Picture a jack-in-the-box: the closer you get to the end of the tune as you crank the handle round and round, the more intense the pressure building up inside, until at last the box bursts open and the clown jumps out at you.

It was like that.

I was at a party, making small talk with some fellow I’d just met; he casually asked where I lived. I named the town. “Oh!” he brightened. “Where?”

The south end of town, near Cubberley.

“Oh.” (A little more intensely.) “Where?”

I hesitated, described a little, he pressed, while I was beginning to squirm inwardly, but I named my street. That got me an intense “WHERE on …!”

I wondered what my better judgment should be saying in such a situation; in those moments, nobody else was immediately close enough to be paying any attention to any of this. Hmm. Oh, what the heck, and I told him our house number.

The jack-in-the-box exploded out into the open: “I GREW UP IN THAT HOUSE!!!”

Pleased to meetcha. Turns out his folks had sold it to the ones who had sold it to us. He’d lived in it till he’d been about eight; they’d been the original owners.

Small world. Too funny. He semi-growled something about how his sisters and he had driven past the old place just to see it, and someone had really changed the front; I grinned with a half-apology and said, yeah, we did. Sorry about that!

Fast forward a couple of years. My folks put their house on the market and moved out of their home of 45 years in Bethesda, Maryland last September.

Stitches East is coming up in October, and I as a newly-minted author am thinking about attending, if anyone should happen to want me to scribble in anyone’s book or two. I’d take any excuse to go home anyway; still got my in-laws there and many a friend to go see.

Could you just see it? Could you just see someone coming up and going, I saw a picture of my new house on your blog!…

The buyer apologized to the folks that she was planning on doing some remodelling. C’mon, those cabinets were 45 years old, they needed to be ripped out! Don’t worry about it. There’s a gap in the front steps where the ground settled and the concrete split apart. I expect that’ll be fixed up too.

Meantime, I’ve been thinking of writing a letter to her, telling her of how my husband and I have a shared earliest-memory of the day my folks moved into that house when I was three and he was four; his folks were pitching in for the day, helping with our move from a tiny warbox house in Silver Spring. Of how her kids should look around under the mayapples in the spring to see the box turtles, and to look out for the foxes and the pileated woodpeckers. It’s a gloriously beautiful neighborhood, with next-door neighbors whose boys used to sneak over to my folks’ and shovel their driveway for them when they weren’t looking.

They’re going to like it there. I think I’ll knit her a bit of lace as a housewarming present.

I was talking to my folks yesterday; Dad had found my old high school graduation program and they’d been reminiscing over it. Dad went from there to saying, “You remember the Colberts across the street?”

Like I could forget? The family with all those kids, including boys my brothers’ ages and one my age? The ones with the big trampoline? And the house fire? Stevie was my little brother’s best friend. They moved away I think before Stevie made it to kindergarten, and then, word came back to their old neighborhood when I was in 10th grade–I have vivid memories of sitting in Mr. Battori’s English class at Churchill High School, wondering about the use of studying this stupid Silas Marner book when Peter and Paul and their dad had just died in a plane crash.

What Dad said next made me go google to check it out, and there’s a Wikipedia entry that says it all: the Wash. DC birth, the plane crash, the big Catholic family, the change in the pronunciation of the last name.

I guess Stephen Colbert isn’t little Stevie anymore. Good for him for what he has become (and wow!) I’m just hoping, by writing this out, that his family might perhaps come to know that their old neighbors always cared about how life played out for them after all that.

About five years ago, I ran into someone I barely knew, a former fellow knitter. She said she was a quilter now, and offered to give me her yarn stash! No. I knew what gorgeous work she’d done in the past. Surely you’ll get back to it someday.

No. Don’t want it. You take it. I’m getting rid of it. I’d rather have the closet space.

I finally thought, well, better me than Goodwill, okay, sure! So, soon after, Pamela came over to my house with all these fabric bags stuffed with yarn, nice yarn, good wools and the like. It was an incredible amount, and she refused any kind of payment; she was just glad to see it go to a good home. Wow.

There were twenty balls of a donegal tweed in brown (does that sound familiar yet?), and I ended up knitting them, along with a strand of a darker camelhair/lambswool blend, into a thick warm blanket. My plan was to give it back to her as a thank you for all the yarn. I didn’t know how to reach her other than her phone number she’d given me when we’d run into each other in a store.

