Thank you, each and every one of you, for your comforting words about Selkie. It’s so hard to believe she’s gone when I’m still vacuuming her fur out from under the table. My parents brought her down for a visit just a week ago when they came to collect another truckload of my grandmother’s furniture from my garage. I’m glad I got to see her so recently, to give her love and pats and praise.

During the effort to move the furniture, my father spent hours breaking down the excess packaging, and the wind blew some heavy cardboard over to squash the tender young lupines I planted in the patch of soil by the garage. I put them out in homage to a favorite book from my childhood, Barbara Cooney’s Miss Rumphius. (I loved saying Rumphius. What a name. Someday I’m going to design a comfy cardigan and call it after that character. I just had the thought that if the book were coming to print today, surely the marketing department would insist on a different title – The Lupine Lady, perhaps. Miss Rumphius isn’t a very enticing and obvious sell to grown-ups.) Anyway, the foliage on one side was all busted, but the main stalk seemed to be bent rather than broken, so we propped it up with a sturdy stick and hoped for the best. Here’s the same plant, ten days later:

Isn’t it marvelous how things grow back?

In an effort to jolly myself out of the glummery of the past week, I finished cutting my Leafy Snowball fabric and laid it all out.

Never mind the little seafoam-green squares; they’re not staying. I’ll find either a more olive-ish green or a grey-blue of similar value. But here’s the thing: I have LOTS of squares left over. I could make this quilt twice as big, and I just might. I’ll need more of the border fabric, which I think I can get; the calico for the back I think is all gone at the store, but I might be able to hunt it down somewhere else. Or I could just have the back be half something else. Here’s a medium-large cat for scale:

You’ll be glad to know I didn’t think about the layout for this quilt for more than the three minutes it took me to crawl around setting down squares willy-nilly. I wish it had more large-print fabrics, but I’m not going to worry about it too much. It seems I’m helpless before an array of beautiful calicoes, so that’s what’s here.

Oh, and lest you should think I’ve stopped knitting entirely: