Witty knitter

We're on holiday!

At the end of last week we flew to New Zealand and spent a couple of days in Petone, near Wellington. It's an interesting suburb on the Northern side of Wellington Harbour. It was once the home of several smelly industries that discharged their waste straight into the lower parts of the Hutt River, the Korokoro stream, and even directly into the harbour itself - a freezing works, soap factories, a battery manufacturer, a manufacturer of chlorine bleach... All of those industries are now gone or are operating in a much cleaner fashion, and the local area has become a much more desirable place to live. I loved there in 1987 and since then it has become much prettier - the mainly wooden houses are being brought back to life and the transport options to the city are much better - buses with wifi! (Sydney, take note.) It's commuter heaven: right on the water, low-rise and attractive, and a short bus or train ride along the harbour to work.

The motel was small but spotless, and the cafes on the main drag are really amazing. (BTW, we haven't had a bad cup of coffee since we arrived: kiwi cafe culture is grand, beginning with steak sandwiches in Hataitai when we arrived - Real Steak!), Best of all, Petone has the Holland Rd Yarn Company, where several skeins of Tash's hand-dyed yarn found their way into our bags. And two skeins of Fybrespates from the UK, which we didn't even see in the UK, grabbed Sandra's hand and forced her to shove it into her bag.

Then we travelled through the Wairarapa (another favourite cafe in Greytown, the Greytown Deli and Cafe), and had a coffee with James and Ian in Masterton. We've been in a hotel in Palmerston North for a couple of nights, but Sandra has flown to Auckland for a conference this morning. My daughter Lizzie and her daughters will pick me up in an hour or so and I'll spend a few days with them before I fly to Auckland to join Sandra. We've had two amazing breakfasts, one in Cafe Cuba and one in Barista - I lived in Palmie from 1991 until 1998, and it's good to know that the best cafes are still in business and still operating to a high standard.

We also found a fabric shop yesterday where cotton prints are presently $8 a metre. As I'm planning a sewing binge over Christmas, this was very exciting. I bought the ends of several rolls.

I'll post later with some photos from Lizzie's garden, and more adventures. Tomorrow I'm planning lunch with the lovely Deborah. Squeee!

 

Yarn shopping in the 21st century

Although there aren't a lot of bricks-and-mortar yarn stores in Sydney, and those there are don't have a huge range of stock (which is to expected, given the size of the knitting market here), it shouldn't be that difficult to get yarn. There are thousands of yarn stores on the knitternet. You see a yarn you like, you get online and order it. It should zoom into your postbox days to weeks later, no sweat. But complications, it seems, abound.

I have been on the hunt for replacement yarns for my Transatlantic shawl (see last post). It's been so much admired and complements my wardrobe so well that I want another the same. The green was easy; the multi-coloured one not so easy. It is, in the way of yarn, discontinued - which is probably why I had been able to get it on special about a year ago. I put in an order for a skein from the only US shop that claimed to have it, only to awaken the next morning to an email telling me that they had lied and didn't actually have it in stock, wouldn't be getting it in stock, and had therefore cancelled my order.

But the magic that is ravelry has come through for me again. A sweet woman in Florida had some in her stash that she didn't want, and sold it to me for a very reasonable price, with minimum postage - the whole thing cost about half what it would have cost from the store that didn't stock it. So I will be able to make another shawl for next winter. And of course, serendipitously, I had in the meantime bought another skein in the wrong colour (well, it's hard to tell online exactly what colour variegated yarns are, and of course I'd lost the tag, so I had to guess. Good story, huh?). It's the most wonderful toffee caramel butterscotch colour - oh here, let me show you - and it sits quite beautifully with the precious deeply saturated orange skein of Collinette Jitterbug that Emily and Clare gave me for my 60th. Precious, because, in the way of yarns, the recent batches of this colour are about half the saturation and not nearly as lovely. I know this because I excitedly ordered more from Sarah Durrant, only to be disappointed when they arrived with a note from her apologising for the wishy-washy colours, and offering to take them back if they didn't suit. So I returned them, thinking the universe was telling me that I didn't need a deep orange cardigan anyway.

Where was I? Oh, yes, the toffee/caramel/butterscoth skein? Perfect with the orange. So another Stephen West shawl in the future.

I find it interesting that everything appears to be so easily available on the internet - just a click or two away - and yet, often we return to the old community mores of helping each other out, just on an international scale and with strangers. Is it that we can't bear to not have something, so we have to go scrounging for it?

Sandra is away this week - her mother in Brisbane is celebrating her 90th birthday in good health, and Sandra is helping out, ferrying her around, taking her out for lunches with her friends and making up for the fact that we will be spending Christmas here in Sydney for the first time in three years. Her mother has made other plans this year, involving Sandra's brother - she's not entirely happy about that but she'll survive. We haven't quite got our heads round it yet, but if you're going to be in Sydney over Christmas we are hoping to have a few barbeque events. Once we've bought a barbeque.