From the very first moment, the very first touch, the fiber spoke. Through every moment of spinning, through each and every stitch of knitting, the fiber spoke. It didn’t matter that the finished yarn wasn’t exactly the gauge called for, or that I used a needle size smaller than called for. It didn’t matter that the pattern was one that had never appealed to me previously, or that it was so riddled with errors, even with the errata, that normally I would have frogged the entire thing and been done with it. No. The fiber spoke and I quietly listened.

With each stitch, each row, the fiber told me a story. I wasn’t sure if at first it was the artistic hand of Delia at play. She dyed the fiber, named the color way “Seafoam” and presented it to me as a gift. Or maybe the undyed fiber had spoken to her as well, telling her which colors to use, what memories to invoke, what magic lay within what it wanted to be.

In my hands, dreams of waves rolling gently into the shoreline filled my every thought. The light foam carried to touch the sand on a breezy day, the taste of the salty air on my tongue. Even the bulbous seaweed so often found on the shore found it’s way into the colors, that wonderful greenish brown that I had seen so often on the beaches in the San Francisco Bay Area. With each stitch, I could feel the warm sand beneath my bare feet, I could hear each wave coming in, and I could feel the gentle ocean breeze tossing my hair into my face.

Slowly, the Faroese style shawl took shape. I lingered in the memories it shared, and in the story it told. It wasn’t a surprise when I noticed that it had even echoed the lines left in the sand when the tide recedes in the shaded stripes that took hold. She even managed to make Spurg gasp when he saw her in all of her finished glory. He declared her beautiful.

She fits on me “just right”, even though she is slightly smaller that she should have been if the correct weight yarn had been used. When I wear her, she paints a picture for me, of myself standing on the beach, just at dusk as the day begins to cool.

I can see myself, closing my eyes, with my face up to the sky, trying to feel the last bit of warmth from the fading sunlight’s glow, as the breeze dances across my face.

And if I am quiet enough, if I am still enough, I can even hear the seagulls crying off in the distance as they search for their evening meal.

When the fiber speaks, I am going to listen. I am going to enjoy the magic that unfolds… and listen to the stories that it has to tell.