Wednesday, November 07, 2007

Norway Rocks!!!!

My fiber and frenzy friend Nina from Norway sent the most wonderful thank you gift. She is a wonderfully talented crafter, mom and nursing student. I guess that those of us that want to do it all usually find our way to connect with each other. This time through the online magazine 'Spindle and Wheel', Alena the editor and founder of the magazine organized a fiber exchange. It's been fun to see what everybody is sending to each other. Anyway, I attended a fiber event on Saturday, this past, that I had been looking forward to for along long time. Nina's package arrived, via post, as I was leaving. I set it aside to give it it's proper consideration. I am completely in awe! This is much more than I expected.

The packaged contained three pamphlets containing children's knitwear and ethnic stockings, gloves and hats for adults, a wrist distaff in shades of blue with beads, a hand-wrapped crystal necklace, three bags of fiber: some black alpaca and two bags of hand washed and carded by herself Norwegian lambswool! and last but not least, a bar of Norwegian style chocolate. The best!!! By sheer will power I have managed to keep the bar intact til pictures today.

There's a story about the chocolate: When my family was stationed in Europe, we went on a family driving vacation through northern Europe. My mom and I where supposed to be collecting chocolate for presents. But none of the Norwegian chocolate made it home to the air base. I wonder........

Sunday, November 04, 2007

No. 251

I was person number 251 yesterday, as the Camella City Stockin'ettes Knitting Guild hosted the venerable Franklin Habit of the blog "the panopticon" * here in Sacramento, California for a shoot of his "1000 Faces of Knitting" project. A really wonderful and well spoken, genteel sort of guy who is seems really good at his job of getting people to relax under the bright lights for their five seconds of fame.

He had mentioned that the visit to California was a trip into the unknown for him. These women from the far coast could be a far cry from the women of the mid west. Fear not, because a good majority of us are from somewhere else. Natives are hard to find and even harder to pin down.

I was able to get one of the ladies hosting the event to take my picture with Franklin, but in the joy and exuberance of the event, forgot to ask if it was OK of me to post his picture, so I won't. I will make mention that Dolores was nowhere to be seen and if the rumors from the 'green room' are to be believed, she may have made a bee-line for the Castro District in SF! Being the gentleman that he is, Franklin demurred.

*the address for Franklin's blog is in the side bar under Links.
**ed. note: if you go and read the entry for Wed, Nov 7 at Franklin's blog you will read about the full story of the adventures of the Habit's and the Von Hoofen's......and Harry/.