Friday, April 10, 2009

my new heroine: Maria from l'Aquila

It was the Yarn Harlot who drew our attention to a report from Cambridge University which concluded that, whilst knitting had a marked effect on coping with the aftermath of trauma, few people were likely to carry "emergency knitting".

Fortunately 98-year old Maria D'Antuono of L'Aquila has proved to the researchers that, sometimes, people do have emergency crochet to hand. According to the guardian and Ansa news agency, she spent 30 hours waiting for rescuers to dig her out after last week's earthquake and, asked how she had passed her time, she reportedly said that "she had been busy with her hook and wool".

Rescuers gave her a packet of biscuits, but she asked for a comb, so that she would look decent on arrival at hospital.

Respect!

Thursday, April 02, 2009

working in the garden...

Yesterday morning, as I wiped the sleepy fairies from my eyes, Mr Caught Knitting announced that it looked like a good day for working in the garden. I had to agree...


So whilst he rounded up the lawnmower and secateurs, I played hunt-the-pasting table. (In the shed, somewhat mildewed after being moved there in the aftermath of the garage floods last year). Mr CK looked bewlidered. He became even more puzzled when, after giving the table a good scrub, I demanded to know where the masking tape was and wanted to know what had happened to the many bath gel bottles that I'd been stockpiling. When I grabbed my cauldron and dye powders, it finally dawned on him.

Yes, my idea of "working in the garden" means setting up the pasting table on the patio and indulging in some textiles pursuit or another. As it was such a windy day I decided that my usual method of yarn painting--dipping foam brushes into plastic pint "glasses" of dye--would result in my dyeing the patio. Hence the use of the bath gel bottles, so that I could squirt dye on the yarn and also so that if a container did blow over it wouldn't splash its contents round and about.


Here are a couple of glimpses of the finished yarns:







I rather suspect that the colours were inspired by the plants I saw in my parents' garden when I visited them last Friday: