A Cold & Rainy Sunday

This is the day when you know summer is over and autumn is here. It happens every year - the date changes. But there is that one day when you wake up and it is cold and you know it won’t be warming up much. We’ve been lucky this year - it was a beautiful summer and September was just as nice. But today it is raining and 51 and autumn is here.

Yesterday was our Needleworker’s Day which I love. We were a small group - so much going on these days! But somehow when the group is small the talk is always more lively. We manage to keep to one conversation instead of several and I don’t wind up with the befuddlement that always sets in when I’m trying to listen to too many people.

Chandra, who makes the world’s best calzone - this month she brought spinach and pepperoni, brought the Christmas stockings she has been working on to show. She got the pattern from the Lion’s Brand web site and made them in a deep, burgundy topped with white. They are, frankly, adorable. Florence is making another of her long, lush, scrumptious scarves - this time in a gorgeous blush pink. She works at Gorton’s of Gloucester and brought us lobster rolls as a special treat. Gwen, who knits in the English manner with a needle held under her arm, is working on winter head bands in gorgeous, complex Faire Isle patterns. Maureen is making crocheted, beaded bracelets. And on and on.

Having finished my Mermaid Shawl (which garnered plenty of ohhs and ahhs) I am mostly experimenting right now. I bought a few skeins of several Knit Picks yarns I have been wanting to try so am mostly swatching to see how they knit up. I started a winter hat for myself in Lilac Ambrosia, a fabulously soft alpaca/cashmere blend and I think I am going to love it. I have also been playing around with a few skeins of Andean Silk, an alpaca/silk/wool blend and it is knitting up nicely. I’ve been wanting to learn the Traveling Vine lace pattern so Have begun a narrow scarf with just five repeats of the vine pattern and I think it is going to be lovely.

While poring through some old knitting pattern books I discovered that the pattern now called Frost Flowers was once called Shooting Star in an old English knitting book I have. There are so many old lace patterns I want to learn and, for me, it is often best to learn them one at a time in narrow scarves with many repeats. Because I knit in the German manner (having been taught by Benedictine nuns), I hold my yarn in the left hand and, thus, my stitches tend to be in the wrong orientation on the needle. Over the years, I’ve trained myself to compensate for this. When the pattern says “SSK” I “K2tog” and vice versa. That works. But I always had trouble on the purl rows. However, working on Traveling Vine, I’m finally working that out. The pattern is coming out nicely.

So I have a lot of work I should be doing but it is cold and rainy and a good day for getting lost in the cosmos. I’ve got a pot of tea on and I’ve started listening to Joshlyn Jackson’s gods in Alabama on tape. Joshlyn is a member of our Working Novelists group and we have all watched with fascination as she has garnered success after success with this book. Now, listening to it, I understand why - it is wonderful.

So summer is gone and snuggling in time is coming. This morning there is tea and knitting and a good book to listen to. The chores can wait a little while.

Thanks for reading.