I am on shawl overload again. I am in that Mystery Stole 2 knit-along, but I really don’t like the sample she gave us as a gauge swatch–the lace holes aren’t well defined. They tend to bleed off into the rest of the work, and since I can’t see the stole until it’s done, I am reserving my intentions on the actual stole yet. I have hopes that it will be gorgeous, as all Melanie’s work is. Doubter that I am, I may wait till I see it in progress before I start it.
In the meantime, I’ve seen two lovely shawls, for which I have the patterns, and I’m tempted to make both of them. The first is this one by Jane Sowerby from the Summer 2006 issue of Knitter’s Magazine. It’s called Persimmon. I think it’s lovely.
The gray one is called the Icarus shawl, by Miriam Felton, and it’s really luscious, although it looks like a beginner shawl to me. It’s in Interweave Knits, Summer 2006, in case anyone’s interested. When I saw the photo from the magazine below, well, my heart almost stopped. Sometimes simple is enough. What a beautiful shawl. I think the original is made of suri alpaca–yarn so thin and soft as to be almost transparent. I am afraid alpaca would be too warm for what I need, in spite of how lightweight it is, so I doubt I’ll make it out of that, although I’d love working with alpaca. (Can you tell I’m trying to talk myself into it?) I do have to keep in mind that I am in the Deep South.
Then there are several others I want to make and still haven’t. The Spirit of the Southwest and the Love Affair shawl (Creative Knitting, July 2005 ), among many others, are still waiting to be made.
I haven’t started any of those because I’m stuck in Flirty Hell. One good thing about it is that I finally made it round the bend. You didn’t know? I thought I shouted loud enough that everyone could have heard. As proof, I offer this photo. I took this sometime back. So I am further along on it now. This is undressed. I just spread it out over the footstool so that you could see.
Christmas In June
I’ve had a small miracle happen, and I’m still a little stunned by it. I’ve had Christmas Cacti for many years. I don’t even know how long–thirty years? They’ve always bloomed for me, and been pretty at Christmas. Now and then, one will bloom at Easter too. I used to have a whole lot of them, but they eventually died off, and I wound up with three–a gold one, a white one, and a red one. All were a bit small and rootbound, and I lazily just replanted all of them in a big pot I had about 10-12 years ago. They’ve been happily co-existing in the same big pot ever since. I put the pot on the floor in front of a large window, and since I’m not in that room much, it gets just the light it needs, but I often forget to water it. It seems to forgive me, and when I do water it, it happily sucks the moisture up, and goes right on. This has been our pattern.
Now and then one of the cats, especially Lucky, will rub against the plant or give it a bite. He doesn’t eat it, but he will sink a tooth in it now and then. The other day, I went in there to get something, and I noticed something different on the Christmas Cactus. I thought at first the cats had put something in the pot, for since the pot is at cat level, anything is possible. No, that wasn’t it. It wasn’t a toy, it was on the plant itself. It looked like a fruit. Christmas Cactus Fruit? Do they even bear fruit? I looked it up, and they do if they are pollinated from a different plant. Here it is.
I believe what happened is that sometime when there were blooms from all of the different plants in that pot, Lucky rubbed against the flowers of one of the plants and then managed to actually pollinate one of the blooms from another plant. At any rate, I have a fruit, and now, I can call Lucky a farmer. He didn’t know he was raising Christmas Cactus, but he did. You know Lucky was the one. He signed the leaf next to it. See the tooth mark?