Yarn Store Yatra, Part I: Stitch 'n' Bitch Berlin!

At the moment I'm kind of reminding myself of the immortal Lorelei Lee as she remarked of her visit to Paris: "And when a girl walks around and reads all of the signs with all of the famous historical names it really makes you hold your breath [...] When we stood at the corner of a place called the Place Vandome, if you turn your back on a monument they have in the middle and look up, you can see none other than Coty's sign." Today was my first visit to Berlin-Mitte or the center city, and there were a LOT of famous museums and historical monuments and impressive architecture that had to be ignored in order to fit in all my needlework-themed activities. Well, I'm sure I'll get to the tourist highlights another time!  


I had plotted out a one-way route of about 20 km on Google Maps to bike from our southwestern suburb of Dahlem to the main Berlin yarn stores that I'd found on the internet:

Yes, German shops are closed on Sunday, but that seemed like a good safety precaution: I could go and check out the shop windows and learn where all the stores are without being tempted to spend buckets of money. However, just as I was finishing my route planning, I serendipitously discovered that there was a weekly stitch'n'bitch taking place up by Prenzlauer Berg in the northeast, starting in a bit more than an hour.  

So I got ready and put my project bag on my bike and dashed off to head for the meeting site as expeditiously as possible, without any windowshopping on the way, but it still took me about an hour and a half, counting getting lost for a while up by Torstrasse. Now that I've ridden in the city center, I think I have to revise my estimate of the proportion of Dutch-style biking to Indian-style biking in Berlin to more like 55% vs. 45%.  

But I got there and had a good time, although I didn't get any German practice because all the participants spoke English. Here's the cafe table with various participants' works-in-progress:

Schlüsselkäfer says, "My Tineidae cousins in the Lepidoptera could eat all this yarn in less than a week!" Shut up, Schlüsselkäfer.

It was a good meeting but not very productive in terms of project progress, because it turns out that even after all that packing I DON'T HAVE ENOUGH CROCHET HOOKS. One of my thread-crochet patterns calls for steel hooks in a weird sizing notation so I thought I had covered all the possibilities, but according to my gauge swatch the smallest steel hook I have is still too big. Hope I can find some others at a craft or needlework store here! I left the gathering about 5:30 so as to bike home while it was still reasonably light out, but on the way back I stopped to check out a couple additional yarn shops that had been mentioned. Here's "Loops" on the Wörtherstrasse:

"Angebot" means "sale", and at 2 euros per 50-gram skein it looks like a pretty good price. (Of course, I didn't actually see the yarn in person, and anyway I've got enough stuff to work on that I brought with me.) "Knitknit" on Linienstrasse looked a bit more chi-chi:

You can see the reflection of my bike in the window (and not much else, unfortunately). There were a couple other shops I looked for in the Mitte, but one I couldn't seem to find and the other appeared to be more woolen goods than yarn. I couldn't take too much time looking around before the light went, but I couldn't resist snapping a shot of this display outside the Legoland Discovery Centre in Potsdamer Platz:

If that giraffe looks kind of pixelated it's not because of my crummy-ish camera, it's because it's made out of rectangular Legos! (Schlüsselkäfer sulked because he didn't get to be a reference scale object in this photo, but he would have been way too small to show up.)

Potsdam or Bust

Today was a beautiful day and you never know when it will be the last one of the season, so I decided a long bike ride would be just the thing.  I had heard Potsdam was nice so I headed vaguely south and west till I hit a road called the Potsdamerstrasse, which I was pretty confident would take me there.  I only made it as far as the suburb (?) Am Stern, which has a nice little park around the Jagdschloss-Stern, a royal hunting lodge built for Friedrich Wilhelm I.  (Apparently today they were having a festival of some kind complete with a German Dixieland jazz group (!?), but I didn't get there till after it was over. They'll have a more "authentic" Herbstfest with hunting horns and what-not later in the month.)

Anyway, two and a half hours straight pushing that sturdy three-speed and I am pretty bushed!  But with a nice little detour through a park along the Teltowkanal on the way out, it was a very pleasant ride.

Fahrrad (Preisfrei!)

In other words, free bicycle!  Our institute has a very convenient loaner-bike policy where you can sign up to borrow one of its stable of bicycles.  You get the bike-lock key and are responsible for looking after the bike and putting it back.  So today I got on my borrowed bike and went off to try to find a yoga studio that was offering an 11 AM class in the nearby district of Charlottenburg.

The map I have shows the city center and the main part of Charlottenburg, so I could locate the studio's position easily, but doesn't show anywhere closer to where I am.  So after a quick squint at Google Maps I figured that heading north and looking for signs for Charlottenburg should be good enough to get me onto the map, at which point I could use the map to find the studio.  This worked better than I expected (I ended up taking pretty much the optimal route from the institute to the studio, direction-wise if not bike-friendliness-wise), but not well enough to get me there in time for the class. However, when I got there I saw a sign in the window saying that today's class was canceled, so I didn't miss anything.  

Moreover, I ended up right near Karl-August-Platz where there's an excellent Saturday market.  I had previously found a small Kaiser's supermarket within walking distance of the institute and picked up some staples there, but this is where they keep the real food!  Not to mention the flowers and the hand-carved wooden kitchenware and the cheap sewing supplies and the cheap clothing (3 pairs of socks for 5 euros; see, I told you there was no point packing extra socks).  

The Germans and I see eye to eye on the question of when a cucumber is overripe (pretty much never: when it goes huge and yellowy and develops a sort of watery texture in the seeds and a tangy taste, that's a good thing).  I got a monster cucumber larger than a butternut squash (and at 2.50 euros per kilo, more expensive than three pairs of socks!), as well as some French black grapes and a bunch of cilantro and some pears of a kind I've never seen before.  Also a chai latte with a straw, which apparently is the way you're supposed to drink it here, frothed to the point where the foam is as enduring as industrial effluent.  There were all kinds of other things that I didn't buy, including quail eggs (Wachteleier, both fresh and preserved) and English scones and manuka honey from New Zealand and specialty soaps (but no carnation soap, which is Susanna's favorite but hard as hell to find.  I know how to ask for it in German ("Nelke Seife") but so far I always get the same answer).  

It was a rather drizzly day and over a half-hour ride back, so after some shopping and checking out the upcoming events at the nearby Deutsche Oper Berlin (Parsifal next month!) I retraced my route on the bike and came home.  German bike gears are calibrated backwards from our point of view, with 1 as the most difficult gear and 3 as the easiest on a typical three-speed city bike, and I only wish I had figured that out before doing a long ascent in what I assumed was first gear.  (Door locks are counterintuitive too, so instead of "righty-tighty lefty-loosy" you have to remember "left lock, right release".)  Biking in Berlin seems to be about 65% like biking in Holland and about 35% like biking in India, so I feel right at home.  There are bike paths and bike lanes on many streets, with dedicated traffic lights for the bicycles and so on, but on the narrow streets of the urban centers it seems to be pretty much a free-for-all.  

We have a tiny shared kitchen on the ground floor of the dorm building so I used the rainy afternoon making a huge kettle of dal saag, with a bag of lentils and a box of frozen spinach and a couple of onions and a bag of potatoes and the bunch of cilantro from the market.  Not much else to put in except some salt and pepper, but it came out well and it's nice to have real food on hand.  Storing leftovers in my little cube fridge will be something of a challenge; I think I'll need to pick up some space-saving German Tupperware equivalents.  

Local Happenings

Why are there a grillion film-company vans lined up on our street since yesterday?  And the back yard of one of the houses opposite is all lit up at night.  Somebody's doing some on-location filming?  

A damp day is perfect for a race between a snail (Schnecke) and a slug (Nacktschnecke or "naked snail").  The snail ate the slug's lunch, zooming past him in a blur of speed, comparatively speaking. Moving at a snail's pace is still better than being sluggish!

Schlüsselkäfer says, "Back in my day before I was stuck in this keychain I could go way faster than that even without using my wings!"

Packing for 4 Months in Berlin: 12 Pairs of Socks, 23 Crochet Hooks

Hey, I refuse to apologize for having my priorities straight.  Plus, realistically speaking a crochet hook is much smaller, lighter and sometimes more expensive than a pair of socks, as well as being harder to find in the correct size.  Obviously you should pack the hook and buy the socks overseas.  (Or bring along yarn and make some socks.)

Also, a crochet hook can be much more versatile in solving problems with a temporary residence.  Got no place to hang up your keys in your dorm room?

Schlüsselkäfer the Lucky Chafer Beetle says "Well, why do you think they call it a hook?"

It's a nice dorm room, though, with a pretty view of a quiet street in the Berlin neighborhood of Dahlem, and good for photographing FOs.

Speaking of FOs, of course, I can't resume my blog posting without providing the obligatory photos of a new T-shirt baby quilt, completed shortly before my departure:

It came out pretty well, though the patterned backgrounds are doing it no favors!  I took some other pictures of the construction process, thinking that at some point I'd put together a complete T-shirt baby quilt tutorial, but this isn't that point yet: you really need to document every step.

Au Revoir, Noyerac

Due to visa issues and some other schedule shuffling, I ended up coming back to the States for a couple of weeks this fall, in between my longer stay in Dordogne and a final couple of weeks for conferences/visits in France and the Netherlands starting in early December.  So I won't be returning to our little village of "Noyerac" this year, but it's been a fun four months of fall.  Some end-of-trip memories: 

- Finishing up a dozen thread-lace snowflake ornaments for C and Y's French family Christmas celebration.  Blocking thread lace (previously soaked in simple syrup so they'll keep their shape when dried) requires a lot of pins. 

- The abundance of walnuts at harvest time in Perigord-Noir, a major walnut- and chestnut-growing region ("noyer" is French for "walnut tree", and "noix" or "nut" has the default meaning of walnut).  The local walnut liqueur has a lovely raisin-y flavor, and C used some of it to make one of the traditional  "tartes de noix" of the region.  What happened to the rest of the bottle?  Well, it was just sitting there in front of the fireplace...

-  The convenience store/market where you can pick up a cured leg of pork (unwrapped, hanging on a rack), a grave marker (totally serious.  The store has an accompanying garden/florist shop, and floral memorial tributes are apparently a big part of their business), or a jugful of local wine from a big box-barrel in one corner with a spigot on the bottom and a hand-lettered sign reading "Vin du pays, 1,5 euro/liter".  There are clean plastic one-liter water bottles in a tray on top of the box-barrel in case you forgot to bring your own jug.  I wonder if any of the wine is from the vendange or grape harvest that I saw going on at a nearby farm one weekend in September?

- Hikes with C and Y and the kids ("Peterama" and "Hanuman") in the hills and forests around Noyerac. Y made Peterama a bow and arrows from saplings (with nylon-cord bowstring, very inauthentic), and he's become pretty good with it, but you have to remind him not to point it at people.  Sometimes we'd find windfall walnuts and whack them with a stone on the road to crack them, and go on our way eating nutmeats. 


Here are Peterama and Hanuman on a knightly tour of a local castle after I left.  (Is knightly work daily or is it strongly weekly?)

Another Fine Furry Product

... from the Atelier Perigordien de la Couture Préhistorique.  (This is probably the highest level of activity in the manufacture of customized undressed-hide products that our village "Noyerac" has seen at any time in the last several thousand years.)

Y plays the bansuri or Indian bamboo flute, and he wanted a travel case for it so he could take it on fieldwork trips and play it in the caves.   (Since archaeological cave sites are generally not furnished with TV and internet, the fieldworkers have to amuse themselves somehow, right?)  Here's how it was made (photos courtesy of C).

1) We're not entirely sure whose skin this is: Y thinks it might be a goat or possibly a deer.  In any case, he thought the tail would serve well as a flap for the case, so that's how we laid it out and cut it.

2) The next step was closing the side and end seams, flesh side in, with blanket stitch.  (All the dental floss in the house has been commandeered by the Neanderthal Craft Club; I finally went to the supermarket and got some French dental floss so I could have some to use for its intended purpose on my teeth, instead of having to root around in my sewing bag for it. No, it's not a good idea to re-use a leftover piece from sewing for dental purposes or vice versa, although I won't say that the idea never occurs to me when I consider how much of the stuff we go through.)

3) The last part of my contribution was adding a snugging seam on the folded side to give the case a more symmetrical look as well as a closer fit for the flute.  Y finished it off with a thong and button for the flap.

And finally, continuing my previous practice of posting on the combined topics of skin sewing and baby quilts, here are a couple of photos of a project from last year that C took while we were visiting Frankfurt.

Generally, I like to use a somewhat more subtle form of documentation rather than making a separate solid-color label, but the backing and binding fabrics here are busy enough that you wouldn't really be able to read anything embroidered on them directly.

French Yarn: the Bande Dessinée version

In the spirit of the French taste for comic books or bandes dessinées for grownups as well as for kids, here is part of one of C's photo-comics of travel adventure featuring Susanna and me in Strasbourg: