French dinner

Before I leave for my fall trip to France tommorrow I write about my touchable souveniers from my last trip in August. The non-touchable souveniers are my experiences and the memories.
I also bought some crafty stuff, already turned into summery, simple jewelery, but that part has to wait.

A good part of my vacation I spent in the Hautes-Alpes and did a little bit of shopping in the beautiful situated town Briancon. I love pondering around in french villages and small towns. So relaxing, at least when one is on vacation!


As an inauguration of my new tableware I brought from there last weekend I invited my "Doppelkopf"-friends. (*Doppelkopf is a very German game*). Normally we have a one-course-dish before grabbing the play-cards but this time I wanted to spoil them. Here is our menu:


Soup from sweet potatoes and corn (not a french recipe),
spiced with fresh coriander and ginger.

Accompanied by home-made fougasse (bread a la Provence) spiced with mixed herbs de Provence.










Papeton d'Aubergines - Crown of eggplant consisting of eggplants, zucchini, tomatoes, pepper, garlic, onion spiced with a lot of self-collected thyme (*in Provence of course, not in North Germany :-) *) and some laurel leaves.





Chamignons in creme fraiche
with fresh parsley.












Baked potatoes in olive oil
spiced with self-collected rosemary
- of course again in Provence.

Tarte aux Poires et Chocolat
Cake with pears, chokolade and cream

Hélène, I wonder if I'm not too mistaken with my french cooking. ;-)

In France we plan on going to the Calanques, a beautiful spot near Marseille at the Mediterrean see. White cliffs are raising directly from the blue sea and we are going to climb some of them.
I hope for a lot of sun to take in before returning into the Northern winter season.

See you in November, enjoy your fall!
Hello from Hamburg
:-Tally-:

Very magenta, threading beads and a shoemaker in India

As I wrote in my last post I only wanted to knit easy and small things. And very likely for somebody else a little spark.
So I knitted a very small skarf and used it as a ribbon and tie for wrapping the present for my girlfriends. Looked very nice, picked up the theme of the present, but - no photo.
Next knit where socks for my neighbour friend - no photo.
But the third knit I caught, although I almost threw my camera away, because I thought it's old and broken, because it didn't produce sharp pictures and instead awful colors. After the discovery of blogland I found out that it's not my camera but the colorway itself.

Today I tweaked one of the "best" photos a bit in Photoshop and this is the result:



These fingerless gloves were meant to bring some comfort to a young woman who is helping us selfishless at work.
I used the pattern "fetching" from Knitty.com.

The embellishment made my brain more glowing then the knitting. How to bring the beautiful, shining, small beads onto the yarn? All instructions I found on internet didn't work out. I pondered and tried and pondered even more, till finally I had figured it out:

How to string bead on yarn:
Take some soft wax and treat the tip of your yarn with it. Work it into the fiber till you have a good hard tip, which will do the threatening.

I use this small waxy "points", which one can buy in Germany and Switzerland and probably in others countries as well. They are used for fixing a candle in the holder so it does not fall out. I should guess bee wax will work fine, too.

The story of this idea is rather interesting. Two summers ago I travelled to Ladakh in Northern India. There I met a Tibetean Lady, who runs a shop for Jewelery. Besides some bracelets I bought little precious stones and pearls from her and asked her to teach me stringing in the Tibetean way. They don't have the elaborate stuff that's available here. She told me to go to one of the shoe-polisher, who are working in all streets to gain some money for their familiys and get some polishing wax from him. Exactly this I did. It was a small, very hard ball, but did the job for the time being.

The shoemaker was very proud to be able to help me. We had a good relationship anyway, because I stopped near him almost everyday to lock my bicycle there before going "downtown" Leh. So we always exchanged some nonverbal communication that consisted mainly of smiles.

Burma

I don't know if an action like this will help the people living and hoping in Burma, but maybe it does. Since I'm thinking much of Burma in these days I might as well participate and not miss this chance of helping.
If you want as well follow this link.

I just had a look into the list of participants and that's quite faszinating. People from all over the world are only blogging this banner and link today. Every minute there are more. Look for yourself.

Very brown

As in other aspects of my life I procrastinate. I had many topics in my head, some posts even written mentally. Notice the emphasis on "many". Oh yes, the good part in my life are my many, many interests and the downpart is sometimes the same.
So now I allow myself to hop into one of my many projects without having to write about all.

Already last winter, when I picked up knitting again, my eyes fell on the Shetland Triangle Shawl, like shown here and here and on many other pages as well.
But no, I promised myself that in my second knitting "career" I should only knit small easy things (more on this topic hopefully sometimes later).
Nevertheless somehow I couldn't resist the call of yarn shops and I ended up amongst more yarn with some beautifull cashmere/silk from the Hamburger Wollfabrik for a sleeveless sweater like the very friendly saleslady was wearing.
The yarn is shimmering very beautiful.
It is so nice to touch. I choose
brown.
Last winter I liked brown.

With two strands I started my sweater. Never got very far.
In spring I did not like brown anymore.

Sometime during the year I got hit by the next scarf, due to the blog "The giving flower". Kimberly was asking for company knitting the Peacock Feather Shawl.
You bet I was tempted. The colors! Blue! Bluegreen! Peacock, like I admired in India and on a farm in Namibia so much for their beauty!
No, I stuck to my promise to myself. Only small things - only easy to knit things.

This fall Kimberly and I had some mail discussion on her yarn and afterwards I knew what to do: Frog the never-will-be-anyway-sweater, take apart the two strands and use one.
For the Peacock? Brown?
No, of course not.
The same night I ordered "Scarf style" and started my Shetland Triangle two days later. (I'm going to sell the book, because this is the only pattern I will follow.)

I still can't imagine brown for a shawl but I do have some clothings it might fit with. To cheer it up I could not resist to put it onto one of my favorite colors.
See for yourself.

BTW: I will have a lot of brown left over!

Blogging - html- color

Changing the color of a word in the text is easy with the formating tabs given by blogger when writing a new post.

To change the color of one or more words in the title a little html is necessary:

Put the word you want to change in between < color = "xxxxxxx">

and < /font color >

For the xxxxx you have to choose the code from a chart (here is an example). And leave out all spaces. I can't type without the spaces, because due to web technic you won't see the tag.
The blogger software is translating the html in something else I don't know so far.