Blogging sister Annie Modesitt's handknit hood.

SOMETHING HAPPENS IN SEPTEMBER that tips off a wave across the Northern hemisphere, turning otherwise attentive women away from the bandaging of knees, backing them off from stuffing picnic baskets, and discouraging the raising of their hands to volunteer to score at scholastic sports events. A harbinger of fall, this tidal shift begins with one woman, and for years I’ve been trying to spot her: the first to go, the very first, and like those marvelous people who have lifelong bird lists and travel the world in search of the very last example of a single species, I do the opposite, searching each year for the very first of this breed of woman. This year, I found her.

There she was, at a local Single A baseball game, one chilly night, exactly two weeks ago, nodding every once in a while to her family, paying just enough attention to the game, whatever lines on her lovely face utterly smoothed by the deep satisfaction of having a very long, sharp stick in each hand, and a ball of wool in her lap: September’s first knitter. And soon, just like red and yellow maple leaves, I saw them everywhere.

Perhaps it’s a temperature thing, but whatever it is, while in some parts of the world the wind may indeed be called “Mariah,” or perhaps whisper “Mary,” into the heads of millions right now wafts a tune that can be sung to the rhythm of “knit one, purl one,” and the soon the socks and sweaters and hats are flying off the needles.

I knit. My sister does not. It’s very much a She Said, She Said, aspect of our lives. But ever since I started blogging, I have blogging knitting sisters, from newyorkminknit, to fromgarden2table, with café-eclectic.net, roadchick, and ironneedles, and all the rest of you who have given advice, cheered on my projects, and joined us on ravelry. So, sisters: rejoice. We are back in the woolery, and I for one am delighted to be face down in the soft and scratchy aspects of life.

I’m here to tell you, however, that while I failed miserably at my last project, I am about to rip it out and turn it into a reproduction of a favorite sweater purchased more than 25 years ago. And that’s just one reason why I love knitting. I mean, it’s a lot harder to repurpose the ingredients of a failed chocolate cake than it is an elaborate shawl.

To brighten up my skills, I’ll take a class in October from one of the sisters we met along the way, Annie Modesitt, when she visits my neck of the woods. (How about that hood up top? You can get all Annie’s patterns here.) And after that? A friend gives birth at the end of November (baby hat!), there are holiday socks to be made, and my oh my, there is that sweater I’ll have again to love and love.

I’m not the only one who looks forward to this time of year, of course. My husband does, as well, suggesting as he does each September that “things go better,” when I pick up my needles again, and like most things said in a marriage you’d like to wake up to tomorrow, I don’t ask him what he means by that, but knit along, just nodding every once in a while in his direction. The perfect marital aid.

Hear that contented sigh on the breeze? I’m sure you do.

What’s on your needles?

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WE’RE GETTING JIGGY WITH TURKEY here on The Sister Project.  If, like me, you do not relegate turkey to a mere once a year, but instead make it more often, you probably have more than a few recipes in your stash. And, if your recipes are like mine, some of them are better than others. Recently, in search of yet another method, I wiled away hours reading my mother-in-law’s recipe box. And whammo: What I found might shock you.

It’s the Paul Evans T-shirt method for cooking turkey, or so it says on the card, in my mother-in-law’s lovely script. I am not making this up. The nicest people, my in-laws, but wowza, they made some wild stuff, including that Spam Chop Suey, and-just in case you haven’t seen it yet-the Popcorn Turkey recipe supplied by Uncle Wayne, from the collection of his wife, Allene, (also my mother’s name, but don’t that that throw you, when there’s popcorn and t-shirts to do so).  So here’s another to add to that maybe-you-will-maybe-you-won’t try this at home recipe list.

Paul Evans T-Shirt Turkey

• Set oven to 500 degrees
• Dip t-shirt in melted butter
• Drape over stuffed turkey
• As soon as it starts to cook well turn oven down to 325 degrees.

When I emailed my husband that I was back in his mother’s recipes, writing about this particular dish, he replied: “The Rev. Paul Evans was a BIG guy. He wore a big T-shirt. Could handle quite the turkey.”

The whole family is really lovely, and normal–I promise. Except perhaps for the Spam Chop Suey, and the T-Shirt Turkey, and the Popcorn Turkey and–well, hmmmm.

Help me out, sisters; send me the antidote: One simple, plain-as-you-please, method for roasting a turkey to counteract this madness. Or, what the hell, go on: Send me another in the list of maybe-nots, and knock my hand-knit socks off.

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I NEED A DIFFERENT OLDER SISTER. If I had one, she would know how I should fix this sweater. Margaret does not. And she doesn’t even like the sweater, so we’re done.

Well, really we’re not really done, because despite the fact that Margaret doesn’t knit, somewhere out there is a sister who will step in with the skills to tell me what to do.

I’ve previously gotten all kinds of good advice on other needling issues on our knitalong group on Ravelry, as well as wonderful feedback here on TSP when I suggested we all knit ourselves new wombs. So I just know that someone can tell me what to do. (I’m used to that; on other issues I simply turn to Margaret. Co-dependent? Who cares?! We get the jobs done.)

So: Hot-water wash? Reknit the neck? The dreaded dryer? The problem, as you can see, is that the cotton sweater knit, oh, now 15 years ago, has stretched out so much in the neck that it practically slips off both shoulders; it always slips off one.

Thoughts? Please knitters: Unite and help a sister.

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SOCKS AND SWEATERS? WHY? When you can have a brand new, bright pink uterus! After reporting that I had knit mere socks following my recent fibroid surgery, several knitting sisters emailed me an alternate suggestion of what a perfectly sane woman such as myself might instead have preferred to have on her needles during such a time. Do I hear the call for another Ravelry knitalong? (Thanks to the archives of Knitty for the image, by M.K. Carroll.)

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I KNIT, SHE DOESN’T. It’s one of the stories of our she said, she said lives. The fact is that I have a sweater/sock/hat/something for every high-emotional holy day of my adult life.

There is my “bullet-proof” sweater I knit myself when I was still single to stitch while talking myself away from a relationship that was killing me (no real guns involved; clever people, we wielded only emotional projectiles). There is my-mother-in-law’s funeral sweater knit on the drive to and from Indiana. (Before that there was the my-mother-in-law-gets-diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease sweater, knit on the drive to-and-from Indiana to label her kitchen drawers and simplify her life; I barely got to wear one when I had to put the next one on the needles.) There’s the Gulf War sweater, knit while I sat semi-stunned by a war with commercial breaks. Fibroid-surgery-socks, and the cat-just-died hat; don’t get me wrong, I knit during happy times, too, but those projects rarely get named.

Until now. Now everything I knit I’ll be naming after my online sisters, ever since Paige started a knitalong group on Ravelry, that uber-deluxe knitting community. (You will need an “invitation” to join Ravelry; just a formality, so don’t be put off.) Now my sweaters/socks/hats will all have the prefix of TSP, as in our group, appropriately named thesisterprojectknits.

Which is where I met Needles of Iron, as she likes to be called. And she, in turn, introduced all of us—via her blog—to her sister (that’s them together a few years ago, tee hee, in a photo from Needles of Iron’s post). This is worth its weight in cashmere.

Sisters, knitting. Knitting sisters. Got a sister who just won’t knit? Don’t despair: Join up, grab a sister, and knit on.

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