Happy Birthday to Me!

Yay! One more fun year down, and many more to go, I hope. To the left, the birthday gifts I got today:

• Flowers from Joe! What a good husband.
• A pretty black scarf from the hotel (how many hotels that you've been to give you birthday gifts?
• A cold Old Speckled Hen, my fav British Ale
• Yarn! Of course

I also got flowers from my colleague, WB, which are also beautiful, and are currently decorating my office. A manicure was my present to myself, but I couldn't get a good pic.

The yarn came from a yarn store that my friend AS told me about here in Lima. The store is called Nakayama knits & crafts, at Avenida La Paz 324 Miraflores (they are still working on the website). The owner is a Japanese-Peruvian, and it looks like she may speak Japanese. They sell a lot of beautiful hand-knit items, both traditional Peruvian style and more modern stuff, as well as a wall full of yarn. They sell a wider variety than Alpaca 859, including blends and acrylics and novelty, which is nice.

I bought 700 grams of DK weight so-soft acrylic in a pretty light yellow color, made by a Peruvian company called Hilados Acrylicos San Juan, S.A. It is their Cigüeñita line, and even though it is 100% acrylic, it is super soft, and perfect for a baby blanket (I wonder whose...!).

This is a very friendly and nice store. I recommend that you stop by if you are in Lima.

One thing that I still have not found here in South America is a yarn store where you really feel like you could spend hours just looking; where you could plop down in a chair with a project and knit for hours (like at Lovely Yarns or A Good Yarn); where you feel comfortable touching everything and asking 2 million questions. Alpaca 859 and Nakayama have nice things, but limited selection (although Nakayama's selection of types of yarn is broader), but no... community space. Maybe that aspect of knitting just hasn't exported this far yet?

This second pic is the back of my tank top so far. I'm almost at the neck, and then I will block front and back and Kitchener them together at the shoulder, and then do the neckband. So far, so good.

Oxfam superfab project: Tejiendo con Las Mujeres (Weaving with Women)

My colleague just handed me a great book about an Oxfam project, funded by ECHO (the European Commission Humanitarian Office), to help women recover from the trauma of Hurricane Stan (October 2005). The project, in Guatemala, taught women in affected communities how to weave, or how to embroider, and brought them together to weave and embroider huipiles, which are the traditional blouses of Guatemalan women.

The book is full of testimonials about how the project helped the women to recover from the loss of family and friends and to regain the confidence to move on with their lives. My favorite quote in the book is, "when we weave, we chitchat and we play. It is like medicine for us."

All of you who do crafts know how true it is that making something is like medicine.