I called. I left messages three times, eventually telling her answering machine that I had something I wanted to give her as a thank you. Eventually, I thought, well, I don’t want to stalk you, honey, I guess you’re not interested. And so I quietly kept the afghan. It sat to the side, unused and uncertain.

Last year I almost donated it to Afghans for Afghans, but, for no earthly reason I could tell you, I just didn’t feel like it.

Meantime, Sandi, my friend who gave me that red scooter down a few posts ago, opened a new yarn store last year, and started having knitting group nights every Thursday. I’ve wanted to go, but, not driving, I’ve just never made it there yet. I get to my old group, somehow, just fine. But I haven’t gotten to that one, even though it’s closer.

As I’ve mentioned earlier, I decided this year to finally give that brown blanket to Afghans for Afghans at Stitches–it felt like the right time, at last–I emailed Ann Rubin to ask her if they could handle a larger item at this time, and that whole story happened.

It was long past when I should have been allowed to make such a change to the text of my book, but I asked my editor afterwards if, now that the Barn Swallows scarf had declared whom it had been for all along, if we could mention Ann and her organization in my book before it flew off to the printer. She checked, and–I absolutely love Martingale Press–said sure. So just barely in time, that happened, and that wonderful A4A organization will get the publicity it so much deserves: a place where individual knitters can create connections to other people, create a bit of world peace, one person at a time. And my profound thanks to whoever at Martingale decided I needed my projects suddenly back, so that I had Ann’s scarf in hand in time for Stitches to give to her. When I hadn’t even known I would need it, and neither did they.

Meantime. Stephanie Pearl-McPhee has been doing some home repairs, and someone posted a comment on her blog. I read it, and immediately shot off a note to the woman: I had no idea who she was or where she lived in the world, but I simply said, I live in an Eichler home in California, meaning one where, like your house, the water lines were originally run under a concrete slab. We, like you, developed a leak under there. We knew that; what we didn’t know, was that by not immediately repairing it, the vibrations it set off ended up breaking the pipes open in 17 places. In our case, we’d been sitting for 18 months on plans to remodel our house. All the sudden, we could no longer just sit there, we had to really do something, with the result being that that remodel did happen. Meantime, (I told her), if you don’t want to jackhammer your whole slab, get that fixed right away.

I got a note back yesterday from the woman. She exclaimed, “I think I KNOW you!”

It was Pamela! All this time later, she’d come back to her needles after all. There was a knitting group meeting at Sandi’s shop, and she’d been going to it, in case I was interested in meeting up there.

If I had gone to Purlescence’s knitting nights all those times before, all those times it never quite happened, I would have seen Pamela, I would have given her her afghan and been glad of it, and that would have been the end of it. Ann Rubin would never have been able to ship it off to Afghanistan, Ann never would have gotten her scarf, and associating it with her and mentioning her in my book would never have occurred to me.

Pamela checked out my blog, saw the photo, says she missed out on a good thing, but was thrilled that that blanket is off to where it’s off to–“How cool is that!” was her reaction. Go Pamela!

And now I can finally, at last, get her yarn-holding bags back to her!

I cast on a new project fairly late last night, in order to have a good carry-around project to work on today. This morning I threw a second 229-yard ball of Kidsilk (aka Cracksilk) Haze in my bag; you never know. Debated throwing in a third, and decided that would be just too pessimistic. But it was a good thing I had that second one, definitely.

John told the nurses wryly that I was going to blog his hand. It is indeed a most impressive shade of orangey-yellow, although it was his shoulder they were working on. That was the most coherent thing he’s said so far.

They assured us that anesthesiology has come a long way since the kid was 11. Still, it was another day of watching other people come in after us, get operated on, recover, leave, while we waited for ours to wake up at all. Anne’s comment was right on, and I am strongly resolved to have all the pertinent information on hand now for any next time for any of us.

He wasn’t supposed to happen.

I had major problems getting our third child here. We got her here safe and sound in the end, to everybody’s profound relief, but the doctor sure didn’t want me to risk that again. My blood pressure had been so low. This was years before my dysautonomia was diagnosed, and he thought it was specific to pregnancy–which it seemed to be, at the time–but, whatever, never again!

But we just strongly felt we were supposed to have one more child. We did what we do: we prayed hard about it. And then we went ahead and did what we felt was right for us personally, and we had our son John. Easiest pregnancy of all my pregnancies, piece of cake, and what we got for it! The nicest kid you could ever ask for. How many teenage boys drive their moms to yarn stores and cheerfully hang out with her friends?

