I haven’t worked on any knitting since the tragic Honeybee Sweater for Rose (I figured it out at last, and she loves it…she had better!). After all that, I needed a break, but I’m so happy to be knitting again. 

This knitting is not for myself.  If you can picture it, still at the unformed stage that it is currently in and crowded among the vegetables and carrot seeds in the table, it will be a February Lady Sweater in beautiful navy blue Falkland Aran wool, though i make the sleeves long, with reductions, and shape the sides of the cardigan to be less swingy.

Last fall I made one for myself in lavender colored Cascade wool, just before my friend Danica moved far away to the Northwest coast. She liked it so much that i offered to make her one as well, and I’m so happy to be knitting for her. 

Something about growing up in a college town, i guess, but my friends always move away. I first met Danica at a mutual friend’s going away party! Her family had recently been living in different parts of Africa, and her three children were close in age to my three children. 

We both home school, knit and crochet and sew, love gardening and fresh vegetables, cook from scratch, enjoy reading and poetry (and strangely, shared an early-in-life enthusiasm for Russian literature), let our children experience nature, and have artistic aspirations, though she is more industrius about it than i am. 

While she was here in town we often got our families together for lunches and dinners and birthday parties, and collaborated on art and cooking projects for home school. We traded books and  drank tea and talked about all sorts of things.

We have differences, of course.  She loves growing flowers, while i am a practical gardener, and grow mostly edibles.  But she inspired me to make the raised permanent beds into a flower garden, and I’ve found that I love growing flowers!

Life is just not the same since they have moved all the way across the country, but they are really loving living close to family and settling into their own house after many years of crazy trans-Atlantic moves, and we have been keeping in touch by letters – not emails, but real, old fashioned, handwritten letters!

It is just SO fun to get a real letter in the mail! Sometimes they are brief and written on construction paper handy from homeschooling, sometimes they get to be several pages long and i find time to send along a pretty card as well. 

There is just nothing like old fashioned correspondence in our modern life.  It’s been so fun that we have started trading letters with another good friend who moved very far away as well.

With all this rainy weather, knitting, even in June, has been a comfortable occupation, and I’m looking forward to sending a beautiful finished sweater along with a letter one of these days. 

Soon, as long as the kittens keep out of my knitting basket! They were evicted from the house a few weeks ago because of unspeakable things they had done, but they are still romping into the kitchen as much as possible. I’ve had to rejoin the yarn more than once so far because of them!