Life's a Stitch

Not just the yarn, the store itself, many a knitter's dream. Mine came true. After planning a roadtrip with friends from Bremen, Germany to Venice, I asked if Paffenhofen, home of Rohrspatz & Wollmeise, was within reasonable distance of our planned trip. It was meant to be, five minutes off our route on the autobahn, and on a day the shop was open. Come with me on a knitting adventure.

What was it like?

A feast of colour. An hour and a half of woolen bliss.

The store is small, three walls and the front lined with windows with a shelf below. Enter the door. The wall to the left is for yarn called "We are not perfect," seconds with slight flaws, each explained on the label. The wall to the right holds current perfect sockweight stock. The middle of the shop has couches surrounded by baskets of laceweight yarn, all seconds. Under the windowed wall are the clearance skeins. 

There were 29 people, 25 knitters (24 women, 1 man), 2 lost men and 2 employees. It appeared there was a scheduled knitting group in progress. Imagine knitting plus a coffee table filled with German baking. I almost had to pinch myself. Am I really here?

Next post: What I bought and a review of the goods.  

Pattern: Willow by Amelia Lyon

Yarn: Patons Kroy Socks Stripe, 2 skeins Colour: Cyan

Needles: US Size 5

Thoughts: Great pattern! Being a woman of a certain age, with a tendency toward overheating, I've avoided knitting cowls, thinking their close fit might inhibit my ability to pull one off quickly in hot desperation. Au contrare. This one is light in weight and half of the stitches are a lace patten, making it very comfortable. 

This particular Willow only had four repeats of the lace pattern due to the skimpy yardage in each skein. Cast on 150 stitches and ended with 90. It works fine as the yarn has body which gives it some spine. While you knit Willow the thought occurs that you are knitting a cowl for a giraffe, however, it accordions nicely onto itself. 

Made for my sister from yarn my mother gave me this past summer. 

Once again, and in consideration of the this year's blue Christmas, we are going for minimalism. I'm liking it. The best part for me is the cleanup. The ceramic Christmas tree and Nativity take about five minutes of work to dismantle. The essence of the holiday without the stress.

We're still hosting our annual Danish Julefrokost for 16. In preparation, and in recognition of our mixed heritages, we hit our favourite Polish deli:

Two kinds of sausage - double and triple smoked, rye bread, pickled beets, red cabbage, ginger bread cookies, marzipan and poppy seed cake. All that's left are the fish, cheese and the akvavit. Skoal!

Location: Bremen, Germany. Sweet little Nativity sheep in the Schnoor. I believe next door to the place I found the hat from my last post. Bremen is special to us, not just for the location, but for the family we have become close to as the result of the German exchange program in which our daughters were involved 13 years ago.

Location: Willersdorf, Germany. Pottery sheep in the Offnungszeiten Restaurant at the Hotel Rittmayer, that's been run by the same family since the 1700's. Besides their brewery, their pond full of carp is their dining room specialty, strange as it sounds it was the best meal of our trip.

Location: Rome, Italy. We probably walked ten miles that day determined to show Chuck what he missed when his detached retina kept him from accompanying us in 2008. These were located between the Vatican and the Piazza Navona. Following this picture we hit the Pantheon, Trevi Fountain, Spanish Steps, Roman Forum, Colosseum, and the Circus Maximus. Thank goodness for gel insoled shoes.

Location: Monterosse, Cinque Terre, Italy, the day before the floods. It started raining while we were there.

Location: Barcelona, Spain in the window of an optical store. Must have been a knitter involved.

Once, after a trip to Connecticut, I regretted not buying some particularly sweet sheep. This time I bought a pair to remember our trip.  What did I buy?

Location: Murano, Italy. Sweet tiny blown glass sheep. 

Here's the story of the 10,000 mile hat. While strolling Bremen's Schnoor with my friend, Ingrid, she showed me a hat, knitted from Noro Silk Garden, with a price tag of 79 Euro. She told me she's contemplated buying it for two years now. What's a knitter to do? Offer to knit it, of course. 

Blogless Marsha kindly poses for the model shot:

The hat was my travel companion, knit in eight countries, sailing across the Atlantic, accompanying me home to Vancouver, then back to the east coast, finally sent by post back to Germany, hopefully to arrive soon. 

My 10,000 mile hat

Yarn: Noro Silk Garden, 2 skeins Needles: US size 6 

Thoughts: Lots of fun, like a knitting sampler in a hat. Not enough nupps or cables to be exasperating. I'm on my second with so many modifications that I'm sure it qualifies as a new pattern. Photos to follow when finished.  

One last view, with the addition of glass beads from Murano:

In the Pacific Northwest, when prolonged rain stops, within 15 minutes you'll observe cabin fevered people leaving their houses; modern ark passengers after the flood. Walking, washing cars, raking lawns of fallen cedar fronds. 

On Sunday I followed the pack and headed for  the trails of the North Shore mountains. I found, that although sunny, it's a false sense of dryness as the water laden branches still shed their moisture like a wet dog shaking after a bath. I came home fairly soaked. It was still a relief to get back to my trails after the trials of life these past weeks. Thanks again to all, for your comments and messages of comfort.

I've been knitting up a storm and will post about it soon.

….or what I've learned from my mother's death, including, excuse the expression, some cold hard facts:

1. That expression in post title really happens.

2. The cost of medical treatment is high, the orthopedic surgeon's bill alone was $50,000.

3. Some cemeteries close for the winter, not based on temperature or the ability to prepare a grave, but on an arbitrary date, leaving families whose loved one rejected cremation, with no options other than arrangements for "storage." This was very upsetting.

4. My mother didn't have much but stuff in her one bedroom apartment seemed to multiply as we packed it up.

5. What on earth? Why did Mom keep a rotten wisdom tooth in a box of my father's military items? I wonder if she ever opened that box? My friend found pieces of toast in her mother's dresser.

6. The judgement of Solomon, otherwise known as "splitting the baby." When dividing my mother's belongings my husband accused my sister and I of such a crime when we agreed to split Mom's set of castanets. Neither of us will use castanets for their intended purpose, and they were a strong childhood memory – the last remnant of my mother's dancing career,  we took one each.

7. Division of property can be easy. It helps that my mother was fair and equal will-wise, not that she had much, but all that stuff in her apartment, some worthless but sentimental. We played a mixture of Mmm and Uck, a game we used to play as kids looking at food in McCall's magazines. Many of my sister's Mmmm's were my Ucks and vice versa. Most furniture, housewares and clothing were given away. Living 3000 miles away, what could I take? No liquids, 50 lbs of luggage allowed. Couldn't exactly stuff a wooden dresser into a 25" suitcase. Anybody in the New England area want to buy a Hoveround type scooter, used once?

8. Things mysteriously disappear or get misplaced, probably in the confusion of circumstances. How did I throw out the airline ziploc from my purse with all my meds, gels and liquids for my trip? How many times did we search for the keys in my mother's apartment?

9. People are very kind. Despite having to pay an exorbitant bereavement airfare to fly within 24 hours, Delta Airlines must be commended for their cooperation and sensitivity. When one connection was cancelled due to equipment mechanical difficulties, while others were having to wait a day, Delta, knowing my mother was dying, flew us to Boston and arranged for a limo and driver to take us to our destination. Same goes for Enterprise car rentals and Comfort Inn.

10. You can make it easy on your family. My sister and her husband, Chuck and I are talking of prearranging our funerals as our Christmas gifts to each other.

Thank you, thank you everyone, for your kind words. It all happened so quickly I'm still numb. I've joined the sad club of boomer aged women losing their mothers. Our father died in 1972, so long ago, I had forgotten what it was like.

I've just returned from vacation to face the trip you never want to take. Most of us get two such sad opportunities in life, the death of each parent. The first for me occurred when I was 16 and my sister, 12. Our father had a long death from debilitating heart disease. Now, 40 years later, it's our mother's turn. In late September she had routine back surgery, but due to infections leading to sepsis, she has never left the hospital. Three days ago after steady improvement, she refused to continue with treatment unbearable to her, but necessary to help her breath, leading the medical team to recommend hospice care. So here we are helping our mom through her unexpected and difficult journey.

What's the past tense of knit? Knit? Knitted? As in "When I knit my Emerald sweater from Iceland yarn…" 

I'll start over. When I knit my Emerald sweater from Iceland yarn, my chidlhood friend, Rosie, requested a scarf from mint green yarn with the same kind of snowballs. Right, I thought. That's a yarn reqest from a non-knitter. Rosie doesn't knit because she's diagnosed herself with "a hole in her concept imagery," which is an amazingly accurate description of a learning disability. Rosie may not knit, but her intuition was correct, there was a yarn matching her description. She had to travel all the way to the UK via e-bay to find it, but voila!

The yarn required an open pattern to achieve a scarf with some drape. This one was inspired by the scarf Rosie was wearing in our photo circa 1975. And since she loves all things sparkly, as do I, I added Swarovsky crystals to the bottom border.