La Dolce Vita

I flew halfway around the world and found yarn.  And gelato.  More gelato than yarn to be truthful.

I think it’s important to note that the absolutely best gelato to be found was the Chocolate Nero with strawberry in Amalfi.  Although the Coconut and Strawberry combination near St. Mary Major was also pretty fantastic.

I knitted in the plane, on buses, and in my hotel room.  I refrained from bringing my knitting out in restaurants as I normally would just because I wasn’t sure how it would be taken.  Overall I got less knitting time than I would have expected just because we were so busy.  Instead of getting 3 projects completed, I finished one and started another.

The local guide we had along the Amalfi coast was very interested in my knitting.  She told me that her mother knit.  I asked where her mom bought her yarn and she said, at yarn stores in Sorrento.  Bingo!  The chase was on!  So one night after Mass, I drug my Mom into a store that was near our hotel that we found online.  Turns out that Google was wrong and that store did not carry yarn, but the woman working understood “knitting.”  She gave us instructions (mostly in Italian) to go to the quatro up ahead (done with hand signals to explain that she meant the 4-way intersection) and turn left.  We kept on walking until Mom started to get nervous about how far we were going.  We stopped in a party supply store and asked directions to the “knitting store.”  She said we were almost there.  Sure enough, 2 stores down was an honest to goodness yarn store.

The woman smiled when I walked in because she could see how happy I was to find a real yarn store.  I might have even said, “Hooray!”  The woman was very kind and helped me find some cashmere, although she was sort of steering me towards the 100% merino.  The cashmere was 4.90 euro per 70 yd skein.   There wasn’t a huge color selection – 3 shades of gray and a navy.  I asked, but she did not have more colors.  I ended up buying 4 skeins of the navy blue and picking out a fur pom pom to go with it.  I’m now feeling a need to pom all the things.

I could be happy living in Sorrento I think.  There are lemon and orange trees lining the streets, the ocean is right there out your window, the people are (extremely) friendly, it was very easy to eat gluten free, and there are yarn stores.  On a side note, my hair liked Sorrento also.  For some reason my hair was very curly in Italy.  Weird.

As for my finished project.  I finally completed a Clapotis.  This is a pattern that everyone and their mother was knitting in 2004.  I even started one out of laceweight that is still in my stash somewhere.  At the time (I was having babies and was a little preoccupied) the project just seemed overwhelming.  This time around it was a soothing easy knit.  The most you have to count to is 3!

Yarn:  Socks that Rock Lightweight in Festivus – 1.5 skeins used

Needles:  Size 6

Mods:  None, I actually knit this as written.

Size:  It’s ginormous.  It’s long and drapey and I need to wrap it around my neck a couple of times in order to make it not drag on the floor.