I sat down to blog this morning, and realized that I don’t have anything to say.

Actually, that couldn’t be a bigger lie. I have a ton to say.  I have a thousand words that I would love to pour out here, words about grief and loss and sad things and families and choices and there not being choices and… the upshot is that something sad and inevitable is happening to someone in our family, and we are all in a wild place. I’d love to share that. I think it would even feel good to share that, but the more I think about blogging and privacy and how much I would like to share, the more I realize that the person who is sick would not like that. They would like another sort of dignity and privacy and there is absolutely no way that I cannot honour that – or even say anything that might not totally err on the side of caution.

I’m telling you this by way of apology. I am used to sharing my life with you all here, and I like it – but this time I am going to be cagey, and I realize that is going to make this blog a little weird for a while – while things happen that I will not discuss. There will be comings and goings and I am going to do my best to be present, and share what I can, but right now it is important that I keep in my head that this is not a diary. It is a place where I share what I think and feel with very real limits, and concern for the feelings of others. I feel like I usually have great instincts about that, and I’m going to honour them.

So here is what I can tell you now. I was away. I am back. I may go away again. There is a lot of tea, and talking, and keeping things slow and close and considering the effect that my words may have on others all the time.
I am knitting, but sometimes, I just need to be still.

Blogging and privacy are tricky, and I’ve always been careful, and I’m going to be more careful now. The internet feels intimate, from this spot at my desk where I’ve always shared so much of my life with you… but it is not.
I know most of you will understand – because I bet most of you have some really strong feelings about the internet, and blogs and oversharing, and I know that sometimes I read things on blogs and think "Oh man. I wish you hadn’t permanently committed that piece of information about another person to the wilds of the world" and I bet you do too. So I won’t. 

Right?

Someone I love really loves reading – and they don’t have a lot of time left to do it. If you knew someone who could only read a few more books, and you were going to the bookstore for them, what would you get?

Your best suggestions will be purchased on my way there. Thanks to all. I’ll be back in this space soon. 

This post comes to you from a chair in the airport in Chicago, where I’m waiting for "some weather" to clear.  I flew in this morning from Toronto,  and everything seemed just fine, so how long it’s going to take to catch a flight out of here is beyond my knowing. This – things being beyond my knowing? It makes me crazy. Completely crazy. So crazy that everyone in this airport should be glad that I am a knitter, and am therefore able to put my feelings about not knowing when/if this plane will go into a really fierce knitting session – because frankly the alternative is me stomping up and down this place while (loudly) refusing to believe that we, as a species, can be considering manned flight to Mars, but are wholly unable to tell me when my flight to Little Rock might be leaving.  My knitting is letting me feign calm and peace as the airport does what it can to get all flights moving.  (Apparently they’ve cut incoming and outgoing flights by 50% – so at least it’s nowhere near personal. I’m starting to get the feeling I wish I’d brought extra yarn and needles. There’s a whole lot of my fellow travellers who could use a little help getting their mellow on. The lady across from me has 5% battery left on her phone, and the guy sitting by the only outlet doesn’t care.  It’s getting intense. )

Speaking of getting one’s mellow on,  the angora experiment was a train wreck.  Nothing short of a big hot mess with a cherry on top.

I decided cormo would be a good thing to blend with angora, and fetched some roving from the upstairs. I weighed it, so I would have 80% cormo and 20% angora, and then I started gently running it through the carder.   It was an almost instant disaster. After the first pass I could see the cormo starting to get neppy. Neps are little knots of fibre that make bumps in the yarn when you spin it.  They aren’t always a horseman of the apocolypse, but for this yarn they would be – they’re also often a sign of over-processing. After the first pass, I assessed my situation. The angora and the wool were still pretty discrete, not mixed together at all, and I was pretty sure it was going to take three passes to get them mixed the way I wanted them. Three at least. If the cormo was already starting to look over-processed, I figured I wasn’t going to get a lot of satisfaction out of it.  I ran it through twice more to be sure that I was right.
I was really, really right. The resulting roving was terrible.

I put out a few feelers to friends, I put on my thinking cap and I thought of a few ideas. First, I wondered if was too impatient and was running the carder too fast for the fussy little cormo.  I tried again – but it changed nothing, except that it took longer to get pissed off and disappointed.

Then I wondered if my carder was too coarse for these fibres.  I can’t change my carder, but I do have fine cotton hand cards. I tried those – and it was better, but still not awesome – and I’m aiming for awesome. It was suggested that I try combining them on combs, but since my combing skills are such that I couldn’t comb my way out of a paper bag with a map and a guide,  that’s my last choice.  

I wondered if I was using the wrong wool – and that’s where things came to a screaming halt.  I think I’d like to try this with something else, something that isn’t roving, but every attempt mangles a little more precious bunny, and that means washing some wool, and that means…

Well that means that I left this trainwreck on the table and left for Little Rock.  I sort of had it in my head  (because I’m nuts, obviously) that I’d throw this through the carder, then spin it up super-fast (but perfectly) and then ply it (exceptionally well) and then set the twist, ball it up and be knitting it on this trip.  All of that was insane, obviously, but it’s not going to stop me from doing a little more experimenting when I get home.
I’ll get it, but I need to do a little research first, so I don’t run out of bunny before I get a clue. Any suggestions?

Many weeks back, Amy Herzog published a pattern called Afterlight, and I was instantly smitten. It’s one of those sweaters I like so much, ones that are garments, things you’ll wear by themselves as a top, rather than over another top. I know the distinction is likely silly to most of you, but there you have it.  I decided to make it, but it’s an investment.  The sweater is finely knit, with fingering weight yarn on small needles, and the yarn, while not ridiculously expensive for what it is, was going to make a considerable dent in a few months of the yarn budget.  I decided that I would go ahead, but wait until Amy’s book came out first.  If I was going to make this thing, I was going to make it perfect.  Knit to Flatter arrived in the mail, I read it (you should too, it’s quite good) and then set about altering the pattern to make it smashing. One of the things I’ve learned from Amy, is that it makes no sense to make a sweater bigger all over if you’re really only bigger in one area, something I’ve been guilty of over the years.  I’m not a big woman, not really. My chest measures 37 1/2 inches, and that’s the size sweater I’ve been knitting for years – with some disappointing results.  It took Amy to teach me that the issue is that I’m big in the front.  I’ve been choosing sweater sizes like my chest is that of a woman who’s almost 38" around, and I’m not. 

What I am is a woman who would be a size 34 if you saw me from the back, and a 38 if you saw me from the front, and thanks to Amy and her book, I’ve realized that I should think of myself as two sizes. Petite in the back, and er… not, in the front.  Yes, I need some extra fabric to get around my assets, but my breasts are located on the front of my body, and that is where the extra fabric to cover them should go… not all over.  Following her instructions, I’m making one size for the front, another for the back, altering the length to recognize the fact that I’m short all over, and dropping the vee in the front of the sweater a little deeper to try and balance my broad, square shoulders.  I’m really happy with my plan, and over the last few days I’ve been knitting away. (For the record, making those changes and combining the pattern pieces turns out to be easy.)

I’m almost at the armhole shaping of the back, and I love the sweater, love the yarn, and have high hopes for its eventual greatness.  I even swore a vow of monogamy to it – but then, oh then I went to Yarnover, and there was this booth (it was Angora Gardens – thanks for the detective work, my friends) and in the booth was this little baby sweater that I can’t stop thinking of.  The sweater was just a little garter stitch bit of business, but it was knit out of a wool/angora combo that was almost perfect to me, but for two things.  First, the yarn had a little more angora in it than I would choose – which is not to say that it had too much angora – it just had more than is to my taste, precisely, and second, it wasn’t free.  It was reasonably priced – but there’s no reasonable price for yarn if you’ve just blown your budget on some snazzy Ultra MCN for a sweater.  I left without it, but I just can’t stop thinking about it. 

I can’t stop talking about it either, and so yesterday when I was waxing poetic about it to a knitting friend, she said it was too bad that I didn’t have any angora – because if I did, I could fix both the proportion of wool to angora – and the cost by spinning my own. Lo, the heavens opened, a bit of angora rabbit has been fetched from the stash, I’m hunting up a bit of something good to blend it with, the drum carder is getting dusted off and…

I swear I’m going to finish the sweater too.

I had a wonderful weekend at Yarnover and at StephenBe, if a little exhausting, but really, if that’s how work is going to be? I can think of lots of exhausting jobs I could be doing that wouldn’t be any fun – so I’ll take it, and happily so.  Something shocking happened though – I took no pictures. Wait, that’s not true.  As I look though my phone, I can see that apparently, I took three.
This one, of the very, very pretty Italian tubular cast-on that I did on the plane when I realized I’d left my waste yarn for the provisional tubular cast-on that my pattern suggested right smack on the middle of the coffee table at home:

This one, which is an absolutely horrific shot of Carson Demers, Nancy Bush and what appears to be Carson’s glass of Chardonnay.

(I have no explanation for why this picture is on my phone. Some bizarre kinnearing accident. I don’t know, but there they are.)

… and then there’s this one:

A shot I took on Sunday night when I snuck behind Stephen Be right before I took the stage at the conclusion of Fiber Fest.  I swear, I thought it would be better.
It’s a huge shame that these are the shots that I got – because if my camera juju hadn’t apparently left me at the border, I’d have pictures of things that were a lot more interesting – like the 100% mink yarn at the Grinning Gargoyle booth in the Yarnover marketplace – Like about 20 of the vendors that had amazing stuff, now that I think of it, including one amazing angora yarn that I meant to go back and buy, but ran out of time for. (It’s inspired me to fetch the angora out of the upstairs stash and do a little blending and spinning, actually – does anyone remember the vendor?)  Or – if I had my wits about me, I could show you the Habu trunk show that almost cost me a fortune (I remembered I had some at that last second. Very near miss.) Or – Steven West doing a cartwheel, or knitting teachers emerging from a van like it was a clown car full of the most beautiful knitwear.  Or – I could have taken pictures of the scads of amazing knitted stuff that I saw on the students (sometimes I don’t know why they are taking classes – they are already so clever) or the bizarre but artful arrangement of decaffeinated coffee packets housekeeping left in my hotel room on the second morning. (I think they were trying to tell me something.)

It was great – and I’m sorry I only took a picture of Carson’s wine. 
I’ll try harder next time.  Were you there? Were you somewhere else?  Get any good pictures?

It’s 1:30 in the afternoon, and I’m sitting in the airport lounge, boggling at that fact that four hours from now I’ll be headed to the dinner that marks the beginning of Yarnover,  and about five hours from now, I’ll be up on a stage, talking about knitting the way that I do. A whole other country, a whole other place, a whole other job, four hours away. Fifteen minutes from now I’ll have done my final edit on the speech (a different, whole new one) for Sunday night, and then I have the whole flight to cast on Afterlight, and enjoy a nice little knit. (By the way, I think this link for Sunday is better, if you’re into it.)

Before I go off and do that though, I want to tell you about the conversation I had at the customs desk on the way into the airport.  There was a long line (customs here is run by the US government, and is effected by the furlough/ sequestration thing) so when I finally got up to the harried US Customs Officer, he looked like he’d really had enough of his day.  "Why are you going to Minneapolis?" he barked.
"I’m going to a knitting conference." I explain, smiling brightly. This is usually the point where they don’t ask me any more questions.  They don’t want to talk about knitting.  They don’t want to hear about how interesting knitting is. I say I’m going to a knitting thing, then they shrug in this "it takes all kinds" sort of way, and wave me into the country.   Not today.
"A knitting conference?" he glares at me.
"Yup." I say. Smiling even more brightly. He’s armed. I want him to be having a good day, and to like me.
"That’s over." He says this to me like this is absolutely true, and cannot be argued with.  I wonder for a minute what he knows, or what he thinks he knows, and I take a stab.
"I don’t think so, I think it’s this weekend.  In Minneapolis.  I’m really sure it’s not over.’
"No" he says, the hand holding the stamp over my passport just hovering there, like maybe he’s not going to stamp it, and maybe I’m not going to go to the knitting conference he thinks doesn’t exist.  "It was last week, or maybe the week before, and definitely not in Minneapolis. A lady went through here. She was going.  I think you missed it."
"Oh!" I say this fairly confidently.  "You’re totally right. There was a knitting conference a few weeks ago. Stitches – in Atlanta. That’s what you’re thinking of."
"No." he replies, becoming quite terse. "It was NOT in ATLANTA, and it is absolutely over by now."
"Okay" I say, wondering if I’m going to be allowed to go to the US if I can’t figure this out.  "There was another one.  Vogue Knitting, in Seattle? That was in early April?"  He looks at me like I am starting to make sense.  My hopes soar. 
"YES." He exclaims, and as punctuation, he stamps my passport. "It WAS SEATTLE!"  We are both relieved to have worked this out. I can tell.  He continues "Any way you slice it, I’m pretty sure you missed it." 
"It’s okay" I say, trying to sound reassuring. "There’s another one. In Minneapolis."

"Three in a month?" he says, making it clear that this is not possible,  and then he realizes that we’re talking about knitting.
"Just go." He says,  and with that, he gave me a look that said that he hoped I had fun at the knitting conference that was over and I was totally not going to, and turned to the next person in line. 
I can’t tell you how much I hope they’re going to Unwind.

I don’t know if my brain is like this because I am a knitter, or if I am a knitter because my brain is like this, but I have always been the sort of person who finds it easier to work things out when they are live and in person, right in my hands.  This makes working on the computer my least favourite way to try and sort out something that needs to be seen holistically – as a whole thing.  If I’m working on a fussy knitted thing that has multiple charts, the first thing I do is print them all out and put them down – taping them in the order they will appear as a knitted item.  I might end up working from the charts in the book or the pattern, but I have the sort of mind that’s just going to make fewer mistakes if I can grasp the big picture before launching.
It might maybe speak to my love of spreadsheets and lists and schedules, and it certainly speaks to the way I edit.  Behold. I give you the system for editing the new talk for Sunday night at Stephen Be. (And it’s pretty good, I must say. You should come.)

Scissors, tape, a black marker, a pen. I print what I’ve got, then start working through it, reading out loud, crossing things out.. adding things, making notes.  When I find something that should be cut – I literally cut it out. When I find a bit that belongs somewhere else, I cut it out and put it where it should be. It lets me see the whole thing at once – and it lets me gauge the length, literally in metres.  When I’m done, I make virtual changes in the document, then print it out and start again. (What you see here is a second pass. The third will be way less brutal.) When I think it’s done – I stand up, in my proper shoes and read it aloud, just as I’ll perform it for all of you. I time it too… to make sure it’s not so long people will run out of knitting or won’t need a second mortgage to pay the babysitter. 

It works for me, though I wondered how unique this system was.  Earlier today – thinking just that, I sent the picture to a some friends. I wondered if anyone else needed scissors and a fixative to get through editing?  Our Lady Rams of the Comments (who is a real person, who exists outside of the comments as well) responded with the most clever answer ever.
"Sit down. Drink your coffee while I explain that "cut and paste" is a word processing metaphor."
I laughed for an hour.  Yeah. I guess I’m not the only one using the system.
Speaking of a system, see the green yarn on the table?

It’s IndigoDragonfly Ultra MCN in regeneration – and knitting it into Afterlight is going to be my reward.  You know. When I get this all taped together.

Whew, here’s a week moving at breakneck pace, although I had a wonderful reprieve this morning.  I woke up thinking it was Thursday, and just about wept considering  how great it would be to have another day, just to make things tidy and beautiful.  When I sat at my desk with my coffee and checked my calendar it was like receiving the most amazing gift to realize it was only Wednesday.  It being Wednesday does also explain why there isn’t a little more done on my current socks.

I’m enchanted by this combination. Sam and I have been watching Angel – I think maybe I saw part of it years ago, but it all seems new to me now.  Sam asked for a pair of socks , ones I could knit whil we were watching and so it seemed only natural to keep with the theme. (Sam can have all the socks she wants, because she actually wears them. Handknit socks are her go-to, far more keen than her sisters, so she can reap the rewards of her enthusiasm.  I still dream of the day she might knit her own, but so far the odds of that seem to be about the same as the chances she’ll announce a longing to clean the house for fun.)

I was sure there was an Angel themed pair of socks out there, and it looks like I was wrong, but there was a pair called Staked, named for the parent series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer . Sam thought this was perfect. (I am less clear on the connection, but I’m faking it. I can admit that Angel seems to be a very nice Vampire, and he does whine marginally less that I remember Buffy doing.) I’m using Bertha, and I like it a lot, though really, what’s not to like about any combo of Merino, cashmere and nylon for socks. Soft, strong and pretty. 
I haven’t decided yet if they’re my plane knitting for this weekend when I hit the road again – the combination of charts and twisted stitches and keeping track of things doesn’t make them the best travel knitting, but I might give it a shot.

Saturday sees me at Yarnover for a class and a talk, and the thrill of going there is almost enough to take the sting out of missing the Knitter’s Frolic here in Toronto. (I’m mostly sad I’m missing the Marketplace. Shop for me, will ya?)
Sunday and Monday I’ll be back at Stephen Be for their big FiberFest 2013. (I think there’s still room in some classes. You could call if you’re in the neighbourhood.)
A special mention of Sunday night, I’m doing a talk for FiberFest, and it’s a new one – I think it’s going to be great, but right now the thought of it is giving me cramps.
I’m going to pour that anxiety into practicing.

Also, it’s totally possible I had a little falling down in the yarn department – and it’s totally possible that it’s arriving this afternoon, and it’s totally possible that it will be hard to resist.  It’s really possible that I might not even try to resist, because deciding to give in is so much easier than accepting failure.  I wonder how long I’ll be a knitter when I truly develop yarn resistance?
It all happened so fast.

There are a lot of things I love about knitting. The list is long and complicated and you all know most of them, or you wouldn’t knit the way you do- which I’m assuming is rather a lot. I suppose I hope it’s rather a lot, so I’m not so odd.  I’ve been making a list of ways that I love knitting, ways that it keeps my life straight and gives me gifts that I’m grateful for.

Today I can tell you that my life is full of unfinished things.  My latest book? Unfinished. The laundry? Unfinished. My kids? Unfinished. (Can you finish that one? Does it ever happen?) The house? Unfinished. There’s a piece of quarter-round missing at the bottom of the stairs. It’s been five years. I don’t see it getting finished any time soon. The painting? I ran out of paint part way through the dining room. It’s unfinished. (I’m trying to convince myself I like it that way.)

The housework, my fundraising goals, my fitness level, eating only whole foods… Unfinished.  I’m working on all of it, but there’s no way I’ll ever be a finished person, or have a life that needs no work.

Waving Lace socks from Favorite Socks .  Yarn: lost the label a long time ago.

That said, these socks? FINISHED. Completely DONE. They are something I started and ended and they are whole, and they don’t need anything more from me. That’s one thing I love about knitting.You can be finished.  Socks, anyway.
What do you love about it?

It would appear that my nephew is so sneaky that he grew while I was knitting, which makes me very glad that I noted the number of stitches and the method of concocting down here – because this one? It’s cute and all, but it fits him the way that 15 year old girls like their jeans to fit, which is to say that it’s too small for my taste.

This little sweater is clearly not going to last him any time at all – his Aunt Kelly took these pictures the other day while they were playing in the park (isn’t she a good photographer?) and I can see the whole thing is skimpy. The only place it looks like it fits is through the torso. Look at his little arms poking out of those short sleeves. (Those sleeves, by the way – I was absolutely confident that they were going to be rolled up. Way too long. Kindly deduct the required points from my knitter card.) 

I suppose I’ll be figuring the math for the next size up, and having a scrounge through the stash for two skeins of something that would be just right. (I think I might skip the stripe matching thing this time. That was killer.)  

I’d be upset, but there’s another baby on the way in this family, and I know Katie will share Luis’ little things, and besides, Lou doesn’t look like the sort of kid who’s going to be an only child.  The sweater will get used.

I do wish he’d stop growing quite so fast though – for more reasons than I can tell you.