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Although I am a very literate person. I stink at Scrabble annd cross word puzzles.

Thus, I'm finding it a challenge to come up with a name for my blog. Looking for something wry and whimsical, yet evocative of being handcrafted. The shop may be a knitting store. Or it may be a book store focused on one or two genre. Or it may be a combination of the above.

Send any or all suggestions along to this blog.

My hope is to come up with a name that could be the title for my blog as well as the name of the business.

Names I like: a yarn company called Alchemy Yarn of Transformation, the Knitche (a knitting shop near me), Purl, KnitOne. Names that aren't to my liking: Have Ewe Any Wool, Chicks with Sticks, Black Sheep Yarns.

My dream name would be as wonderful as the names of shops and characters in Harry Potter. I love that Rowling plays with the meanings of words as she labels the storefronts. Flouish and Blott's for school supplies? Hogsmeade for the name of the town where the students imbibe? Madame Pince as the librabrian (get it. . . pince nez)? Lortd Voldemort - sort of a vol de vent with death as the end product?

Yesterday I played with combinations of words, trying to get that Rowling, ironic, poetic feel to my shop's name.

But honestly, the mind is blank. . .

I have been in a frenzy of dyeing yarn for the last two days, and it is beautiful. The yarn started out as a white bamboo from Habu Textiles in New York, and the project is for one of my assistants. She runs very warm, so I needed something other than wool for her shawl.

I played with some Knit-Cro-Sheen from Hobby Lobby and Dylon dye first. Not color fast, and the yarn just didn't have any sheen to it, despite the name.

Next, I craved some amazing yarn at my local yarn store. Something called SeaSilk - at $35 for 400 yards, but in the colors Jeannine requested (blue is her favorite, but she says she looks good in "jewel tones" - hmm). Still, I had to make myself walk away from it.

Then I had the brilliant idea of dyeing my own yarn. At $3 an ounce, the bamboo seemed much cheaper. And being the Type A type that I am, I immediately started planning my own yarn company of handdyed but affordable luxury fibers. (If you know a good source for wholesale bamboo, cotton or silk, please let me know!)

Never mind that by the time I'd bought the yarn, paid tax and shipping, and bought PrcionMX dyes, soda ash, urea (yup - it keeps the yarn wet while the dye penetrates), and Synthrepol, I'd spent over $50.

But isn't color wonderful? There's something meditative about pouring the dye, working it into the yarn, rolling it up, and then waiting. And there's definitely something restorative in seeing a plain white yarn become something new.

I think that we all need color. Not metaphorically, but literally. I consistently used to wear only black. Then I started accumulating pieces of jewelry full of color and texture: an African wedding bead bracelet with chunky, lightbulb shaped beads in reds and blues and greens; a beautiful Alexis Bittar necklace with rough pieces of semiprecious stones in pinks and pale blues and lavender; a wide silver cuff-like bracelet from a little Tibetan gift shop next to a restuarant in St. Paul, clustered with lapis and opals and turquoise.

And slowly, my clothes have become more colorful. Not clownlike, but how can you not smile when you look down and see red Mary Janes on your feet?

But back to the shawl for Jeannine: I'm swatching the Kimono Shawl from Folk Shawls by Oberle on a size 7 circular needle. The swatch is blocking as I write, and now I get to have a cup of chamomile tea, read The Art of Detection by Laurie R. King, and put my jammies on and crawl into bed.

I just finished playing with some Dyelon cold water dye and some 99 cent mercerized crochet cotton from Hobby Lobby. The goal is to create something close to the incredibly beautiful Sea Silk (hand dyed silk at $35 a skein) that I craved at the knitting shop today.

I made a stock solution of three different blues, then diluted each color to half strength. Soaked the yarn (after skeining) in room temp vinegar water. Then I laid the hanks out on saran wrap on the kitchen table and started pouring, working the colors into the yarn with my fingers, sopping up puddles of dye with the yarn as they occurred.

Since this is a cold process, I've rolled the yarn up into a sausage shape. Let it sit for 1 hour (the package direction advise agitating the fabric in the dye for 15 min., then letting it sit for 45 min. in the dye bath), rinse in cool water, and then behold the results.

If it works, cost of the project in mind (a lace shawl for Jeannine): $20 instead of $60 or more.

