A friend who is a casual knitter recently told me she thought Knitting Season was finally here. I don’t believe I could live by a calendar that excluded knitting from any month of the year, but for this woman the earth has to tilt away from the sun, the clocks have to change, the birds have to depart for their southern quarters, and the winter rains have to set in before she’s ready to dig out her basket of wool.

I love seasonal markers, the little celebrations of cycle and change: I’ve washed and filled my bird feeder with sunflower seeds; carved, jack o’ lanterned (Second Annual Miyazaki Tribute: Cat Bus!), and then roasted a rouge vif d’estampe pumpkin from the school gardens; gathered the last of the green tomatoes from the vines and baked them in a pie; planted lily bulbs that will sprout straight, strong and purposefully skyward next summer. And of course there’s already wool within easy reach in pretty nearly every room of my house. This didn’t stop me from indulging in the seasonal ritual of buying more.

Yes, I finally gave in to the powerful urge to order from Beaverslide Dry Goods. I’ve had my eye on this company for years; read the paeans on blogs and review sites; drooled over other knitters’ Ravelry stashes of it. Then Jen said she was getting some, and I thought I’d better just take another look at the website. There was beautiful natural grey merino… on sale. This yarn is already very reasonable in price when it isn’t on sale; the opportunity to snag a sweater’s worth for $35 proved irresistible. What, you say I already have seven or twelve sweater’s worth of yarn stockpiled against whatever disaster might close the yarn stores for months at a time? Well, yes. But it never hurts to have a snuggly skein of yarn in your bag against the sort of office climate that’s entirely too consistently chilly:

And while I was waiting for the Beaverslide to arrive, another package turned up. It was from the remarkably generous Merete, who said she was sending me an owl postcard from Denmark, but this package was awfully plump for a postcard. Inside were three postcards, and also beautiful yarn in the perfect green. Isager Tvinni Tweed, no less, and this just as I was losing my heart to the Isager Alpaca.

What do you think? A pretty lace scarf? I’ve got 510 meters, and I’m taking pattern suggestions. Because I hear it’s open season on wool these days.

I almost forgot to post pictures of the hat I made my brother. If you’ve followed my Ravelry projects or my Flickr stream, this is old news. If not, look! A hat!

There’s no pattern for this one; it’s just a collection of traditional gansey motifs from Gladys Thompson’s oldie-but-goodie, Patterns for Guernseys, Jerseys, and Arans. Plus a little improvised fancy footwork at the crown, and some short rows among the welts at the brim to cover my brother’s ears.

I bought a grungy old copy of this book at Powell’s, and there is much to mine between its ragged covers. There’s a photo of a very simple man’s pullover with gussets built into a ribbed saddle shoulder that caught me aesthetically–there don’t seem to be any notes on its construction, but it seems like the kind of thing Elizabeth Zimmermann would have “unvented” and I’m keen to play with the idea.

Let me say a word about the yarn: it’s 100% alpaca from Honey Lane Farms, a cooperative of alpaca farmers on San Juan Island. It comes in 52 beautiful colors; Saxton picked out this heathered greenish blue when we were home together in August. It’s luscious stuff. I hope it warms his head and reminds him of home.

And since I’m suddenly obsessed with my kitchen cabinets as a backdrop for knitting-related photography, check this out:

Mmmmm… Blue Moon Luscious Single Silk, unjustly named “Bleck.” “Bleck” should be a sludgy drab banana slug color, not this beautiful lilac grey. It’s not for me, but I get to knit with it: Katrin and I are making each other February Lady sweaters for Christmas. So this is the yarn for Katrin’s sweater, while she has the two skeins of Blue Moon Twisted in “Corbie” I chose. Now all I need is a quiet weekend (and a manicure!) to get started. I daren’t haul pure silk around in one of my many bags for chance fly-by knitting moments.

Caroline Lee Pope, circa 1969

photo credit: Martha Porter

I brought a set of fabulous yellow filing cabinets and a desktop that belonged to my father’s mother out to my office at school, and I spent the morning tidying and organizing in preparation for the school’s annual Open House this weekend. While I was moving files, I discovered a couple of folders left in one of the drawers. One contains letters from Granny’s sister in England and from her brother in France, written during the 1990s. The other is a file of newspaper clippings and photographs pertaining to the peace vigil my grandmother founded in Connecticut during the Vietnam war. She had one son in the Coast Guard and another organizing peace protests at Stanford, prepared to go to jail rather than participate in the violence if his draft number came up.

My parents met at the Vigil when my father came home from California; one of the newspaper articles I found this morning indicates they weren’t the only couple to connect there: “Following the Vigil, all present were invited to partake of Cold Duck brought by newly-married Mr. and Mrs. David Griggs who had met each other at the Vigil.” The vigil continues to this day on the green in Salisbury every Saturday from 11 till noon–our soldiers came home from Vietnam, but the arms race and the Cold War and countless other conflicts continued; the Gulf War and the war in Iraq rekindled interest in the Vigil. My brother and I have stood for nuclear disarmament and flashed the peace sign at passing motorists from that little triangle of grass many times during our visits.

I remember Granny as equal parts artist and activist. If I’ve inherited any of her facility with wool and needles, I hope I’ve also derived a little of her gumption and fire to stand up and organize when it matters. She’d have relished the opportunity to go to the polls at this important moment in America’s history. I’m going to be thinking of her when I drop off my own ballot. Go vote, everybody. It’s the simplest way to serve your country. And it’s a privilege.

Hope is a word that’s taken on political overtones during this marathon election cycle. This isn’t a political blog; I happen to have strong feelings about politics, but I choose not to print them here. Besides being a banner and a rallying cry in 2008, hope is a plain human sentiment we all need in anxious times like these. My work and affiliations are such that I know non-profits and charitable groups are experiencing the anxiety acutely: people tend to clamp their pocketbooks shut when the economy goes into the flusher. I realize that youth, employment, and native optimism are advantages, even luxuries, that many don’t have. But I do believe that things are going to get better, and that they’ll get better faster for more people if those of us who can afford to keep an even keel and continue to support worthy causes in any way we can do so. Personally, I felt there was a choice: either I could fret about the obliteration of our 401Ks, or I could count our many blessings and take extra pride in making my annual contributions.

That’s one of the reasons I didn’t hesitate to make a donation to Ramona Carmelly’s fundraising walk against breast cancer. I zipped over to her website upon seeing La Harlot’s interpretation of her gorgeous Hibiscus for Hope socks, and in the seconds this hop through cyberspace took, I was already thinking this was a heck of a good model: tantalize knitters, whom we know to be among the most generous folk on the planet, with a tasty new pattern, then ask them to make a donation to your cause in return for it. No amount suggested. But I’ll bet most people gave more than the five bucks you’d expect to plonk down for a sock pattern. And what a sock pattern it is:

These pictures don’t do them justice. My feet are too big to model them, alas. But the pretty yarn is Dream in Color Smooshy in Petal Shower (the perfect un-twee pink), and look at this clever Bordhiesque heel:

Can you see the wee baby gusset under the sole that sets it up? And the way the lace pattern gradually wraps all around the leg? Actually, I veered far off the path with the heel itself. I may have unvented a whole new short row heel by accident. The thing is, I’m a top-down sock knitter. I see the advantages of toe-up, namely the assurance that whenever you run out of yarn you’ll at least have a sock-shaped garment that covers all the essential parts, but I never know where I am with the heel. Ramona directs you to Wendy Johnson’s short row heel instructions, but wouldn’t you know I managed to reach the heel point on both socks when I wasn’t near the internet? I can work a short row in my sleep when it’s for a heel-flap sock or some extra bust shaping, but I couldn’t for the life of me remember how to begin in the toe-up situation. And because I’d rather make things up and be wrong than cease knitting, I conjured a short row heel that involved working outward from a small group of central heel stitches, wrapping the stitches and then knitting them up and wrapping their neighbors on the next pass.

I suspect this isn’t really the greatest way to do a heel. I think I got away with it because of the lace pattern being stretchy; if you had a rigid fabric and a high instep you’d definitely want the deeper, cuppier heel you get from Wendy’s (or anyone else’s) instructions. And actually, I don’t know that I DID get away with it – the recipient is in New York and I haven’t heard whether or not she can put them on her feet comfortably. I need to experiment on a pair for myself. But the socks almost certainly would have been too long in the foot if I’d done the heel the right way: I eliminated about an inch of sole length by inadvertently chopping out that nice little trapezoid you get under the heel in normal conditions, and since the socks were on track to fit me, this was a good thing.

Anyway, they’re sock-shaped socks, and I’m not a Socktoberfest loser, and they’re a little drop for the fire hose in the fight against cancer, and they’re for someone I love who lost her mama to the disease, and I even survived some dramatic moments when I dropped the package in the mail last Saturday AFTER HOURS and then realized I’d forgotten to print a return address on it. (I made a panicky dash home for a bright yellow sheet of paper on which to scrawl a desperate plea for clemency from the postal workers. The post-anthrax rules say they must callously discard packages without return addresses, and I was in something of a lather to think my handknits might meet their end in the rubbish. So I mashed my sad little note with my return address through the slot after my package and prayed. Then I decided that direct action was probably a safer bet in such a critical case as this, so I went around the back of the building and clung to the chainlink fence and hallooed a woman who looked like she was on her way home. She answered. She pitied me. She went back inside and found my sorry yellow note. She wrote the return address in the proper spot for me. Marika’s Hibiscus for Hope socks were saved.)

And speaking of hope: I don’t often feel driven to hug four-star generals, but my opinion of Colin Powell went way up this weekend when he took the national stage and pointed out that whether Barack Obama is a Christian or a Muslim ought to be irrelevant, and that we should mind the message we’re sending to Muslim-American children who dream of growing up to be president.