I’m ready for my close-up… mwah-ha-ha-hah!

And you might suspect it had taken its color cues from this hellebore that I call “Queen of the Night,” although I have no idea if that’s its official name or just my own particular brand of whimsy (and who cares? It suits, don’t you think?)

My daughter will soon be hearing from the colleges to which she applied – yes or no. Needless to say, the stress levels in my household are sufficiently high to power the rooftop solar panels on a cloudy day. She strives for calm, for patience, for perspective, for Ommmmm… but really, who am I kidding? We are all on tenterhooks (just what is a tenterhook, anyway?).

She continues to beat me to the mailbox every afternoon. Yet in a mere two weeks, all the waiting and agonizing will be over. One of the dozen universities that received her application will have the pleasure of her company (and my money) for the next four years – after which, we can only hope, the job market will have improved or – god help us – she’ll want to continue straight into graduate school.

A riot… of violet.

And I love the spot stitch for its resemblance to seed stitch without actually being seed stitch, which – if you ask me – can get a bit tiresome to produce.

The color is totally off in the photo below; earlier photos show the full glory of this silk/merino Sundara yarn much more accurately. That Sundara, I tell you – a total color maestra, and such a lovely person as well! This Aran Silky Merino is a pleasure to work with, sliding softly through the fingers. Already, however, I detect a slight halo on the knitted surface that will eventually dull that lovely sheen… but never enough to dull my pleasure in wearing Guinevere.

I worried initially that I might run out of yarn for this project, but by now it has become clear that I’ll have plenty. Though my intention has always been for this project to have elbow-length sleeves, I could even make them full-length. Now that’s a nice surprise!

Poppy #1 in full bloom

Despite predictions of more rain, we’ve got the sun all to ourselves at the moment.

And the garden likes that.

Very much, from all the evidence around the grounds.

And because I’ve always been terrible at keeping secrets (except when it comes to surprise parties; ask my husband about that sometime…), here they are: These three are metal-backed, domed shank buttons with faceted iridescent rhinestones set in all around. They glint and sparkle with shades of green and turquoise that are set off by the green yarn.

I’ve been holding onto these buttons for years, waiting patiently for the right project to come along. And when I received this yarn (Green Tea Aran Silky Merino) from Sundara as the first installation of her 2009 Sweater Collection yarn subscription, I knew the right yarn had at last arrived. And since I’d been sketching an idea for a new design and waiting until the right yarn for THAT came into my life, it was pretty much a triple whammy of perfection: right yarn, right design, right buttons.

At the top of the button band will be one button that is different from the dome-shaped rhinestone trio; it is vibrant turquoise enamel on brass and equally gorgeous.

This one will be stitched onto the front of the button band, which will be closed underneath by way of a large single snap. This will help prevent the button’s metal edges from fraying the yarn, and the button can be secured in a way that will keep it flat against the body of the cardigan, preventing the dreaded button droop.

I am so excited! Now to finish the cardigan.

Weeding efforts focused on the California poppies that, living up to their name, are doing their best to “pop” up all over the front garden, in and around the roses and deep inside the protective camouflage of the ground covers where they doubtless hope to proliferate unnoticed. Of course, one doesn’t want to eradicate them completely. They do add a certain wild, cheerful – even hedonistic – element to the sedate roses around them. And in recent years we have had large swaths of not only the classic brilliant orange poppies, but delicate pink and white ones as well. So we want to encourage those varieties.

While pulling the worst poppy offenders, I discovered another incipient arrival; this arum variety with its enormous flower spike. That flower, when it blooms, will be nearly black in color, and of a rich, velvety texture that is both unusually gorgeous and gorgeously unusual.

Sadly, the orchids in their gigantic pots on the back terrace did not fare well this winter. Several hard frosts in January and early February killed off most of the new growth, leaving me only one surviving specimen – and as you can see, even this one doesn’t look too healthy.

Too much frost, not enough sun… we droop in protest.

Finally, along the back fence is a clematis planted three years ago as a tiny rooting. It didn’t do much to impress me during either its first or its second year in the garden. This year, however, I see hopeful signs that it has finally settled in and will produce some of the spectacular white blooms it is known for.

Do you realize what is happening on Sunday? (Actually, Saturday night if your household is like mine.) Here’s what is happening… we will all – except for residents of Arizona, of course – move our clocks forward an hour as we launch into Daylight Savings Time. Which gets longer and longer every couple of years.

First, Ronald Reagan moved up the start of Daylight Savings Time from the end of April to early April, and in my opinion it was one of the precious few GOOD things he accomplished during his presidency. Then Dubya moved it up again, from the first Sunday in April to the second Sunday in March. The return in the fall to Standard Time moves out concurrently, getting a few weeks later each time one of our pitiful Republican presidents (realizing belatedly that most of the country despises him and thinks less than favorably of his “accomplishments” while in office) feels the need to do something memorable – something that will jog people to think, “Well, at least he did THAT. At least I can drive home from work in October and it’s still light outside when I get there.” Like that. Woo-hoo!