I once upon a time stumbled across Robin and Russ (now defunct) selling baby alpaca at a dollar a ball on closeout; the undyed brown in fingering weight just hadn’t sold well. I bought enough to knit it triple-stranded into big, warm afghans for each one of my children. Some of it, I dyed.

Three years ago, I was knitting up the balls I’d dyed in crimson, and John across the room put down his book, came over, grabbed the bottom of that afghan, and started rubbing it against his cheek, enjoying (ed. note: I wrote “swooning at” and he read that and exclaimed, “MOMMMM!!!! Swooning? SWOONING?? On your BLOG!??” and retyped it as “enjoying”) the softness. That particular afghan instantly became his.

So today’s his birthday, the day he’s officially old enough to have his papers in to go be a Mormon missionary for two years–first, though, he’s having shoulder surgery tomorrow and will need a bit of downtime afterwards. But meantime, today is a day for me to reflect again at my great good fortune that he made it into this world, and how much he blesses our lives every day. He’s a good one. I’ve already knitted that afghan, so I don’t know how to say it any more powerfully than this, but–John. I love you.

And I admire you, too.

One day last year, a new couple had just moved into town, and I held the door open for the dad as he pushed the stroller in the front door at church. The wife asked me, “Excuse me, where’s the cloakroom?”

I laughed, and told her, “Californians don’t know a thing about cloakrooms!” And then it was oh, where are you from? Where are YOU from?

And then we both stood there, jaws on the ground. You’re Cameron’s sister! And Brent’s daughter!! –You’re the JEPPSONS’ daughter!!

We grew up going to the same ward (congregation) in Maryland. Her dad had interviewed me as part of my application to go to BYU, 31 years ago. I think my little sister used to babysit her.

P’s sister was here visiting on Sunday; she was not quite the baby anymore who was born while I was away at college, either. I sent her off with the navy scarf. She told me she had spent “about a year!” knitting a scarf, and couldn’t believe that it had only taken me about three hours to make this one. (Hey. It was a bulky brushed-alpaca yarn, and lace is airhole space as much as yarn; throw in size 7mm needles, and how much time can it take?) Three hours, huh? I could see the wheels turning; maybe knitting was doable with a little practice after all!

Still being subversive over here…

A few years ago at Stitches, towards the end of the day, a tired friend asked if she could hang her bag on the back of my electric wheelchair. Sure, no skin off my nose; go ahead!

If only there were a video. I was tootling along, and had no idea that between her bag and my chair, somehow the back snagged someone’s rollaboard luggage they were using that day for their purchases. I saw a few people’s surprised expressions, having no idea why, and then all the sudden my 250-lb chair was popping a wheelie! That woman had seen her bag suddenly going airborne, had grabbed for it hard, and I guess you don’t come between a knitter and her new yarn.

So here I was at Stitches again last week, and as I’ve mentioned, my chair was dead. I ran into my old friend Sandi. It was her first time being there as a vendor; she’s one of the co-owners of Purlescense in Sunnyvale. We talked wheelchairs a moment, and she said she’d inherited a scooter she didn’t need and hadn’t been able to find anyone that did need it. My electric chair was dead? Did I want this other one?

This is like asking, do you want some cashmere yarn to go with your stash?

We finally got down to San Jose to pick it up from her. Wow. Thank you, Sandi! I have to tell you, we need to replace a car, and one of the issues holding us back was that we didn’t want a big one anymore, and we couldn’t see buying one where we couldn’t haul that monster chair around. It seemed like we were stuck with my big minivan with the seats out. This scooter, Richard simply lifted it up into the car. It folds. It splits into pieces for transport if need be. He can fit it in the trunk of his ’01 hybrid Prius. We can replace my van with another Prius. The scooter isn’t as fast, it’s certainly not as turbocharged, it puts me very low to the ground–my husband, who is 6’8″ to my 5’5″ wryly commented that that was certainly not a new thing–but for me it does everything I really need. Wow. Thank you, Sandi!!

(Now, I just have to figure out how to put a finger puppet on this thing somewhere somehow.)

When my husband was considering a job offer in California, the offer letter solemnly promised, “No home delivery of snow.” Right there, in writing, with the added note saying, “and if you think you do see some, go back to bed for an hour. It’s just an illusion. It will be gone.”

We had 70″ of snow in two and a half weeks right before we moved out of New Hampshire 20 years ago, and they got hit with 15″ more the day after we left.

