Twisted Threads

This post has also been written for a while, but was postponed for the same reason as the previous one.

I actually got to go to a fibre show!

Unfortunately I felt like shit, having come down with something deeply phlegmy which has made me lose my voice. I was determined to go, since I'd booked myself a day of annual leave, so I dragged myself out of the house and down to Ealing Common to sit on the Picadilly line for 45 minutes. When I reached Wood Green, there were friendly people in fluorescent green vests showing us where to catch either the W3 or the free shuttle bus. Now, there were enormous queues of elderly ladies at both bus stops, and I couldn't see myself determinedly taking my seat on a bus and preventing one of them from sitting down. I walked, which would have been fine if the phlegm hadn't been in residence. Fortunately the walk up the hill is rewarded by a view of London (hard to get. London is amazingly flat) and only one shuttle-bus passed me, so it was almost certainly quicker than waiting.

The show itself was mad and lovely and crawling with every type of fibre fanatic you can imagine. I bought some small leaflets and a little kit from some braiding people. I stared longingly at batik and shibori. I resisted Shilasdair yarn in both organic cotton and silk, and then went back and resisted them again at the end of the day when I still had money left. I did buy some insane knitted silk fabric (in the gum) from Texere, and I intend to play with it and dye it because I have Kool Aid and I can.

I also bought some yarn from Habu. I first heard of Habu in the context of stainless steel yarn, but I have never made it to New York. They have serious, proper, mad yarn and I love them. I bought some silk out of which to make a bag, I think, and a sample bag to play with. I love that they had sample bags, and I can imagine that I'm going to be sending them an envelope at some point with a letter which says: what is this? and can I please have some more? Although using their website I have figured out three of my 4 mystery yarns:

Clockwise from top left:
A-130 alpaca knitted yarn in 04 - Charcoal
A-110 tsumugi silk combination in 19 - pink/yellow/black
Unknown laceweight, smells as if it has wool in it
A-22 Silk Gima in 03 - Charcoal

The 4 balls of silk are
A-111 tsumigi silk combination in 7 - Navy, 10 - Camel

I was very systematic, and I'm pretty sure I went to each stall at least once. There were so many ideas, so many beatiful things to look at and so many lovely textures to touch. It's probably a good thing that I don't get to go to many of these, as I think the number of WIPs might grow exponentially if they were available more often.

Norwegian Fibre Adventures

I wrote this post a while ago, but I hadn't taken any relvant pictures, and work has been more than usually ridiculous. 60 hour weeks. That sort of thing.

So, fibre adventures in Norway.
I didn't get to do as much as I would have liked, but I did get to do more than I'd planned, so I can't complain.

The first fibre related thing I did was to buy some gloves. We took the ferry over from Tørvikbygd to Jondal in order to go and visit the glacier. Just outside the ferry car park there was a little charity shop (I think) full of hand-knitted and crocheted things. My hands were cold, and the fingerless gloves fit my silly little hands. Plus, they're sort of sweet, and like absolutely nothing I would ever knit.

Exhibit A

At the nearest town of reasonable size (Norheimsund) there was a lovely yarn shop which I spent some time in. I eventually bought this Ego Tweed yarn because it was just so lovely. I have no idea what to do with it, but that's what stash is for, isn't it? They had lots of other lovely yarns, but I have come to the realisation that moving back to Australia really means that I should be looking for cotton and silk yarns, or thinking about making bags. For all practical purposes, the number of scarves I need in Australia is zero. (Well, maybe one if I plan on taking a winter holiday in New Zealand.)

I did visit a couple of yarn shops in Bergen, but although they did have lovely yarn, there wasn't anything I needed. Plus, since we spent rather longer than intended at the place of interest mentioned below, we were rather strapped for time.

My partner pointed out to me that there was a advert for the Norwegian Knitting Industry Museum on our tourist map, and that it was just north of Bergen. I have no idea what possessed her to mention this, but I'm grateful that she did. We went there. They seemed rather surprised to see us, but gave us a tour anyway (I suspect they mainly cater to school groups). The flat knitting machines were cool. The circular knitting machines were cool. The drum carders were not only cool, but seriously pretty. The spinning, winding and plying machines also had a certain cool quality. There was a film about the factory's history, which indicated that they mainly manufactured men's underwear from a cotton/wool mix until they started being unable to compete with the Asia. They were saved briefly in the 70s by a fashion obsession with 'icelandic' sweaters, which they were able to make easily and fairly cheaply, but eventually had to close down. There was fine-gague knitting goodness and a lot of 19th century machinery. What more could a girl want? This girl, anyway.

33

It's my birthday today. I've got laryngitis (proper coughing-until-you-vomit laryngitis, too), I feel like shit and I think I should probably postpone it. But hey, I'm 33 and that is a pretty number. I've always been a bit ambivalent about my birthday, although not because of getting older: so far life has only improved as it's gone on and I wouldn't go back to my twenties or (shudder) my teens if you paid me an inordinate amount of money.
Birthdays are just odd to me. My family have always been a little strange about cultural festivals: we don't celebrate mother's day or father's day, and we never really celebrated Easter (long story). From when I was quite young we decided that presents should be something you really, really want, which, given our generally expensive tastes, meant that we tended to get birthday-christmas-birthday presents. On one memorable occasion when I was still living at home, everyone I knew, including my parents, forgot my birthday. It pissed me off a bit, but at the same time made perfect sense. If I didn't invest much meaning in the day, why should anyone else?
On the other hand, my partner understands the need for rituals. She got up early and made me breakfast. She wrapped my present with the biggest, pinkest bow she could find because she knew I was feeling unwell and a bit sad.
Although I explained that what I really want this year is a contribution to my sewing machine fund, she bought me Beautiful Thing, which is a DVD I've wanted for years, and which has just been re-released. So I get to stay at home on a rainy day watching a romantic tale about teenage boys from a housing estate (I'm secretly soppy and like to watch romances).
She really is the perfect antidote to my rational, serious tendencies. I don't really know why this gem of a woman puts up with my joy-killing rationalism, but I'm doing my best to put it aside every now and then.
Yes, I am starting a sewing machine fund. We're going back to Australia in January, and I will need a sewing machine. I grew up sewing on a 1960s Singer, and then on a late-80s/early-90s Singer when the earlier one died. Although the later Singer was a bit persnickety, it would sew nearly anything, including 14 oz denim. It's still in perfect working order, but it belongs to my mother, who, as of today, is moving to another state. 14 hours drive is a little far to go to borrow the machine.
I do have a sewing-machine over here, but I'm not taking it home. It's a solid and fairly grunty little thing, but I'd like something with a little more finesse, so I'll be selling it, probably in November.

I'm using a couple of days' enforced rest to catch up on reading blog entries. There were over 200, but I'm whittling them down.

Norway

I love Norway. I don't know what it is about Scandinavia, but I love it and would dearly like to live here. I'm sure there are things which would annoy me if I did live here, but this is my fantasy, so I can ignore them.

Getting here was pretty awful. When I got home from India I felt like hell. The M4 eastbound was closed, so it took me over an hour from the airport to home, and I then had to sprint off to the doctor. I rang them when the plane landed, explaining that I was landing from India and had to fly to Norway early the next morning, and needed an urgent appointment. The triage nurse rang me back and agreed that having a sinus infection would make being an air hostess miserable. I had a good laugh at that: clearly the only occupation the doctors' staff could think of when faced with my itinerary was cabin crew. I put on washing, took it to the laundromat for drying and dragged myself up our stairs to pack my bag. I felt ghastly at this point, and everything was taking me at least 3 times as long as it should have.

Somewhere around this time I realised that I had no idea where the information for our accommodation was, and it had only been sent to me in paper format. I found the telephone number of the agency, but the first website I went to gave their hours as 09:00 - 20:00 Monday to Friday. No use at 22:00 in London on a Friday night. I looked up the owner in the Norwegian phone book online, but they weren't listed. At this point I had a small meltdown. Thankfully my partner wasn't home to see me wandering around crying and being loopy. Eventually I got over this, and made a plan. I still had the address of the owner, who I knew didn't live far from the house, and there was a hotel nearby where someone might know who they were. I found another website, which gave the agency's hours as 09:00 - 20:00, 7 days a week. I rang the agency number, but the answering machine was in Norwegian or Danish, and I didn't understand. Plan A was to email the agency and then ring them from the airport to get the details. If that failed, then plan B was to drive to Strandebarm and try to find the owner. Plan C was to sleep in the local hotel overnight and try again in the morning.

Having worked out that, I collapsed on the couch for an hour and took antibiotics and Neurofen Plus. Things started to look a little better.

The taxi was booked for 5:45, which meant getting up at 4:45. I got to sleep some time after 4, after I had packed everything (including copious amounts of knitting) and printed out information for our stay. The prospect of being cut off from the internet for a week makes me a little frantic, as I usually just keep everthing online and don't worry. I actually got asked for my ticket in Hyderabad airport, and I didn't have a printout or know my flight number. Too much flying means that the desk is lucky if I turn up with my passport and know what city I'm flying to. Occasionally I get the wrong country on the first try.

The taxi arrived on time and then drove like a demon. We shut our eyes and tried not to think about it. Stanstead was surprisingly OK as we weren't in the first rush around 7, so there were no queues. The agency answered the phone and my email, and I bought some wireless time to download the details of our accommodation. Our plane wasn't at all full. Once on it, I slid into a dead sleep until we started descent into Bergen.

Once we got our car we had the challenge of driving into Bergen to find the tourist information office. We couldn't get a map of southern Norway at the airport, and Hertz gave us a spectacularly useless one. Now remember that I had had 40 mins sleep the night before and just over an hour on the plane, was suffering from a sinus infection, and was navigating from a tourist map. My partner had had two hours' sleep and was driving a manual car on the right side of the road for the first time. We got very, very stressed in Bergen. There were emergency vehicles at some point. We finally managed to park somewhere after much swearing and explosiveness. We found the tourist info. We found a place that sold very expensive knives (the other half wanted to get a Norwegian knife for her father). We found a supermarket, we found a public toilet. We tottered back to the car and tried to get out of Bergen. It wasn't easy. We went the wrong way a couple of times. Part of this was due to the fact that the detailed map of the city didn't have North pointing to the top of the page, whereas the map of the surroundings did. We then went exactly the opposite way to the direction in which I had been trying to go, and I realised that this would actually work. Two-and-a-half hours later we arrived at the house we had rented.

The house was superb. There was a combustion stove with firewood in the cellar. We drove around and looked at fjords and mirror lakes and windy roads and apple orchards. We drove up to a glacier and watched people ski down it. We fruitlessly tried to get tourist information (we were here after that magic date, 1st October, when tourist activities cease to exist). We drove into Bergen and out again without too much swearing. There was knitting (but not enough), relaxing (definitely not enough) and cooking (probably too much). We bought apples and pears from the roadside, so there was apple crumble and pear crumble. There were roasted vegetables, egg and lemon soup, sausage jumbalaya, more roasted vegetables and hot chocolate. There was a rotisserie chicken which had been soaken in brine, I think, and was the most delicious chicken I have eaten in Europe. One of my partner's colleagues heard that I was having trouble finding tapioca flour and got some for us, which was very sweet of her. I brought it on holiday and made these little cheesy buns. I made them with Jarlsberg, and as long as you knead them until the motor on the little hand-held mixer tries to give up, they are lovely and not too slimy at all. The house had a dishwasher. Lots of cooking did not require lots of arduous washing up. I think a dishwasher may be our first investment once we return to Australia. Life was good.

We sat on the verandah and looked at the fjord. We watched Battlestar Galactica on the laptop of an evening. We had some long overdue deep and meaningful conversations. Can I have a month here? Please?

View from the verandah... more Norway photos here

In the next exciting installment I will detail the fibre and craft activities we partook of in Norway. There were two yarn shops, a bead shop and a knitting industry museum. My partner willingly watched a 20 minute video on the history of a knitting factory which primarily made underwear. Admittedly she was coming down with the flu, but it's still a noteworthy event.

India

India was exhausting. I had firmly decided to just go with the flow, but nothing particularly disturbing happened. Things just took a long time. One morning it took 1 and 1/4 hours to drive to work because the traffic was so awful: the same journey took 20 minutes the previous day. I had to leave work at 13:00 one day because 30,000 people were coming to the lake next to my hotel to throw statues in it that evening, and I would have had trouble getting to the hotel at the normal time.

The hotel was beautiful: five star Marriott with several restaurants, a pool I didn't get around to swimming in and a beautiful garden.

I found the line of people saying 'Good morning madam' and 'Good evening madam' out the front a little daunting, and the fact that they checked every car that came in the gates for bombs was a little disturbing. I don't cope well with servility - it doesn't sit well with my world view. The food was lovely, and I have picked up a new habit: hot chocolate with hot milk in a jug, demerara sugar and chopped dark chocolate. Put your chocolate in your tea-cup, add a little sugar, pour hot milk over it, wait a little and stir... My excuse is that the room was airconditioned to 20 degrees as a fixed temperature, which when you are not very well can seem rather cold. In general, the food was very good, and I got to eat dishes I miss, like Malai Kofta and Paneer, and discovered Dosa, which will probably be my undoing. I have to learn how to make them. Have to.

I may be the only western person from my company to go to India and, instead of getting an upset stomach, come down with a cold and a sinus infection. I felt pretty awful most evenings. Work was OK: the class were very polite and hard-working, so I was pretty happy with that, and Sudafed Max (bless the British for still stocking pseudoephedrine in pharmacies) got me through most days.

I did have some trouble sleeping, and the last day was bad. I woke up at 04:30 and couldn't get back to sleep. I then worked a little, went to the office for a full day, came back to the hotel to finish packing and have a client teleconference, then slept from around 22:00 to 00:30. Got up, went to the airport, slept around 1 hour on the plane to Dubai and then 3 or 4 hours on the plane to London. I then had to go to a doctor, pick up some antibiotics, and pack my bags for Norway... after which I got about 40 minutes sleep before the taxi to the airport arrived...

Emirates was lovely, and on the Dubai - London leg I got a new plane with almost-flatbed seats. I asked them not to disturb me and slept like the dead for a few hours, after which I picked up a swatch I started about 5 times before getting it right. All I was trying to do was get the correct number of stitches in the correct configuration to have a pretty edge on seed stitch on both edges. The end result is below, but too little sleep made this difficult for me to figure out, clearly. Two of the crew came to talk to me about the knitting and told me how clever I was. Given my inability to achieve a pretty basic task, I felt like a fraudulent 5-year-old.

To have a nice bobbly edge on seed stitch:
Cast on an odd (divisible by 2 +1) number of stitches:
R1 *K P* ...K
R2 Sl P *K P* ...K
Repeat Row 2

One of my colleagues who has been seconded over to the company in which I was training has all her family in Hyderabad, which was why she took the opportunity when it came up. She took me fabric shopping with her mother and mother-in-law. Her mother-in-law was from a weaving family, and was able to tell me not to buy a couple of fabrics because of flaws. There were so many beautiful silks and cottons. I wish I had more time and more energy, but I got a good haul, much of which will be for presents in the future, some of which will be for me and for me alone...

India is so brightly coloured, and a large proportion of the colour comes from its women. The saris and salwar kameez come in colours I'd never consider wearing, but which look so normal in India. The way women ride side-saddle on the back of motorcyles, holding onto the shoulder of the driver, saris floating in the breeze: this still amazes me.

The tiny little yellow taxis and flatbed trucks amused me. I'm not sure what the taxis are, but the trucks seem to be Piaggio Ape. They are crammed with people and goods, and do seem like strange little bees, buzzing around a slightly altered universe.

