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.)

1. I feel a new color phase coming on. Soft greys, sunny creams, russets, bright tansy and sunflower yellows, navy and slate and icy blues, bark browns and greys, deep dark chocolates.

2. Rustic, simple shawls in earthy neutrals, like Terhi’s at Mustaa Villaa and Alexandra’s at Moonstitches.

3. Simple socks with just a touch of ornamentation, like Terhi’s here and here.

4. Cooking outside on the grill, even though it isn’t summer anymore. It’s right out the kitchen door under the porch overhang, so it’s just as convenient as the stove. Tonight before choir practice I’ll be tossing some Yellow Finn potatoes in olive oil, fresh rosemary and sea salt; stuffing some Anaheim and Gypsy peppers with mozzarella or Trader Joe’s beluga lentils (already cooked!) seasoned with lemon juice, toasted walnuts and some of the marjoram that’s taken over the herb bed; and dumping the lot on the grill.

5. The Japanese anemones and Joe Pye weed in my garden, which bloom faithfully from July through October.

6. Oregon apples from the farmers’ market. We favor Tsugarus, Akanes, Honeycrisps, Ambrosias, and Jonagolds in mid-October. I find the names of apples enchanting (I weep that I somehow missed the Black Gilliflower (Sheepnose) variety), and despite the luscious bounty of summer peaches and berries, they’re my favorite fruit.

7. Early-season West Wing episodes on DVD. I *heart* my fictional government.

8. David Copperfield. It’s our geekier-than-thou book club selection for December. We dig the classics.

9. My new Keen shoes from the REI sale, the only model that seems to be narrow enough for my feet. I went for the army green with orange stitching. They’re my everyday fall shoes, and I finally feel like a real Portlander now that I’ve got the Official Footwear.

10. Homemade chiya – the Nepali version of chai: Brew up a pot of black tea (I use Red Rose) with sugar to taste, slices of fresh ginger, and cardamom pods. Drink it like that for kaalo chiya (black tea) or add hot whole milk (1 part milk to 3 or 4 parts chiya is generally good, depending on the strength of your chiya) for dudh chiya. I made a big jar of kaalo chiya, removed the tea bags after they’d steeped, and have been keeping it in the refrigerator to reheat a cup whenever I want some (which isn’t quite four or five times a day, as in Nepal, but it’s been nice to have at tea time).

11. SouleMama’s blog, whence cometh the spur for this post. I’d like to be able to order a future family life out of this enticing catalog. Mine would take place on San Juan Island, but the rest – the cute and clever kids, the crafts, the walks in the woods, the little daily discoveries, the mad photography skills to capture it all – would be much the same.

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.