We celebrated Hanukkah this weekend past in our own style. Fried foods are traditional. We did crab cakes. Not traditional by a long shot, but tasty none the less.

The Resident Male, finding himself at the fish shop buying the crab was tempted by some beautiful Bluepoint oysters. So he brought home four as a special grownups-only treat.

So there we were, happily slurping down our excellent oysters, when I thought I found a bit of shell. Not uncommon in oysters opened by amateurs*. But it wasn’t shell.

It was a pearl.

A natural pearl. Far from gem grade, but round and pearly enough to qualify, even though you can see a bit of the gravel that inspired it sticking out from one end.

I’ve put my tiny pearl next to a strand of cultured pearls for size comparison. I’ve joked about finding a pearl, and have known it was remotely possible. But I’d never heard of anyone actually finding one. So what to do with my inferior but extremely lucky pearl? Wear it for luck, of course. I’m thinking of getting a tiny silver charm in the shape of a cage to keep it in.

And I’ll probably make the traditional latkes tonight.

As far as knitting goes, I’m trying to zip through the remainder of a pair of socks, plus get a start on the foraging cap (in the style of a Liberty or voyageur’s cap) for my re-enactor friend. I’ve got a nice hand-spun wool fingering weight single, in a color sort of between forest and teal, with a touch of black. I would have preferred a barn red, but the red I had was heathered with too much white and from a distance read “pink.” Shown here are my larval beginnings (I’m working on the area that when finished will be the facing in the earband, plus the too-pink yarn. Gauge here is between 5.75 and 6 stitches per inch. I’ve got 130 on the needles, and am getting a band big enough to fit a 23″ circumference head. There’s some allowance for stretch and the hat will be double thick at the earband, but I don’t want to make it so tight that the wearer will get a headache. You can see just a bit of provisional cast-on peeking out at the bottom of that dark green wiggle:

Other than that, I am finishing up yet another pair of gift socks. This one from Schoeller+Stahl Fortissma Colori/Socka Color, color #5.

* We follow the safer Julia Child oyster method (learned while watching her on TV). It involves identifying the hinge and using the pointy end of a bottle opener to dislocate it. Then using a thin, sharp knife – winkling it into the opening made by the unhinging and running it around the oyster inside to scrape it top and bottom from its shell.

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