My friend Leanne lived around the corner from us in a cul-de-sac. Right after our development was built, the town of Merrimack banned builders from creating any more cul-de-sacs, for the very reason Leanne got stuck with: the snowplows would go through hers, pushing all the snow off the road from that big circle, piling it up and up and up and finally depositing it across the fronts of everybody’s yards and driveways.

I used to racewalk every morning for four to five miles before my small children woke up, time to exercise, time to myself, time to wave hi at the neighbors without distractions. So I got to see what it was like for Leanne.

Picture a Cape Cod saltbox, two stories high with a small front yard so the house was near to the road, that, standing in the street near the house, you could not see that house for the height of the snowbank in front of it.

Now, picture a mom with three kids under four years old, including a small baby. A husband stuck overseas on business on a work assignment that was only supposed to be for a few days, but that had ground on into several weeks. Now picture all that snow. What are you going to do? Do you take your babies outside in that weather for the amount of time it’s going to take to shovel that whole driveway and That Pile all by yourself? How do you have any energy for your children afterwards? Do you leave them inside, unattended, for all that time? Do you slip out when they’re napping, hoping they don’t wake up, that the baby doesn’t decide it’s hungry when you can’t hear it, yadda yadda. What do you do?

My own husband used to travel a lot, and issues like these helped contribute to our decision to take the job in California. Our last child, born here, was the first pregnancy where I didn’t have to push my Toyota out from being stuck in the snow–by myself!–in that condition.

The biggest blast of that three-week off-and-ongoing snowstorm happened on a Saturday night. Leanne, like me, is a Mormon. She had a home teacher from church who had young teenage sons–and Mike looked at that brewing storm and knew from his own family’s experiences when his kids had been younger that Leanne was going to need help.

So: without saying anything. He and the boys got up early enough Sunday morning to dig their own car out, and then they headed over to Leanne’s. The snowplow had gone through, and the heavy, densely-compacted pile across the bottom of her driveway–never mind tackling the rest of the driveway–towered very much above their heads. They took their snowshovels and had at it.

Which means that when Leanne woke up that morning, expecting yet more snowboundedness on the one day of the week she could otherwise have had some actual adult company, some relief to help keep her sanity, some support while her husband was stuck in Singapore and unable to help, she saw–

–a clear path out all ready to go. Be our guest. Happy Sunday. See you at church.

And that, ever since, has been the story I’ve wanted to live up to of what true service to another person can really be about.

Is it just this household, or is there something that makes men not notice things around them in a way women find just unfathomable? For instance. My husband bought one of those Costco-sized bags of avocadoes. My (said person shall remain nameless, let’s just say, a male member of this household) set a heavy toolkit on top of that bag. Only squished the one avocado, luckily enough.

That toolkit didn’t get moved for days. This is what I found underneath. You can’t really tell from the photo, but the bottom is as flattened-out as the top. It didn’t rot, it didn’t go bad, it just adjusted to the way things are now and went happily on as is. Doesn’t look the same anymore, but the insides were fine.

(Power failure for hours today, sorry about that.)

Jacqueline loved pink. I had this pink baby alpaca scarf all ready to go for her, hoping she would come home from her long hospitalization, but things weren’t looking too good. Many visits were made, and in the end, she thanked everybody, asked that we all do a good job of looking out for her husband, and then the first person I think I ever met who’d fled the Dust Bowl of the 1930’s let go of this life. We went to her funeral today.

I had never heard the story of her parents trying to sell off their belongings there in Oklahoma, setting off for California with their toddler the only way they could afford: they walked. And hitchhiked. And eventually got here, and did indeed find a job in Santa Barbara. They stayed.

The last time I’d gone to a funeral at our church, it was for Al, who’d been 96. Sitting there that day, there was a sudden severe jerk as the pew banged upwards underneath me, the left end jolting hard, immediately bolting to the right. I glanced up: the chandeliers were swinging hard, hard enough that I glanced at Mark sitting directly under one, trying to gauge whether, if it broke loose, I would have time to throw myself across the aisle and shove him out of the way in time as it fell. California earthquake building codes, please be enough! The poor speaker, terribly nervous from the moment he’d sat down before the services, seemed completely oblivious; maybe he thought it was just his knees giving way from stagefright. I managed not to suddenly giggle at the thought that the swinging chandeliers were Al waving happily goodbye to everybody.

Jacqueline didn’t go for the showmanship, I suppose one could say; the earth held still. But as her friends spoke, we were moved.

Just a quiet coming together of friends and family wishing her well along her way home.

I went to sign in with the receptionist at the doctor’s today, and a woman was sitting knitting. Bright pink, lacy, large… “A baby blanket?” I asked her. “Yes!” she exclaimed in delight. We talked knitting a moment, and I asked her if she’d been at Stitches the past weekend. Yes, and it was her first: talk about overload. She said that after they’d walked through all the aisles once, then it felt somehow manageable, and she could actually look at the yarns and things in the booths. But there was Just. So. Much. There.

How well I know that feeling.

And she was a fellow Lisa Souza enthusiast. How cool is that!

Then I signed in, her husband came out, she left, I sat down where she’d been, pulled out my red cashmere and silk, and another woman muttered, “Another knitter!”

If I had had a small finished project on hand, I might well have handed it to her on the spot to try to recruit her. We’re taking over the world, she might as well accept it happily.

I was in the lab waiting for a routine blood test this afternoon, and so were a lot of other people. They had a sign up: “Projected wait: 20 minutes.” I pulled out my knitting, a lace scarf I’d begun. People came, people went, lots of people. Knit on. The sign got changed: “30 minutes.” I knew I wasn’t a stat, so I’d be pretty much last in line. I didn’t *think* I would run out of yarn…

An elegant elderly woman in a wheelchair came in, being pushed by her granddaughter. They came over next to me, the granddaughter sat down, and we all struck up a conversation; it is amazing how welcoming yarn and needles seem to universally be. The grandmother said, almost as if it were an admission and a failure on her part, a shirking of her grandmotherly role, that she’d never learned; the granddaughter told me she’d made a stab at it herself, and that a lot of young women like her seemed to be learning these days.

I picked up my ball of blue baby alpaca/silk and had them each hold it a moment, as I said that there are so many really nice yarns out there these days, and they don’t have to cost a lot. They oohed and aahed over the sheen and the softness, stroking it a bit; I went on, saying, to fall in love with knitting, you really need a nice yarn. Not, say, a cheap acrylic.

The granddaughter nodded and said that cheap acrylic is indeed what she’d used, that one time when someone had been teaching her. But touching this, she could see how the knitting bug could really reach out and grab you.

You betcha. (Now. Why did you think I held it out to you, eh?)

This is a slightly breathless-sounding post, but if you’ve ever been, you understand the overload. Stitches West was wonderful and overwhelming and totally a Disneyland for knitters–over 200 vendors. I love it. I love running into people I only ever get to see there, some local, some from all over the world. That delightful fellow from Wagtail Yarns in New Zealand, with my hearing loss in that noisy place and his accent, we somehow need to put closed captions on him when he talks, but we laughed at ourselves and managed just fine. (His kid mohair in Dark Teal. The intense color!) I finally got to see Blue Moon Fiber Art’s yarns, and understand why they’re so popular. Gorgeous. (Backstabber: was that deep rose-red colorway named after that bank that yanked their credit card operations for their Socks That Rock Club, claiming selling sock yarns had to be a terrorist front, that no one knits socks? If it is, they made something beautiful out of that whole mess, I love this stuff.) I got to see, of course, Sheila Ernst and Lisa and Rod Souza, my favorites. (Mardi Gras, Saint Valentine, Berry Poppins, with Jellybeanz on order, and Lime and Violet glass needles to play with them on.) I got to go to Half Pint Farm’s booth and exclaim on behalf of my friend Cris (it’s a tradition), “Ellen: you ROCK!” She laughed and laughed; I hadn’t forgotten! (Emerald, silk/merino.) Karen at Royale Hare, who wanted to read my whole book on the spot (Cazadero Mist, Fitch Mountain Frost.) I got to see Melinda at Tess Designer Yarns, who’d been pretty stressed last year; I didn’t help at all at the time, given that I caught and tore an expensive yarn with my wheel, and she waved me away when I tried to pay for it: so as a thank you for her kindness, I took some of her hand dyed silk I had, knitted it up into a scarf, and surprised her in the mail with it not long after. This year, she seemed much more relaxed, enjoying people, really enjoying the show and how much people loved what she’d dyed. I patted myself on the head and chose to believe I’d played a small but good part. If nothing else, knitting for her had made it all the more important to me that she have a good time, and she was clearly having a good time. Yay!

