I didn’t say, since it hadn’t arrived yet and I didn’t want to spill the beanz, is, it’s actually for the grandmother, to represent a beautiful woman who works wonders with dyes and yarns–to look like how I imagine the backsplash around her stove would look like, in her dye-raj, as she calls her workplace. She and her husband just moved to a new home near their small grandson, up in the Sierra mountains. How could I have knit any pattern for her out of her yarn other than this one? Bigfoot. How perfect is that?

A shawl in a merino spun tight to have the resilience and bounce she needs as she copes with having done the right thing, having taken her aging mother into her home, on top of all the other changes that come with uprooting and moving her own household.

Lisa Souza, just so you know, your fan club is looking out for you. Have a great trip to the show in Santa Monica.

(P.S.  I should add, the Jellybeanz yarn was a gift from Lisa in the first place, and there was no possible better place it could have ended up.   Go Lisa!)

Come if you’re healthy… I’d love to sit and knit a spell with you.  Booksigning this Saturday, 3-4:30, Nine Rubies at 28 E 3rd Ave # 100 San Mateo, CA 94401  (650) 685-6205.

When most of your yarns are fingering or laceweight, and you want to work with something with more heft to it, combining yarns creates a chance to combine and play with color a bit. I find that the finished effect tends to be somewhat flatter than had it been knitted up in a single strand–and yet, the laceweights have more twists per inch in the spinning than a comparable worsted strand, so it seems to me to be less likely to pill in the finished project.

Yarns: Schaeffer Yarn’s handpainted “Anne,” Elann’s “Baby Silk” in Sapphire, and random stash 90/10 silk/cashmere that I dyed royal blue ages ago.

This is the first year we’ve had a good crop of apples on our Fuji tree I planted awhile ago: I crumbled egg shell bits around the base of the trunk in the spring, and the snails couldn’t climb it at night to eat the blossoms. The next thing to watch out for is the squirrels, who like to arrive just before the apples are ripe and pick one, eat one bite, throw it down, and try out the next one till they’ve gone through and stripped the whole tree, looking for that one perfect Fuji. Everybody’s a gourmet in northern California. They get the hormonal twitch to eat big, thinking winter’s coming, in a climate that doesn’t get cold enough for them to ever hibernate, and in the feasting process some of them grow to the size of small cats. It can be amusing to watch the telephone lines sway under their weight.

There’s a metaphor here to Stephanie’s worries about a “wool blight,” and how one must gather up all the wool yarn one can jam into one’s closets, under one’s bed, and down the arms of whatever jackets the kids have grown out of/haven’t grown into yet for storing it. I plead guilty, at least to the closets part.  But then, that means I had just the right shade of green for Erin to choose from when I offered her her choice out of four or five giant balls of the green baby alpaca I had, to get her started knitting; I like to call it my yarn library in there.

Lisa Souza’s new yarn, Hardtwist Petite in superwash merino wool, two balls, my Bigfoot pattern. It’s sproingy, a yarn with good tensile strength, and practical for a new mom who doesn’t have time to worry about the fragility of laceweight.  The little overall splashes of color–well, once she starts feeding her baby in a highchair, she’ll understand why that belongs in her shawl.

The Monterey Bay Aquarium has a new exhibit, and I’d like someone to explain to me why the young African River Otter, after zooming past an obstacle in the water, stopped and head-butted the sandy floor. I think it was one of the male twins they said had been born in the past year. Meantime, a larger one on land above him stood on its hind legs, eyed the crowd with his white whiskers making him look like an aging champion, and pumped his paws high in the air, Rocky Balboa style, twice. We were totally charmed.

And watching them cavort, it hit me: water ferrets. My brother once mentioned to me that he hadn’t been emailing much lately because his new pet ferret was entranced at his typing, and would scramble onto his shoulder every time and take a flying leap onto the keyboard.

I could just see these doing that, just pleading with you, type me a river. Water ferrets.

My daughter’s friend from college came out to visit us, spend a few days sightseeing, and then they’re driving back to school together.   We were all sitting around talking last night, when I picked up my shawl project and started knitting away, eyes barely glancing at my project.  After awhile, she said, “You know, I should be doing something too.”  She knew how to crochet; and now, with some baby alpaca to help keep up the enthusiasm, she knows how to knit!

