Coincidence

(Spoiler alert: if you haven’t opened/received your Knit Love Club parcel for March yet, be warned that there’s a pic of the yarn in this post.)

Yarn. Lovely yarn. It comes in all sorts of blends – merino, cashmere, silk, angora, alpaca. (Lurex, nylon, acrylic, but we won’t talk about those.) It comes in many colours – rich reds, angelic blues, peachy yellows, solid colours, semi-solids, and riotous blends of colours you think would never work together but, somehow, do. And those colours have some curious names. Yes, there are some traditional (‘bluebell’, ‘cherry’, and the like), but many are from the nail varnish school of naming: at the moment my pale gold nails are, according to the bottle, swathed in shade ‘Buy me a Cameo’.

Take these three randomly selected beauties from my stash.

From left to right, that’s some silk laceweight from Fyberspates, colour ‘Majic’. The sock yarn from Knitsch in the centre is ‘Chelsea’. And the Knitting Goddess offering on the right is ‘Rococo’.

On the needles at the moment – my biggest project to date, a laceweight Icarus Shawl (on the cover of this book) – is some ‘Charlot’ from Yarn D’Amour. It looks like this.

(I’m up to 330+ stitches per row. And I still love it. Mostly. I’m having to make myself work to a ‘4 rows per day’ target though, so I don’t get seduced by projects offering instant gratification. If you want to see how it works out, drop back around June 2014 by which time I might be done.)

So, that’s the background. On to the coincidence part.

I belong to a sock club and every couple of months I receive a skein of yarn and a pattern to knit with it. The yarn and pattern are exclusive to the club so each time there’s an informal knitalong happening, as we all knit the socks and discuss the pattern online, and post photos of our progress on Ravelry. (If you don’t knit you may find it difficult to understand how much fun belonging to a sock club is. Trust me, it rocks.)

The day after we went to the hospital to talk about whether to continue herceptin or not, and found out about the Persephone trial, and decided to call it a day with the treatment, the Sock Club parcel was posted out. The yarn is a squishy, springy, pink and green concoction from Brooklyn Handspun. (Nora took the photo and I’m grateful to her for letting me use it.)

And the colourway?

Persephone.

Now, I don’t want to believe in a universe that cleverly organises for a drug trial to be called Persephone, and a yarn colourway to be called Persephone, purely so that the yarn can remind me that I’ve made the right decision. If the universe was that organised, surely it would just, y’know, make it so that the cancer didn’t happen to begin with. (Or maybe the universe has a tendency to micro-manage.)

But when I saw what the colourway was, I had a little moment where I believed that the universe had, in fact, flicked a little bit of reassurance my way. It was a drive-by grin, a wink as my world held a door open. It made me smile. I’m still smiling.

These are going to be the best socks ever.