I had people coming up and introducing themselves over and over, and thank you to each of you if you’re reading this, you totally made my day. At one point, I exclaimed, “SUE!” I hadn’t seen her since I’d gone to…well, let’s see, my younger daughter was in fourth grade at the time and is a college junior now. Been awhile. I got to see Robert, who wove my much-loved medicine blanket. Very, very cool.

Pictured above are two of my favorites, Pam Bell and Darrin Kaufman of Pacific Meadows Alpacas (garnet for a shawl, and red for a scarf). Darrin found me before I found them, and dropped everything to come over and chat awhile. They sell the baby alpaca yarn that I used in a lot of the shawls in my book–wonderful, soft stuff, and they are two of the nicest people you could ever hope to meet. So don’t mind me; I’m bragging on my friends for a minute here.

So, meantime, if anybody bought the silk/stainless steel blend yarn from Habu, tell me, what on earth do you DO with it?! Their website says it was originally developed for oil filters. It reminds me of the old joke that if you give an avid knitter steel wool, he or she might knit you a Volkswagon.

A little bit of each of these vendors, most of them people who are already good friends, will be there with me as I knit up their yarns. Good times ahead.

Before I say the rest of this, I want to publicly thank Shelly, who has emailed with me any number of times but whom I had never met. Today was her first-ever Stitches, she was only going for the one day, and she spent three hours of it pushing me around. Knitters are such nice people… Many, many thanks, Shelly.

When I was knitting my Barnswallows scarf for my book, I picked out a yarn that reminded me of the color of well-weathered wood, Jaggerspun Zephyr in Mushroom; it went with the story and it felt right. But as I knit it, I wondered whom it would eventually go to. It was pretty, but it wasn’t a color you’d be seeing me wearing any too often.

Ann Rubin is the person behind Afghans For Afghans, as I noted on my Weapons of Mass Construction entry, and for the last several years she has run a booth cum collecting point at Stitches for people wanting to donate handmade warm woolen things for the people of Afghanistan. To wage peace and goodwill. I’ve stopped before and chatted a bit, but never felt virtuous enough to make the effort to knit a whole blanket.

Well, Ann recently put out a call asking for hats, mittens, small things; someone was flying over there, but luggage space would be a problem. The one time I finally have an afghan I want to offer, a donegal tweed wool knitted with a camelhair/lambswool, big and warm and practical. So I emailed Ann; could she still use this? Sure, she said; there will be another shipment going not too far off, bring it, and thanks.

I went to the KnitU meetup last night, held after the opening-day stuff was otherwise over. I didn’t expect Ann to recognize me; other than the fact that I’ve been in a wheelchair at Stitches past, there was nothing ever to make me particularly stand out when we’ve met before. She and I were sitting across the large room from each other at this meeting, and she was dead tired, could hardly keep her eyes open–but they had us go around the room and say our names; she registered mine when I said it, her face lit up, and she smiled a silent hello.

Getting ready for bed last night, it suddenly hit me in total clarity: if I knitted something for Ann, anything warm she would feel morally obligated to share with those in far greater need of that warmth. She is someone who cannot sit still when there are humans in need. But the story of that Barnswallows scarf was about creating a place of peace in a background of ongoing war–and it is a wispy little thing, a bit of Jaggerspun Zephyr, a symbol and an airy lightness.

There is nobody else it could possibly have been for.

(Ann hesitated to accept it; she didn’t want to leave the other volunteers out, and she didn’t want the focus to be on her. I told her it would be wonderful publicity for the Afghans For Afghans project, and with that she relented. And she absolutely loved her scarf.)

The doorbell rang this afternoon. It was the tall UPS guy, with two boxes: a smaller one full of yarn I’d hand dyed–that picture will be on page 10–and the second one full of the projects in the book. Plus a few that didn’t fit in, including the green one Amazon currently shows as being on the cover. That cover got ditched when I pointed out that the pattern wasn’t in the book. Oh, oops.

So here, with a Kaffe Fassett coffee-table-style knitting book at the back for scale, is all the knitting projects of the last two years that I haven’t given away. Most of them, however, I’ve given away.

Why, yes, I do buy more yarn when I go to Stitches. Fancy that. (…My husband and the wheelchair repairman set my top speed at 8 mph. I could wipe out a whole aisle if I forget to turn the thing off while writing out a check. But it also means that baby alpaca/silk at Lisa Souza’s is going to be mine, because I can get there faster than anyone else.)

See you there!

(Edited to add: dead chair battery again. What, does it not like freezing garages? This is going to be interesting…)