Remember when I said that I’d lost a project?  It happened right around when Tupp died and the book was due and I was riding my bike really far and … let’s be clear, my life was sort of scrambled.  Grief and organization are not compatible for me, apparently. I lost a really cute pair of socks in progress and they were going really well too.

(Duet Dee-kay)

They were lost during such a crazy time that when I couldn’t find them, I just decided that the situation had gotten the best of me, and I gave up. Gone. They were gone, and I was a loving and accepting person who was totally the heck over stuff like that, and after I threw the tiniest little fit,  I resigned myself to the loss of the sock, and to the reality that I was now a person who had lost a project.  It had never happened before, and I think I took it pretty gracefully.

Fast forward to this morning when I’m up at 5:30am getting ready to head to Webs for a little fun (I hope to see some of you there, it’s a neat new idea) and then find myself realizing I’m a little short of knitting (I always think that. How can you think that on the way to a REALLY BIG YARN STORE?)  I panicked, grabbed a ball of sock yarn, and then turned to the shelves in my office and grabbed an empty project bag, except guess what?

You guessed right. 
I am still not the sort of person who loses a project.  I may be, however, someone who doesn’t know where they are for a while, which is totally different.

(PS. Picture totally taken in the airport in Philadelphia. Almost to WEBS!) 

Friday morning I did my level best to convince myself it didn’t matter if the blanket yarn arrived or not.  Friday afternoon I was having a harder time, and when the post didn’t arrive and I had to reconcile myself to the situation, I was pretty upset.  I know that the idea of a baby getting their blanket a few days late seems like a no brainer to a lot of you, but it didn’t seem to me like it was going to be a few days.  The soonest the yarn could arrive was today, and I’m leaving tomorrow (Rhinebeck Ho!) and there wouldn’t be time to both knit it and block it before I left and that would mean that for the new plan to work, the baby had to be ten days late. I was upset, but I was trying to be okay with it. I’m adult that way.

All that exploded when I heard that Robyn’s labour had started.  Any peace I had found with it, any acceptance that I felt in my heart evaporated in an instant.  I snapped. I decided that somewhere close to me there had to be one ball of that yarn, and I started looking.  I tweeted. You guys retweeted. I blogged, I went on Ravelry, I followed up leads and stuck with it until finally I got a tweet near midnight from a knitter named Martha who had a skein of the yarn I needed –

@MJPomilio 11 Oct
@YarnHarlot I can get a skein to you at the Toronto/Buffalo border crossing in 4 hours. Dead serious!

and suddenly Operation Swift Blanket was underway.  "Joe" I said, "We’re going to Buffalo." We all had a sleep, and bright and early the next morning, we were on the road.  Joe and I drove like thunder, thinking the whole time that we couldn’t believe that someone was willing to do this for us. (Let us pause for a minute and also notice that Joe was willing to do this. When I thanked him, he just said "It’s for my niece or nephew too.") All the way to Fort Erie, we talked about how amazing Martha was, and how it was going to be her that made it possible for the new baby to have a blanket on their birthday.  (It was rather clear by now that Saturday would be the baby’s birthday.)  Knitters, meet Martha.

Hours after "meeting" on Twitter, we were in one of the world’s dodgiest Chinese restaurants, buying Martha lunch, throwing presents at her, and none of it was enough.  See, by the time we got to the border, we knew something wonderful.   Our niece had arrived.

The race was on to have a blanket finished by the time we were able to meet her.  Lucky for me, Martha is so smart and kind that she wound the yarn before she brought it, and I was able to join it in the restaurant, and knit all the way home. 

Funny thing about that yarn, just a crazy thing.  Martha had just ordered it.  It had arrived at her house the day before, and she had only ordered one skein – and she couldn’t explain why.  She had no plan for it, it wasn’t enough to do anything with… it had just found her way into her cart on Monday, and shipped to her house just in time for her to see my tweet. More than that? Martha doesn’t do twitter much.  She’s got no explanation for what possessed her to order a skein of white yarn she didn’t need, and then hop onto twitter.

Me? I’ve got a pretty good idea that it was her knitter instincts taking over. Somewhere, somehow, the need for the yarn was so big and so mighty, that Martha heard the call, and responded the way that only a knitter can.  It was a yarn miracle.

I wasn’t able to finish the blanket on the drive home (turns out I might have underestimated the amount of work left by a few hours) but I kept knitting when I got here, and by 8pm it was blocking on our bed upstairs.

(Forgive the crappy picture. It was dark.)
By midnight it wasn’t yet dry, so Joe and I found other beds, and the next morning when it was finished, it was glorious.

Baby blanket, my own pattern, one of a kind. (9 skeins of Loopy Ewe solid series, in white.)  This blanket has pines, for the camping and out of doors Chris and Robyn love so much, and I’m sure they’ll share with their daughter.

Bee stitch, for what a busy little bee the baby was on the inside, rings – for the circle of family and love that surrounds this child-

and waves…

for both of her parents come from islands. 

How did it end up?  Blog, welcome Myrie…

or at least her tiny feetsies, that’s as much of our wee niece her parents are ready to share with you, and they get to choose.  She’s very new, and they’re keeping her lovely, perfect, healthy baby self close – for now.

(PS. Her middle name isn’t Martha, but I think it should be.)

The baby is on its way. I need one skein of yarn Loopy Ewe solids, 1 skein, in white.   NOW.
Internet, do your magic. 

I will pay overnight shipping, invent teleportation for inanimate objects, ANYTHING.

It’s Thanksgiving weekend here, and while I’m looking forward to days of family and food, there’s no Saturday mail service here, and Monday is an official holiday so that means that if the yarn doesn’t come today it can’t possibly come until Tuesday, and the thought of that makes me want to weep a little. I know it’s no failure that matters if the blanket isn’t done and the baby comes, but right now I’m thinking about this baby arriving any minute, and not having a blanket, some part of me is screaming  "YOU HAD ONE JOB" and I’m apologizing over and over.  This is, I know, because my heart is leading my brain around like I’m a well trained pony at a county fair. I just like things to be so right, not because I’m an obsessive freak (okay, fine… I might be that too) but because effort and energy are how me make people feel loved, and I want this baby to feel loved, and I want his or her parents to feel loved and really, I’m me, so it’s REALLY HARD TO DO THAT WITHOUT YARN. 

I’m going to take a deep breath, and acknowledge that babies who are loved half to death are born with so much less than this baby will already have, and that in the grand scheme of things this blanket is totally irrelevant…
and then I’m going to go check the mailbox again because I can’t believe this is happening.

Needless to say I’ve been knitting like a wild thing while I pace frantically around the house. These socks are the latest fruit of that hysteria.  Started months ago, they’ve kicked around my purse for a while.

A round here, a round there… (pattern is my basic one from Knitting Rules)

Then yesterday whammo.  I was turning the heel on the second one when I picked them up yesterday, and before I went to bed there it was. A finished pair. (As an aside, have we ever talked about how hard it is to take pictures of your own feet?)

I went this morning to look up what the yarn was, and had a little laugh.  (I take pictures of the ball bands now so that I can’t forget.)  It’s Super Sweet Sock in "Knit City 2012" and that’s pretty funny, because in two weeks I’ll be at Knit City 2013.  Crazy, right? I didn’t even think of that while I was knitting them.  It’s going to be a fun thing, wearing these at that.  Sock yarn harmony, if ever there was some. 

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I think I’m going to go knit the baby a hat. Or a sweater.
Or maybe another blanket – one I have enough yarn for.
C’mon yarn.

Well. There you have it.  It turns out that my title of the meanest mum in the world might have been trumped by my own love of all things matching (and yes, Presbytera is right, like she always is, and I do sort of have a thing.)

Sam is now the proud owner of a delightfully matchy pair of fingerless mitts.

Pattern Sakura Fingerless Mitts. Yarn: Sakura Cotton.

…and I didn’t stop there. I’m not just a person who likes matchy stuff, I’m also a person who’s pretty decidedly cheap thrifty. The idea of having knit whole mitt for no damn reason just rankled too much, so when I was done knitting the third…

Yup.  One skein, two pairs.  Done like dinner, and now I’m a gift ahead on Christmas. That’s right, I said it.  (75 days knitters. Start thinking it over.) 

PS. No yarn, although it’s been transferred to Canada Post, which is a very good sign.  It might be as far away from here as it can be (Vancouver) but that’s only 4 hours away by plane… right? There’s no baby either, although I’m walking a fine line, so far, so good.

PPS. The cool sippy cup top to Sam’s jar is a Cuppow. (Props to Soulemama for the hook-up. I’m not a "drinking out of jars" type myself.)

PPPPS. Because someone will ask, Sam kept the pink pair.

So here’s the thing.  I am pretty good about making things for people when they ask me to, assuming that they do not fall into any of the following categories.

a) Strangers.
b) Practically strangers.
c) Individuals who have been inappropriate about my knitting in the past. (This determination is completely up to me, and changes like the wind, but if you’ve ever suggested to me that the things I make are the same as the things in the store, and enquired that I might be able to save my self a ton of time, then don’t be looking under the tree this Christmas for a little woolly love. You don’t get it.)
d) Are known knit offenders. (Crimes include felting more than one thing, losing too many hats, or never ever wearing anything I’ve given you.  Also suspicious, saying  everything is itchy when it’s not – even cotton or silk, because I  know you’re lying and you should just tell me you don’t like knitted stuff.
e) Are asking for something too horrible to contemplate knitting, even if you really, really love someone.  (Yes Erin. I’m talking about you. Buy a hammock.) 

Other than that, if a family member (who does not fall into categories c, d or e above) asks me for something, I’m probably going to make it. I’m especially vulnerable to requests from children, and from my daughters.   When the girls ask me for knitted stuff, I feel like they’re apologizing for all the times they thought I was a dorky knitter and asked me not to knit where their friends could see me.  This is a long way to saying that Sam asked me to make her some handwarmers. She’s taken to carrying a jar of tea or coffee to school, and the jar gets too hot. (I know, I know. USE A MUG. She can’t though, because she’s really cool, and being really cool limits your choices a lot.) I got the cutest little kit from Knit East, and Sam saw it and said they would be perfect and so voila.

The Pattern is for Sakura Fingerless Gloves (designed by Kate Atherley and free at that  first link) and it came with a skein of Sakura Cotton in 52801. (I love it when the colour names are sexy.)

Maybe because the girl in the picture is holding a mug – who knows but Sam saw this as solving her jar problem straightaway.

Totally cool… right?  You would be wrong.  Not that Sam want’s to be ungrateful (she definitely doesn’t want that) and she did stress that she’s going to wear them anyway, but didn’t I agree, she asked… that they were super not-matchy?

Longtime readers of the blog will recall that Sam has issues around matching. She thinks you can spot knitters by their mismatched stuff – and she’s largely right. (I’ve been guilty of that. My favourite hat, my nicest mittens, the scarf I just finished… they might match colour-wise, sort of, but they definitely aren’t a "set.") and Sam loves things that match, Enough that I wondered if she would have a problem with these mitts.  I told myself that she’s a smart girl, and had seen the pattern picture (where the mittens are clearly mismatched) and reminded her of this when sure enough, she was not thrilled that they didn’t match. 

"They’re really, really different." She exclaimed.

"You knew they would be!" I said, not at all shrilly. "The cute girl on the pattern has mismatched mitts and she’s still cute."

"Mum. Obviously she has the hat to pull them together."

Sam feels, I can tell, that I should do one of two things.  Knit her the hat, or knit her another mitt. One that matches better.  I definitely haven’t got enough yarn to knit the former, but I absolutely have enough for the latter, and truthfully, I think the hat thing wouldn’t cut it for Sam. She’s going to keep looking at those mitts, and it’s going to keep bugging her. I’m thinking I’ll just knit her another mitt,  but do I want to set a precedent like this? Is this un-appreciating knits? Am I spoiling her if I knit a third one? Do they match well enough and she saw how it was going to be and there of lots of other girls in the world who are going to sleep tonight with no fingerless mitts at all, never mind matching ones and…

I think maybe they really don’t match enough. 

(And no. The yarn is not here yet.)

Well. At least it looks like I’m waiting patiently.

PS: Hey, dig that… remember my spinning wheel?

According to the tracking info (thanks Loopy Ewe, that’s super handy for obsessive types) the yarn I’m waiting for is currently in Los Angeles.  I think this means that I can stop checking the mailbox every five minutes, and start being amazed that it’s made it this far, this fast.  The blanket and I are eagerly awaiting it’s arrival.

There you have the thing, with all but one little bit of the border done.
(For those of you who are the type who want to know, it’s measuring about 120 cm across. That’s about 4 feet – so I have no idea where all this yarn is going. It’s really not a massive blanket.  Ken was over looking at it the other night, and he posited that it’s all going to surface when I block it.  Maybe – but I just think this pattern is more dense than the last few.)

Yesterday when I finished all the yarn I had, I took a deep breath, did my best to accept The Way Things Are, and folded it up, and put it on the table.  Then I opened a knitting bag to find something else to work on until the new yarn arrives, and a miracle happened.  Snuggled amongst the socks and such that got set aside when I took up with the blanket was one little half skein of this yarn.  I just about cried from happiness.  It wasn’t enough to finish, and I knew that when I saw it, but it was enough that I could pare down what’s left to do when the yarn arrives – make it so that there’s only a few hours of work when the yarn comes through the door, and that matters.

Robyn is close enough to the end that any minute now she’s going to start looking around for the reason for why she’s still pregnant, and dudes. I don’t want it to be me. I know it’s a little unreasonable to be thinking that an unfinished blanket could be what’s holding the whole thing up, but I remember being this pregnant, and it’s a pretty unreasonable state. I could say something to her like "babies come when they’re ready" but if there’s ever been a reason to punch someone in the kidney, that would be it.  Hell hath no fury like a woman with an entire human being jammed between their lungs and bladder, and if there’s a way to send that rage in another direction, then I’m going to do it. (Hold on. I’m just going to check the mailbox again. Maybe the website is wrong.)

Once it arrives (and no, it wasn’t there, dammit) I have only about 3 hours of knitting to do. Then there’s a rather ridiculous blocking mission, for which Joe and I have to give up our bed, since it’s the only place big enough to do it. (I think that if it takes more than a day to dry, Joe won’t care if we have to camp in the living room. (If he’s smart – and he is, then he’s as afraid of Robyn as I am.)

Meanwhile, I’m knitting some handwarmers out of Sakura Cotton. The weather has just now started to change, and Sam’s complaining of cold hands. 

Let’s hope that I don’t have time to finish them. I’m just going to go check the mailbox again.

(PS. The pattern for the handwarmers came with the yarn as a set. How funny to see that non-other than Kate Atherley is the designer. Didn’t notice until I’d started.  Hi Kate!)

My friend is laughing.  I’ve just told her something that I believe about parenting and being a mum and what it does to you if you do it long enough, and I’m laughing too, but her kids are little and mine are big and I don’t know if she knows I really, really mean it.

We were talking about a kid we know, and how they really didn’t want to do something that the mum really wanted her to do… and how the mum was all upset about the kid being upset and was going to have to tell her "no" even though it was going to hurt the kid’s feelings.  "It’s hard…" my friend said. "That’s a hard place for a mother" and I shrugged at the phone and took a swig of coffee, and I almost didn’t say anything, but then I did.

"How hard is it?" I finally asked. "You just say No" and when I heard that she was a little taken aback, I said "Don’t listen to me. I’ve been a mother a long time. I don’t really care about children’s feelings anymore."

She killed herself laughing and I laughed too, and I tried to explain because it sounded so bad. When I say I don’t care about kid’s feelings, I simply mean that how a kid feels about whatever we’re considering, isn’t my prime directive.  I care what a kid feels, but when push comes to shove, my job is to do what I think is best for them, not what they feel is best for them.  I mean, c’mon.  I’ve had at least one teenager who had some pretty strong "feelings" about their privacy and how I shouldn’t be all up in their business, and you know what? I didn’t care. Until your frontal lobe is developed all the way, you get privacy in your room and privacy in the bathroom, but I get to know where you’re going and what you’re doing, and if you want to keep a secret about where you’re at from me, you’re going to have to work hard at it, and it doesn’t really bother me if you’re upset about that.

Do I care if a kid is sad? Sure I do. I care a lot about their emotional state and how they’re doing, but that’s different than caring about their individual feelings on every point – isn’t it? I mean, I’m feeling right now like I don’t want to go to the grocery store because it’s raining, and I’m feeling super sad that I’m going to get wet,  but I’m still going, because feelings don’t matter if you’re a grown up and you’re out of toilet paper, and someday my kid is going to have to do stuff way harder than shopping or homework or showing up on time and I want them to have practice.

I’ve had these conversations so many times, and every time I end up sure I’m the meanest mother in the world. (This is an idea I may have gotten from a kid who was yelling it at me when I didn’t care about their feelings about vacuuming.)  Someone will ask how I got the kids to eat brown bread and vegetables and homemade yogurt and all I can think is that kids don’t have any money and they don’t do the grocery shopping and they don’t cook and they aren’t in charge and really, doesn’t that mean that they’re going to eat what I make? Or people ask how I limited TV as much as I did, and I can’t figure out how they think it would be that I would make a rule (no TV if it’s daylight, for starters) and then a kid would say that they didn’t like it, and that then… what? We would have another rule? One they made?  There were times that I responded to a kids needs by changing a rule, like… the "you have to go to school" rule got trashed because a kid really needed home-schooling for a term.  We’re all about responding to a kids actual needs, but you’re going to have a hard time convincing me that one of my kids needed me to make them a separate dinner because what I’d made them wasn’t what they wanted. (To quote my own mother, this is a family, not a restaurant.)

I can’t tell you the number of times one of the kids tried to turn on the tv, and I went and turned it off again. A few times the tv got taken away entirely, put in a closet and locked up because they broke the rules, and I’m not fighting with you if you do something untrustworthy, and really, I am a mean and horrible mother who doesn’t care at all if that makes you cry. AT. ALL.  Television is a privilege, not a right, and you want to scream about it, that’s cool man. Let those feelings out, but they won’t change my mind. Age, maturity, independence, your skills, your actual needs,  that stuff changes my mind.  Your feelings? No ma’am. 

I can hear somewhere, someone’s heart breaking for all of this. They’re thinking that I am actually a mean mum, and that it’s wrong not to consider the feelings of children and thinking how hard it must have been to be raised by someone who does what she thinks is best and steamrolls all over the tender little hearts of her babies.  They’re wiping a tear away from their eye right now, and they’re the kind of mum who’s going to turn to me later and say "But how did you turn the TV off? My kids would be so upset if I did that. They would freak out. I could never, ever take away the TV" and I’m going to explain that the difference between me and them is that they think they need their kid’s buy in or permission, and I think it’s my TV and I can do whatever  I want with it, because I care more about limiting TV than I do about crying children and that makes it easier. Louder, but easier.

I get that parents perspective. I really do, and let me tell you, I care a lot about what my kids needed – and I will still go as far as a kid needs me to if we’re talking about their physical, spiritual and emotional well being.  I want to talk to kids about how they feel, and what their preferences are, and I have always, always tried to listen carefully to what they want – because they’re part of the family and we’re on the same team but dudes, that team has  Captains and it’s the parents and we’re looking at the big picture, and it’s their needs that matter to us – not what they want, and I’m totally cool with that, because there’s a reason that society doesn’t let these people vote until they’re 18, and it’s because they lack experience, and wisdom, and a lot of the things that keep you safe and make you go to the store in the rain when you don’t want to, and I have my eye on the prize.
I’m making grownups.

I love my children desperately. I just don’t care about their feelings. 
If you know what I mean.

Madness. I’ve been knitting on the blanket like it’s a job, and still, there’s no perceptible difference.  The ball of yarn keeps getting smaller, even though the blanket doesn’t seem to change much –  later today I’ll join the last skein on (and I got an email last night letting me know that the rest of the yarn has already shipped out of The Loopy Ewe – damn they’re fast) and if I’m lucky it will arrive just as I run out. 

This morning I got a bit of a reprieve, learning that I’d been right about Robyn’s EDC all along, and 48 hours got added to the ridiculous deadline that the baby doesn’t care about. This shouldn’t make me feel better, since whomever is in there has no access to a calendar, but somehow it did. (It turned out I’d taken Joe’s word on the thing. That’s like taking advice from him on how to organize your kitchen, so I have no idea why I believed him.)

The blanket is lovely (and, I suspect, extremely large) but I think I’m close to snapping. This morning I looked around and saw little mountains of yarn everywhere. Bright piles of yarn – in combinations that are thrilling and delightful, like bowls of candy, or piles of leaves or all the laundry thrown on a teenaged daughters floor.  All this white is starting to affect me.  Check this out.

See those two skeins of yarn?   Suddenly, I think they go together PERFECTLY. A week ago I would have thought that was bold as brass, but now? Oh lovely. Just lovely.
This morning I wondered why I don’t own any red shirts. I washed Sam’s green pants in the fond hope that she’d wear them. I think having a black cat is lame.  I left out a rainbow roving,  just for ornament.

All this white is getting to me, but I know what Denny would say. "At least you’re not knitting it in January."

PS. I know. You need to know what yarn that is. It’s String Theory Casper Sock in melon and winterberry.

PPPS: for everyone wondering how I kept warm in New Brunswick after I forgot my woolies? I didn’t need ’em.  It’s October in Canada and it was warm and lovely. That’s either fabulous or scary.