I’m not complaining. I LIKE it when the days feel longer. It makes it seem that summer can’t be that far off. I like it even when I find myself outside weeding at 7 o’clock (instead of making dinner like I should be) because the persistent sunshine got me all disoriented. The only thing I don’t like about it is that for several weeks it is still totally dark outside when I get up in the morning. Seriously, at 6 am in northern California in late March, it is still pitch black outside. The moon is still hanging around in the sky, not even coming in off the night shift yet, as if to say, “What the heck are you doing out of bed already?”

How gorgeous am I? You can call me “Queen of the Night” Hellebore.

This particular colorway is “Green Tea,” one of the colors available during her Sweater Club offering. This yarn collection was my holiday gift last year, and it is definitely a gift that keeps on giving.

When I have a flash available, I’ll photograph the fabulous vintage buttons that will fasten this sweater; they were given to me by a friend years ago, when her grandmother died and my friend inherited the button box. Now that’s an inheritance worth having! It was full of special buttons for which my friend had no use, so she gifted them to me and I’ve been saving them for projects that are equally special… such as this one.

Blush-colored flowering quince, fresh out of the shower.

I did it! Though it took nearly a week to dry on the blocking board, the Stripey Noro V-Neck sweater officially joined the ranks of my finished objects by the end of February. After watching those glorious colors snake through my fingers for the better part of three weeks, I am as much in love with them as ever. And after blocking, the combination of Cash Iroha and Silk Garden is even softer and more delicious next to the skin: the ultimate cozy wearable.

And guess who has oh-so-casually hinted that she just might adopt it as her own, despite my determination to keep this one for myself?

This looks so much better on me than it does on my mom!

Just take a good look at the smiling teenaged model above and you’ll have your answer. Sigh…

Spent yesterday all day at Stitches West, sadly camera-less, but absolutely gobsmacked at the variety and loveliness of the yarn and notions available. I kept a fairly tight rein on my wallet, but even so I did end up succumbing to a couple of irresistible stash enhancing purchases. Now that I am in the market for a new camera – my heretofore trusty Canon PowerShot S70 suddenly and quickly declined in function from merely “quirky” to “unsalvageable” – posts for the first part of March will unfortunately suffer from either a total absence of photos or a replay of the last batches I was able to eke out of the camera before it went kaput.

So the rain let up, just for today, and the sun came out. A reminder that in a couple of months, we will look back on the deluge of the last couple of weeks and wish we’d gotten still more rain. Meanwhile, taking advantage of the golden light while the sun shines, I hurried outside with camera in hand.

There’s a corner of the garden in the back where the daphne and hellebores are in full, gloriously perfumed, flower. And where the violets have formed a carpet of delicate color under the still-bare branches of the old pear tree. The fragrance is sublime, refined (unlike the heavy scent of a few renegade hyacinths around the corner), tantalizing and then fading each time the breeze picks up to disperse it throughout the garden. I spotted these double – make that triple – violets, just a little patch of them off by themselves, their frilly petticoat petals the palest shade of lavender blushed with cream. Where they came from is anybody’s guess.

And these little lanterns, waxy cascades against the brilliant green of their leaves. Lovely.

My latest NaKniSweMoDo project, the Stripey Noro V-neck, is moving swiftly along. Yes, I know that will be two sweaters completed in February and that makes me sound like an obnoxious over-achiever, but the Lotus cardigan was already a WIP when I picked it up again, with only the bottom half of the body left to complete. Now for the truly new project, the V-neck sweater body is done (goodness, I love circular needles!) and the first sleeve is well underway.

I hoped to have it ready to wear during my upcoming trip to NY, but suspect it will be my plane project instead. I just don’t knit that fast; with three hand and finger surgeries behind me, it will always be necessary to take frequent stretching breaks. As it is, my fingers are already depressingly uncooperative when I first wake up in the morning.

Still, an hour working on a project like this is almost as good (and not nearly as caloric) as a bar of my favorite chocolate. The colors literally make me smile, gloriously sherbet and sunset-toned as they are.

At this time of year, it’s easy to understand why landscapers refer to this kind of retaining wall as “moss rock.”

I counted at least four, and possibly six different varieties of moss and lichen growing on these rocks that line our front walk, all of which have appeared as a result of the torrential rains we’ve had for the last week or so.

It’s really as if these rocks have come alive: their contours shift and blur, and their newfound green brilliance makes a stunning contrast to the dark mulched ground.