brief summer in the bay and the swallowtail shawl

hello all!

I guess it's been awhile! Summer arrived… well, for a few days anyway… here in Berkeley. We had a week (almost) of global-warming-inspired, freakish, humid heat, and I spent as much of it outdoors as was humanly possible. Now it's grey again, as is to be expected of summer in the Bay.

That's me out at the Albany Bulb – a local favorite of East Bay-ers everywhere, but particularly those with dogs. Do I have a dog? No. I wish. But I do have a client who runs a company called Metro Dog, doing boarding and training and walking and such things for lucky Bay Area doggies…







So I went for a walk with said client on a sunny day out at the Bulb, and visited the constantly shifting outdoor gallery of, I supposed what must be considered to be Outsider Art.

I think the story goes something like there was quite a large – what, colony? – community of homeless folks living out on the Bulb, which juts out from Albany in a particularly Bay Area landfilly kind of a way.

Most of them have moved on now, but they left behind an incredible sculpture garden of statues and murals made of / painted on the random urban detritus which society throws away and never thinks about again.

The place is constantly changing, like a dreamscape out of the Sandman or something, like a living thing. Faces materialize out of the broken concrete, wings sprout up into the sky. It's a fabulous place to take a walk when you're feeling a bit low on inspiration.

I guess it reminds me that if you have the eyes to see, then life is just chock full of little surprises and unexpected beauty. It's greatly augmented by a sunny day, of course, but even in the fog and the cold (like the fog and the cold which have descended again this week) a cheery kind of magic still occurs in funny little ways.


Well, on the knitting front, I started my swallowtail shawl. And boy, is it a b*tch! Lace is a challenging thing.

The Malabrigo Laceweight is a pleasure to work with, which is a good thing, because if it weren't, I'd have thrown the whole piece out the bloody window. Have any of you done this pattern? Anybody want to enlighten me as to why the Lily of the Valley border patterns NEVER add up properly? No matter how many times I count or how closely I follow the chart… dammit.

This picture shows the scarf before I got to the bleeding difficult part. The little leaves were a pleasure to knit. This border… well, all I can say is, at least the variegations of the yarn hide some of the wiggliness I have knitted into the shawl.

What else can I tell you lovely people? Oh if any of you reading this live in the East Bay, please come and join me and my client Síle Convery of knit-one-one at Rudy's Can't Fail Cafe tomorrow night at 6:30. We're having our bi-monthly (or rather…twice monthly, I can never remember the proper word for that) knit-out night. Great fun, really! And really good meatloaf (yes such a thing is possible!) at Rudy's on Wednesday night special.

Maybe I'll see you there!