Judy, I found this: http://carderock.net/carderock.html which has one very badly-worded sentence about 2/3 of the way down on the first page about the naming of Cabin John, although, the history on that page is fascinating: for instance, the first settler who stayed and farmed in the area was the great-grandson of a man who arrived in Virginia Colony as a Scottish prisoner of war of the Cromwell government. I did not know that any of the colonists were POWs.

The site does explain something I never knew about the rock quarries on River Road: they were used for building the canal! Makes perfect sense, but I never knew that nor that they were so old. When I was a kid, we were strictly forbidden to get near them; those steep rock faces dove straight down.

I believe the stone entryway of the house I grew up in came from there… (Dad?)

Here’s another, from cabinjohn.org, giving the various theories–the folklore about a hermit was the story I grew up with–saying that Captain John Smith was the first to explore that part of the Potomac, and that Cabin is probably a corruption of Captain. It says, “The following is a description of the Cabin John area as recorded by Captain Smith in 1608: ‘The river … maketh his passage downe a low pleasant valley overshadowed in manie places with high rocky mountain from whence distill innumerable sweet and pleasant springs … Having gone so high as we could with the bote, we met divers savages in canowes well loaden with flesh of beares, deere, and other beasts whereof we had part. Here we found mighty rocks growing in some places above the ground as high as the shrubby tree .’ ”

I went looking for the CD of photos my friend Karen (of water turtle fame) took, to add to this post, but haven’t found it yet. I now know one place I want to point my camera when I go home to Maryland for Stitches East: I want a shot of that quarry. And the tiny stone house, the old innkeeper’s lodge at Seven Locks Road, that is the oldest building in Maryland, next to that quarry.

I can’t wait to go home. I’m so glad I have Stitches East in nearby Baltimore as an excuse.

I was talking to Tina Newton of Blue Moon Fiber Arts on the phone the other day. (How’s that for name-dropping and borrowing some coolness factor. Go Tina!) I was just curious… Among other things, I had bought a skein of Rock Creek-colorway bamboo yarn to play with and make a scarf; that wouldn’t be named after…? Would it?

She laughed, and said, “There must be a Rock Creek in every state. But, yes.”

I grew up next to Cabin John Regional Park. My husband, in the next town over, grew up two blocks from Rock Creek Park, which runs a very long way through DC and along the DC/Maryland line. Tina had named this colorway after that creek. Turns out, she grew up two miles down the road from where I did.

It’s a delightfully small world out there.

If a tree falls on a house, and nobody hears it, is the roof still damaged?  (Actually, I don’t think so.  I hope not.)

Two in-progress top-down circular shawls I’m doing. On the left: Lisa Souza’s Jellybeanz colorway in baby alpaca, which I’m knitting for me to match the socks Jasmin gifted me with, and on the right, the same dyelot done in Hardtwist Petite superwash merino sock yarn. The colors are brighter and the splashes more pronounced in the HP, and with this particular merino, the background is a tad yellower than the baby alpaca. I had not thought of the alpaca one as being pinkish till I put the two together.

The Hardtwist Petite is sproingy, bouncy, resilient, soft, and with the superwash aspect, it’s practical for where it’s going. It can get sneezed on, tripped over, you name it, and the recipient won’t have to worry about its being too delicate to touch. Plus, it’s just plain pretty, and would go with a whole lot of clothes.

I think I need to go buy some speckled jelly beans to put in a jar to send with it when I’m done.

When Nancy showed me these two colors she was thinking of putting together, I wasn’t quite entirely sure. Jaggerspun Zephyr in this slightly mustardy orange and this brighter, deeper-orange Gentle supersoft superthin merino laceweight from The Yarn Place. But knitted up! We blocked it at my house yesterday, and she picked it and me up to take to Purlescence for knitting night tonight. I wish I’d gotten a shot of it on her, because the Zephyr just glowed golden within the orange, especially with its silk content and in the rays of the late sun. It was as if she were wearing those rays themselves. It was absolutely stunning on her.

Colors are like people: they can bring out the best in each other, sometimes in surprising ways.

“Do NOT call into a disaster zone. Email them.”

Yes, dear, I know. We live in California: it’s a given that you’re supposed to have one out-of-state person that everybody knows to call to hear the news. Things happen here. But Minnesota? Who makes plans like that in Minnesota?

My husband’s aunt’s house was a half mile from the epicenter of the ’89 Loma Prieta quake. His grandmother called and woke me up at 4 am, trying to get word on her daughter. I groaned to him, hours later, “Your grandmother got the time zone differences backwards!” I was later told she’d been dialing the phone all night. She kept saying to me, over and over, “I couldn’t get through! I couldn’t get through!”

I’d had nothing I could offer by way of comfort; we hadn’t heard either. Turns out that, although the house was trashed, her daughter and her family were okay. There were even funny stories: like the electric shaver, attached to its cord, that bounced across the bathroom, down the hall, down the stairs, into another bathroom, and the wall landed on the cord. Great. Now, just how do you lift it off it to get it out again? Um…

My husband got his ham license and his Disaster Services Red Cross certification after that. Next time the lines were down, he would be able to help get the word out.

New York. My brother was able to call the folks. My cousin, at work a half block from the Towers, got the word out the next day about seeing the planes hit and walking miles home. Leigh Witchell from the Knitlist and I spent two weeks trying to track down any word on Madlove Gina; turns out she’d just quit her job in the Towers and gotten a new one in Jersey. Hated it. Wanted to go back. When 911 happened, she did go back–as a volunteer, to help, knowing that people she loved were in there. Anything she could do.

There were New York shopkeepers who stayed put as the endless streams of people walked past them out of there, handing out water to strangers in need, over and over. Heroes. They didn’t decide it was too many people for them to be able to make a difference; they made a difference.

Email. Do not overload the local phone lines, let the people who need them most immediately, the ones who are right there, have them. Wait. I waited.

Dave was away on a business trip. Wanda was feeding the kids dinner. I don’t know if that trip had anything to do with it, but they did not cross that bridge a few exits down the highway to go to the Twins game. There is a guilty relief that the people I love are fine, but it doesn’t lessen my compassion for the ones who can’t say that. My heart goes out to Minnesotans.

I got a package in the mail the other day that was a complete surprise: from Martingale? What?… Opening it up, I found this: a copy of my book, signed by everybody there. From the CEO on down to the shipping clerk.  With a cover note mentioning how Martingale felt every person there was important to their success, and congratulating me on such a fine book.

I cannot tell you how much I lucked out when I decided to send my book proposal to them. (That’s the photographer’s signature alone on the next page; I like how it goes with the expression on the model’s face: “Here’s looking at you, kid.”

In real life, the baby alpaca background is closer to a natural than a bleached-white effect, but this is the start of playing with Lisa Souza’s Jellybeanz in the laceweight.

I went to Amy Singer’s booksigning at Purlescence on Saturday, and my friend Jasmin, the one who gave me the Jellybeanz socks, showed up; I showed her this, from yarn Lisa made me to match the socks, and she was delighted. Amy, meantime, was wonderful, like I knew she would be, and I’m very glad of the chance to get to meet her. I introduced Jasmin to her as the one who had driven all the way to Petaluma so I could get to see Stephanie. Since Amy had had no idea who I might be when I’d come in, we all laughed about all of us being on a one-name basis now, right?

And if you want a good book re working with animal fiber-free yarns, “No Sheep For You” is definitely the way to go.

I went to the computer this morning and found myself growling, “The Internet connection is down *again*?”

My husband’s first job out of grad school was with Digital Equipment Corp in New Hampshire. Merrimack was a boom town; when we wanted to buy a house, we had to pick a lot and wait for it to be built. One benefit of that is that everybody else in the neighborhood was as new as we were and curious about meeting everybody else.

One couple, a few doors down and across the street, had, it turned out, been friends with my sister Carolyn and her husband in Indiana when they were in grad school together in married student housing. Small world. The kids directly across the street, when they got locked out of their house, came over to mine and knew they’d be welcome. I used to walk several brisk miles every morning, waving hi at people on their way to work before I headed back in to take care of my little ones. We all knew each other, at least by face.

But after a few years, people became more settled into their own routines, and that initial openness kind of faded. Until the day: a construction crew with a backhoe accidentally sliced through the major phone cable servicing half the town. Thousands of wires gone. This was going to take awhile. We were all cut off from the outside world for a week unless we got in our cars and drove away.

And you know? The weather was beautiful. People started strolling around the neighborhood, taking in the day. Chatting with their neighbors. Actual face time and in person; it was delightful. A bit scary, on one level, knowing you couldn’t call for help if something happened, but for everyday life, it was wonderful.

And then after a week, the phone service finally came back, people disappeared back into their houses, and that was that. The difference was startling. One couldn’t help but wish for just a little service outage from time to time, just a little.