Knitting and Stitching Show

Another year, another Rhinebeck missed.  

While it is fun to have an extravagant shopping weekend at the fairgrounds, I miss the experience most of all.  Gathering with friends, seeing all the fantastic knitwear, being inspired by the colors of upstate New York autumn, the fantastic food, getting to pet lanolin-rich sheep and chatting with the farmers.  It's the ritual that I miss...summer is really over, now have some apples and lamb chili and cover yourself with wool.  

I slyly made my way up to Alexander Palace for the London Knitting and Stitching show last week.  Rhinebeck it was not, but I was hoping to recapture some of that spiritual feeling of autumn being here.  

Well, the weather screamed fall- lately, if it hasn't been a steady pour, it's been a wild windy ride of sun and rain, and lots of rainbows.   

Plus, I had wanted to get up to North London and check out the hilltop Ally Pally- a beautiful old convention center, crystal-palace style.  This hill is where the first TV broadcast signal in the world originated from!  

 Ah, and a touch of fall color.  There's very little of this here- leaves just turn brown unceremoniously and fall dead to the ground.

 And the city from afar:

 Inside, knits!

I don't know if I'd ever thought of knitting suet before, but someone surely has.

The show had all sorts of fibre artist- a lot of them had their booths set up as galleries and they had really amazing stuff.  Sculpture, multimedia, fashion...

The only thing I was really interested in was buying British wool.  It ended up being a tall order- there were many vendors there, and very few had nothing but commercially available yarn.

There were tons of fabric vendors.  I set out to buy fat quarters and some plain-ish jersey knit and ended up being overwhelmed by choice.  Any game plan in my head was quickly forgotten, and I walked away empty-handed.  

 Although some of the vendors need a bit help in the organizational department.

It seemed that the less organized a vendor was, the cheaper the prices were.  I watched in amusement as one discount yarn vendor had piled bags and bags of yarn into their booth....

In this hip-deep pile of yarn, people were scrambling for the centre, as if some magical yarn lived there.  As the pile spread further and further onto the floor, some worker would come by and shovel the yarn back into a stack.  Some people were literally swimming in the plasticky shifting pile, creating hazardous landslide conditions while searching for that elusive bargain.

Alas, Jameson's Shetland was there and the only cash I parted with that day was for a small kit of color-coordinated yarn for a fair isle hat.  They were just so nice!  Plus, Scotland.

So, aside from lacking the rustic aspect of being outdoors in the barns and pawing fleeces both on and off the sheep...

It was a fun way to spend an afternoon.

Oh, and the food vending situation was awful.  Microwave pizza and pre-made sandwiches and rubbery pastries kind of awful that I stayed away from.  A quick check on my phone revealed that the neighborhood around Finsbury Park tube station had plenty of good Turkish restaurants, and I became the hero of the day for bring a bag of meze and kebaps in take-away bags back to South London.  It wasn't apple cidre donuts and lamb chili from the 4-h stand, but it was decidedly delicious.

Brugge

Hi there!

I've been traveling a bit and just been kind of scattered in general, hence the inability to sit down and collect my thoughts for more than a minute or two. Ah, life.

We did go on a what amounted to a beer-buying trip to Belgium lately.

I do not like to drink beer. I dislike the stuff and prefer the grape and the distilled versions of grains. I am easily persuaded to go on road trip adventures though and I am sympathetic to the cause- good beer is hard to find in Paris and people go to great lengths to acuire the good stuff. A few hours north of Paris, you hit the Belgium border and our buying spree begins. The beer is cheaper than bottled water here.

Belgium also seems to get the brunt of the gusty driving rains from the North Sea. Paris seemed downright balmy compared to it.

We centered ourselves in Brugges, a medieval city filled with gorgeous old streets and canals.

It's a breathtakingly beautiful city. Its labyrinth of cobblestone streets were easy to get completely lost trying to navigate, but the pleasant surprises that come with getting completely lost was exactly what I wanted.

The 13th century bell tower dominates the main square of the city.

Sometimes these rainy days surprise you with a brief bright hit of sunlight, leaving the world saturated with color.

Belgian chocolate is really different from French chocolate- it's sweeter and creamier- and it's everywhere.

But it's pretty obvious from the fact that every cafe and bar had a beer menu the thickness of the NYC phone book, this was a serious beer town.

Autumn

The trees here don't turn brilliant scarlet and gold. My east-coast lifestyle has always been a spoil of color before winter sets in, yet in Paris, the leaves turn brown and fall off. What an anticlimactic way to say goodbye to the sun for a few months!

However, the produce scene has more than redeemed the autumnal feeling I crave that the trees usually set off.

While I have yet to find apple-cider donuts (sigh, beignets) I have been busily cooking and eating my way through autumn. Every trip to the market sets off ooohs and ahhs and I generally end up carrying home much more than I planned to. Kilos of crispy-bright apples and pears, bunches of green cabbage, squash and pumpkin. My entire apartment permanently smells of garlic and onions as that is what goes into almost every meal now. I miss having a food processor and my big-ass kitchen aid mixer, but I am making due and having a real creative renaissance in the kitchen.

I've even been super lucky and found a vendor at the Bastille Market that has enormous bunches of kale:

Slugs seem to love it too, as I found several lurking in the folds of the leaves when I was washing and chopping it up. Squidgy! But I had several kale-based meals this week and have more in the freezer for later. Thank you to Kristen at the Kale Project for her hard work in this department! She sends out alerts when kale is spotted in a market in the city, and she's been working with farmers to convince them that there is a market for big bunches of bitter greens.

One of my only complaints about the produce here is that there is almost no bitter greens (kale and collards and rabe) and no hot peppers. The French don't really care for spice, and for whatever reason, the good stuff just never made it into their daily menus. I can usually find swiss chard, but not the pretty rainbow variety you get in the states. I can occasionally find bok choy. Alas, I can not really truly complain. Everything is brilliantly fresh and other than those few unavailable items, the variety is downright stunning.

Don't even get me started on the cheese.

Château de Chambord

Our first destination on the La Loire à Vélo was the Chateau Chambord. Just like the raspberry liqueur! Once again, I find myself drawn to places that give their name to sprits.

We did get lost- a little issue where we zigged where we should have zagged and ended up on a bigger loop than necessary- so the ride out to the Chateau ended up being longer than the 20km we planned. No matter though, as it was a pleasant ride.

The trail followed quiet farm roads and country lanes. There were very few spots when you had to use the road, and it was usually to cut through a sleepy little village with little traffic anyway.

France has been long denuded of trees, save for a handful of forest preserves. It was lovely to ride through the shade of trees, their leaves starting to get crackly and dry with impending autumn.

The Estate of Chambord is a giant game preserve, with a 32km wall around the permiter to keep the boars and red deer in.

First, a picnic...

A lovely bottle of local white. The Loire has good, crisp, fruity white wines.

I failed to find cups on the way, so we rinsed out a container of coconut water we brought, chopped the top off and had a very nice wine glass. Keeping it classy.

Loire area is also known for its excellent goat cheese. With a saucisson, a hearty bread, fresh apples and pears, we had a nice warming picnic lunch.

Max Vauche is the local awesome chocolatier. It's good, fantastic stuff that I'm now hoping I might be able to locate in Paris.

Ah, already sunny outlook much improved. On to the Chateau.

Chambord is the largest and grandest of the Loire Chateaus.

It was originally built as a hunting lodge for François I, the Chateau was where the Louve squirreled away works such as the Mona Lisa and the Venus de Milo during WWII.

The most unique element of Chambord is the double-helix main staircase, rumored to be designed by Da Vinci.

Also unique- you can climb the stairs and end up on the roof for a really nice view of the spires and the grounds.

Not too shabby.