I had a sudden urge to go and see a particular church, but she only had eyes for the benches. I could get a smile out of her only when I bought her a carnival pastry, and the icing sugar floated onto her red jacket as she took her first bite. I too smiled.
While in the US I splurged a bit, and bought some fabrics that I'd been coveting for a long time. Oh, the joy of online shopping, in a place where you know the Italian mail-person won't charge you some surprise tax or other when they deliver your foreign package (I currently have a 5-year-old unresolved claim with the Italian Post Office for massive taxes applied to a little baby gift I received from the US when Rebecca was born). The only inconvenience, of course, was that I had to limit my fabric enthusiasm to the size of our luggage. Which, come to think of it, maybe was a good thing!
I shopped at QuiltHome.com during their Christmas promotions, and was very happy with the customer service, especially as they invited me to visit their store and even to have lunch with them (unfortunately, I couldn't make the trip up - next time!).
I got some flannel by Anna Maria Horner from her LouLouThi collection to make PJ's for Rebecca (QuiltHome seem to have run out of this particular pattern). It was more expensive than I'd thought, so I bought just enough to make the top, and then got a piece of matching solid plain-gray flannel (believe me, it really is matching, although it doesn't appear so in the photo) from the local Jo-Ann to make the pants, and have plans to do some colorful embroidery to spruce them up a bit. Something like this:
I also bought some laminate fabric, which I'm very excited about as I've never sewed oilcloth before: the kind of oilcloth you find in this country, in fact, is too sad for words, and is merely intended to cover your even sadder kitchen table.
You'd never call this floral oilcloth pattern "sad," would you? It's a Kaffe Fassett's collection, and it will look great on Rebecca as a hooded raincoat. I wouldn't mind having it on my kitchen table either, actually!
And lastly, something for me: another bright and colorful Kaffe Fassett fabric (this is also unavailable from QuiltHome at the moment). Oh, so many sewing plans!
On the 10 hour intercontinental flight, my big boy worked on his math (he, as well as his brother, had devoured their travel reading, Inheritance, well before the flight back - and I can assure you that he didn't inherit this kind of mathematical dedication from me!). Later, he fell asleep, his head nested on my lap, and while I got a chance to stroke the dark, thick hair of my lean, sleeping teenager, I remembered the first time I took him on a flight as a chubby, bald 5 month old baby, and how my then hyper-sensitive boy squirmed and howled so inconsolably and loudly that a concerned hostess asked me if I needed any help. Now here he was, sleeping soundly and peacefully. And he even slept through the piercing sound of the smoke detector alarm, which made most passengers jump out of their skins, and made his mamma skip several heart beats and gain dozens more "blond hairs". Later we were informed that the alarm had gone off for no reason at all, better than a real fire, of course, though not entirely reassuring while you're suspended 30,000 feet somewhere above the Atlantic Ocean. And far too late to get all those brown hairs back!
Off a busy and unappealing street, in an old brick building, I stumbled into paradise.
As in Paradise Fibers (also an online paradise) - a real paradise for someone like me who's used to buying yarn from a little stall at the weekly street market down by the coast, choosing from their small sample boards because most of their yarns are stored away in their van.
Here, on the other hand, I found a two-story brick building filled with everything (and more) that a lover of fiber crafts could wish for: floor-to-ceiling stacks of yarns in every imaginable color, texture, and thickness. Yarns made of countless different fibers from every corner of the world (there were many gorgeous hand-dyed yarns from South America). Buckets and boxes filled with raw wool and fibers. And, of course, all the tools for turning those yarns and fibers into crochet, knit, woven, or spun projects - hand-carding tools, looms, spinning wheels.
In a sense, Paradise Fibers resembles a number of other stores over here, where choice and variety are the rule. But while I sometimes find myself a bit overwhelmed by so much stuff, however useful and beautiful, each time I've walked into Paradise Fibers I've felt energized and brimming with more and more ideas of things to make, new projects to start and new skills to learn.
Indeed, a paradise. And I think these few balls of yarn I'm wounding as fast as I can, and my handmade wooden crochet hook, will be perfect as a carry-on for our intercontinental flight today, don't you agree?
Au révoir for now!
A heartfelt thank you for your good wishes yesterday to Tom about his book!
Many of the daily doings over here in the US are quite out of the ordinary compared to our life in the rural middle of nowhere, Italy. A few examples:
- Dishes here get washed in a dishwasher - ah, bliss! A dishwasher is the one appliance that I really wish I could have, but for all of my adult life, I've never lived in a house with a kitchen big enough to fit a dishwasher in. However, I can claim to have lived in a bedsit in London where the kitchen if not big, was at least long enough to have a bathtub in it: lined up against the kitchen wall, in fact, were a sink, a cooker and a full-size bathtub! I never figured whether that room was a bathroom partially remodelled as a kitchen, or a kitchen partially remodelled as a bathroom.
- Sushi for breakfast, burritos for dinner - and totally indulging in them, as well as in all the diverse foodstuffs that can be easily found in American supermarkets.
- Looking out at the frozen and snowy world in awe and wonder, but without fear: snow plowed roads and studded tires (forget the obsolete chains or the not-as-efficient snow-tires!), in fact, make it possible to get around even in the worse weather conditions should there be an emergency (fortunately, we haven't actually needed to test this theory).
- Blazing fast internet connection with no down times - need I add more?
- Netflix - it allowed me to discover the marvellous and addictive Downton Abbey (that's how I kept my sanity during many jet lagged hours), and almost catch up with years of missed movies, including: Jane Eyre and Bright Star (the sewing scenes are mesmerizing and made me itch for fabric, needle and thread).
- Baby carrots - The weirdest vegetable ever, and totally out of the ordinary (these are our ordinary baby carrots back home). Personally, I'm inclined to believe that the totally identical and perfectly chubby "baby carrots" here are regular carrots grown individually in test tubes.
- Tennis for tots. In this country, they start them early. No preconceptions about tennis ruining young kids' posture. Not even when the eager 5 year old beginner is wearing her shoes on the wrong feet: an Italian coach (or more likely the Italian mother - and I speak from experience!), would have rushed the child away to put their shoes on right (this Italian mother struggled not to do just that).
But the American coach had a laugh, remarked "Do you do this often?", and continued on with the tennis lesson in his extraordinarily engaging and playful way.
- How about the yarn and fabric stores over here, with an amazing wealth of quality and choice? More on this soon!
Today, I find myself thinking of our simple Christmas last year, the five of us in a little apartment high in the Alps, an enchanted forest outside, and inside a few ornaments we improvised (here). And of Christmas the year before, with our artificial tree lit by candles and sparklers, pine boughs on the mantlepiece, and our shared fondu dinner (here). This Christmas on the other side of the pond could not have been more different. It was so rich in family, normally so far away, and in traditions so different and yet familiar, part of the story of our bi-cultural family, enriching our days now and the days to come.
There hasn't been any snow so far, but it's a striking white winter landscape, with a tracery of heavy frost around the edges.
Merry Christmas to you all!
In the Old West, the water belonged to the birds. They reigned over the winter-frozen sheets and the fresh water - a water landscape so utterly still and silent, broken only by the calls and screeching, and flapping and splashing of the birds.
In the evening, after a full day in the wintery 'Old West', we took a dip in American cinematography and politics, and watched All the President's Men, which the boys found as enthralling as I had when I was their age - except that I'd watched it dubbed into Italian, while they got it in the high-impact original.
I didn't bake Rebecca's birthday cake this year. Granny did.
It was a "layer cake", which in my book means baking two cakes. Granny baked them both.
I didn't make my simple lemon juice & powder sugar icing for the birthday cake either. Granny made a proper fluffy cream cheese frosting.
The birthday cake that Granny made for Rebecca was beautiful.
And all I had to do on this birthday, was sit down, sing along and enjoy the cake. It was delicious.
Family life at the edge of an ancient rural community near the Mediterranean
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