India was hot, dusty, noisy, humid, tasty and very polite.

I got a very little bit of knitting done: two swatches, one in RYC Cotton Jeans for a Baby Yoda and another in Jaeger Aqua, for either another Baby Yoda or a Baby Kimono from Mason-Dixon Knitting. Babies are afoot.

In transit

As I suspected, life has been a little insane in the last couple of weeks. I've had an average of about 5 hours' sleep a night and I'm desperate for a holiday. One more week, and I'm going to Norway to sit on the edge of a fjord (actually, I suspect I'll spend the first 3 days sleeping, waking up occasionally to murmur 'mmmm, pretty' before dropping off again).

I had a particularly stressful client engagement in Brussels, which involved 6 hours' sleep in 48 hours and falling up a set of stairs, then went to Barcelona for 5 days, three of them work. Unfortunately I caught a bad cold in Brussels, so even though I saw quite a lot of Barcelona (my poor partner joined me for the weekend and had the joy of dragging me around) all I wanted to do was sleep. However, the food was divine and... the Catalans understand coffee. Real short blacks with not a trace of bitterness and jugs of hot milk. Wheeee!

I spent the last week preparing for this week's trip to Hyderabad, India, again for work, which included getting various vaccinations, a last-minute visa application for which I hand-delivered the documents and organising some groceries for a colleage who has been seconded to the Indian office. His children miss weetabix minis and pasta, apparently.

I'm writing this from Dubai airport's Business lounge, as BA WTP cost more than Emirates Business class and Emirates doesn't involve any internal flights in India. My plane is running an hour late, but I can live with that, it just means I'll get to Hyderabad at 4 am instead of 3 am.
So far, the Emirates flight was well worth losing out on the BA miles. Seats aren't flatbeds, but you can stretch out and my gluten-free mean consisted of actual food. One of the male crew took one look at my very short bleached hair, said "Hello, friend" and flirted with me gently the entire flight (much to the confusion of the poor man next to me). I do love gay men.

Emirates Business Lounge Dubai at 11pm

Unfortunately I spoiled all this by getting a migraine a couple of hours into the flight, which I could really do without. I still feel shaky and the pain is dulled but still very present.

I am determined to do some baby knitting during our week in Norway, so, in a rather scattered way I ordered some yarns: Patons 100% cotton DK in Kiwi and Orchard, RYC Cotton Jeans in Hessian and Blue Jeans and Jaeger Aqua in Indigo, all from MCA Direct. I knitted a swatch of the Patons to play around with the pattern, ripped it out because it proved that I really can't do intarsia and knit plain one to get gauge. I then washed it and put it through the dryer: it has to survive this, as I don't believe in making mothers of small children hand wash or line dry their clothes.

I got gauge for Cristina Shiffman's baby kimono from Mason-Dixon Knitting perfectly before I subjected it to the dryer, but I'll have to adjust the pattern to cope with the inevitable shrinkage. I have the yarn, the needles, the swatch and the pattern with me, but between the migraine and getting 7 hours sleep in the last 48 hours, I think casting on might be beyond me right now. Pity.

Good intentions

I did manage to find a perfume I sort of like in duty free (Azzaro Visit), but I'll be coming back through here at the end of the week, so I'll see how I feel about wearing it for a few hours before buying it. The perfume I really liked has been discontinued (Body Shop Beleaf) and I'm looking for a replacement. Visit seems to be developing a sweeter scent with wear that isn't what I'm looking for.

Erratic Blogging Expected

I'm not home very much until mid-October, so I don't expect I'll get to blog much, nor to do much knitting or sewing. Next week I go to Switzerland on Sunday and Barcelona on Tuesday, returning late Sunday night. Then 5 days in the office and off to India on Saturday. Return on Friday evening, then off to Norway on Saturday, returning on Saturday night. I think Sunday 7^th is the first day I get at home. Madness. At least the weekend in Barcelona and the week in Norway are for pleasure, not work.

A sunset from our Scottish holiday. Photos are in the travel collection on Flickr.