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.

Friends, the Danes have been holding out on us. They’ve been smugly sitting on one of the nicest yarns on the planet, just hoarding it all, apparently. But the secret is out, and now that we Americans can buy Marianne Isager’s Alpaca 2 without traveling to Europe (which this American loves the excuse to do, but there’s this teensy problem with the economy just now), my life may never be the same. Sweet heavenly saints, people, I don’t know where this stuff has been all my knitting days. I saw. I touched. I read the ridiculously reasonable price tag. I bought. I knit, immediately.

As you can see, I couldn’t resist whipping some some stranded colorwork. I’d already been salivating over Kate Gagnon’s beautiful Selbu Modern beret on Ravelry for a week or so. Now, I love me a beret, but I’d just made one and didn’t think a fine, drapey, alpaca fabric would be exactly suited for the tam shape anyway. So I improvised: I started the brim like a sweater hem (with a purl turning round in the contrast color); then threw in a couple of tuck rows (so easy with a contrast color involved: work a round in it, then knit some rows – five, in my case – in the main color, then on the next round reach down the backside of the work, lift the top of the CC stitch onto the left needle tip, knit it together with the next regular stitch; repeat all the way around); worked a tier of pretty berry sprigs, a classic Selbu motif seen on mitten cuffs; added another tuck round; increased a bit to get my stitch count up to a multiple of 24; then began Kate’s colorwork chart. I omitted one repetition both horizontally and vertically to account for my desired clochey shape, but otherwise the rest of the hat is just as Kate wrote it.

I just love those tuck rows. They’re so simple, and they add a lot of shape and style, don’t you think? I may have to put them on all my hats. I’ve already worn this one five or six times. It fits under my bike helmet (which looks totally weird, but keeps my head warm), and I can wear it with my dressier jackets or, as seen here, with my dog park duds. Love the versatility. (And also the mild fall weather we’ve been having.)

Go knit one now! You won’t be sorry. And you can tell your Danish friends you’re onto them.

I’ve also been working on my Confectionary vest experiment. It may be too small. It may also be bulletproof. But the color changes are so seductive that I’m just gonna keep on knitting…

P.S. I’m naming my firstborn Marianne Isager. (Okay, maybe just Isager if it’s a boy.)