What I would really love to try dyeing: the bamboo yarn at Habu Textiles in New York. It's semi-affordable, looks beautiful, and this is a yarn store to support: it's Japanese in origin, and everything from the packaging to the fibers to the website is exquisite and unusual. You can't order over the Web (need to fax, email or write) and the yardage/skein weight is a little confusing, so I'm procrastinating. This is dfinitely a booth to check out at the traveling knitting shows - incredible artworks, very special kits, and it's just a visual and tactile treat.

Taught yoga for the second time since being sick again. The more that I teach, the more that I am convinced that yoga is a metaphoric experience. By working through the physical, you absorb tricky concepts like patience or compassion or balance. Seems about the body at first. Then you begin to notice that all of the corporeal elements have a metaphoric import for the mind. Can I balance? Yep, but only if I'm not rigidly holding myself in place. In fact, the more that I can adjust to change - for example, the way that my blood pumping and my lungs expanding and contracting will affect my pose - the more likely I am to be able to balance. Ohhh, yeah, balance is about accepting change.

Maybe it's like soaking a sponge in water. It changes, becomes heavier, wetter, fuller, but it's still a sponge. When you practice the poses of yoga (the asanas), you begin to absorb the meaning of intellectual concepts by playing them through the body. You're still you, but different.

I may not be clear here. I guess what amazes me is how often what I am trying to achieve in a pose represents - or acts out - the way that the mind could tackle the same question.

My favorite part of having a CT scan is the cunning little icon on the machine that tells you to breathe or hold your breath. It's on a screen over your head as you slide into the doughnut hole part of the machine. When you are supposed to breathe, you see a happy green PacMan face with a little open mouth. Hold your breath is even better: PacMan in orange, pursing his lips together like he might burst like a balloon.

Least favorite part: when the tech injects the apparently radioactive stuff that lights up your innards so that they can see what's working and what's not. It's like an extreme hot flash that reaches into your fingertips, the back of your throat, your pelvis. It's not the sensation so much as the suspicion about what's now racketing about one's bloodstream.

Best medicine: off to a matinee of "Cars." It's hard to relax after a CT scan. . .perhaps Milk Duds and cartoons will help?

I've been trying to learn to wait. Waiting, for me, has almost a physical quality; it's heavy, irritating like a too warm wool sweater on a hot autumn day. Waiting goes against every grain of my being; moving, driving, walking, cleaning up (generally referred to as a "cleaning frenzy" in my house because it takes place rarely and when it does happen, it has the force of wanting all mess and clutter gone NOW), shopping, anything to fill the time from when I wake up to that hour around sunset when things are allowed to slow down.

The strange thing is that I am an advocate of quiet. I believe that sitting still, reading, lying in the hammock watching the sky, are very important Things to Do. I teach yoga, for God's sake, and I spend each week urging my students to slow down, to let there be empty spaces in their daily lives when they can stop and notice what is around them.

But taking my own advice is not so easy. I say that I have two speeds: constantly moving and asleep.

Lately, however, I've had to try to develop a new speed. I've been sick the last six months, on and off. It started out all crisis oriented and surgical and completely unexpected, and has metamorphosed into a succession of ups and downs, with two more trips to the hospital and more and more time spent at home, waiting to get better.

So, I've been waiting. Waiting to get better, waiting to find out why I keep getting sick, waiting for results on tests, waiting to get through the day, waiting. Most of all, waiting for some meaning to emerge from the mist, for a lightbulb to go on so I can say that I get it, I get why this has been happening. And having gotten it, then, logically, I could change the pattern, do something different or not do something old, and find myself back on some sort of path.

One thing that I have learned is that I want answers to the mysteries. Control freak or a reader of too many novels? I'm firmly rooted in a worldview narrative culture; I want a beginning, a middle, and a denouement to each story. So I'm waiting to see the arc of this plot, but my big fear and, at moments of honesty, my knowledge is that there won't be a resolution, or a grand speech that illuminates all that has gone before. I'll be lucky if I get a little bit of insight, certainly no parting of the Red Seas or thunderbolts.

In the meantime, really good hot fudge sundaes help to pass the time and to make the waiting have lightness. Also, laughing. Also, watching at least four Veronica Mars episodes on DVD in a row, preferably with one of my daughters. Also, yoga. In no particular order.