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Silver-Studded Blue

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Hello! I hope you’re doing okay and have had a good week so far. It’s heather season here, and as it’s been too hot to even think about knitting this week, I thought I’d just chat a bit about a felt butterfly I’ve made and take you along for a stroll to enjoy the purple gorgeousness.

In some places the heather carpets the entire ground, in other places it grows in tussocks.

Most of the heather here is common heather, or ling, but there is some erica as well.

Even though it’s still morning, the  highland cattle that have been hired to keep the heather free from encroaching trees and purple moor grass have retreated to a shady spot.

The sheep with the same job description can stand the heat better but they, too, prefer to laze about in the shade today.

The bees love the heat, though, and the entire heath is abuzz with them. The butterflies fluttering about are mainly cabbage whites. It would be great to see a silver-studded blue, known as heideblauwtje (heather blue) in Dutch. As it’s a red list species chances are slim, but hold on, what’s that blue speck?

Yes, it really is a silver-studded blue,

only it’s made of felt, with embroidery and beads.

Designer Marianne of Lindelicht has captured its essence really well. My stitches are not as neat as those on the shop sample, and I had to replace the tiny blue beads with slightly larger ones because I dropped the original ones in the garden and was unable to retrieve them all, but still my butterfly is also clearly recognizable.

This is the fourth of her butterflies I’ve made so far – lovely little summer projects.

Writing this reminds me that I also have several hanks of Marianne’s beautiful hand-dyed yarn in my stash. Maybe it’s time to knit some of those up into a shawl or scarf. But first I’ll finish the socks and the cardigan that are still on my needles. Perhaps there’ll be something to tell you about one of those next week. Hope to see you again then!

Harmless Amusements

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‘Let us read, and let us dance; these two amusements will never do any harm to the world.’ With this quote from Voltaire my current library book starts. It’s Jenny Colgan’s The Little Shop of Happy Ever After. A cringe-invoking title if ever there was one, but I could do with some light reading. And it’s about books. In a nutshell, librarian Nina loses her job, buys a van, moves to Scotland and starts a mobile bookshop.

I haven’t finished it yet, but I can already tell you that it’s totally unrealistic and fluffy, and also warm and funny. Yes, let us read! But I’d rather substitute something else for the dancing. I can think of lots of other amusements that meet Voltaire’s criterion:

☑ Walking and cycling
This is one of my favourite stretches of bicycle track, part of one of my short weekday close-to-home cycle routes:

It was here we took the photos of my Gazelle Mitts. I’m looking forward to the time I’ll be needing mitts and mittens again.

☑ Making felt butterflies
With blanket stitch two layers of felt are sewn together – short stitches, longer stitches and some beads along the edges.

☑ Knitting
I’ve just finished a pair of socks from Meilenweit ‘Cosima’ (100g/420 m/560 yds; 75% Merino extra fine, 25% Polyamide). The yarn is very soft to the touch, yet so strong that it can’t be broken by hand. I wonder why one sock yarn is far stronger than another with exactly the same wool and synthetics percentages. Trying to get two matching socks and to make the cuffs and heels coincide with the colour changes in the yarn was a fun game.

I’ve come to call these my Dutch landscape socks, because they have a typical Dutch heel and, well…

☑ Photography
With my small and simple camera, I wouldn’t call myself a photographer. But what I love about taking pictures is how it opens my eyes to things and creatures I would otherwise never have noticed. Just imagine wearing a pair of feelers your own length once again on your head all day every day.

☑ Spinning
My own spinning hasn’t progressed much since last week, but I met a wonderful spinner at a market on Wednesday. She doesn’t have a website to link to – just call me Reny, she said.

At the back of her stall there was a washing line with hanks of wool in beautiful colours.

None of them for sale – all hand spun and plant dyed they were priceless. Instead of price tags, they had tags with recipes. This one was for the second skein on the left (the green one): mordanted with alum, first dyed with onion skins, then overdyed with indigo.

What she did sell were knitted birds and small sheep from unspun wool, as well as these peg loom woven sitting mats. They look wonderfully soft and warm.

I have the feeling that Reny wasn’t really there to sell things, though, but rather to share her passion for her woolly ‘amusements’.

Watching the news and reading the paper, I often feel sad and powerless. What can we do? Engaging in ‘amusements that will never do any harm to the world’ at least will not make things worse. That’s something. And they may just add some warmth and beauty to the world as well. I could think of many more such amusements, but am signing off for now. Hope to share some pictures of a finished butterfly and blooming heather next week. Bye!

Sky Blue-Pink

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Hello, and thank you so much for last week’s thoughtful comments. Taking your advice on board, I’m telling myself that it’s okay to be less productive for a while. Focusing on small and simple knitting projects for the time being seems like the best thing to do. Socks, and perhaps a small scarf or a pair of mittens – thank you for your ideas. And I hope to finally get round to some other crafts projects that have been patiently waiting.

In 2023 I bought some spinning fibre at the wool festival in Joure, from the Q-Art stand that was filled with hand-dyed wool-and-silk in many colours:

Is there something there to your taste? Which would you choose? I chose two balls, together a little under 300 grams – these:

One a dusty pink, and the other the colour of the sky on some mornings and evenings: sky-blue pink.

I love these festivals so much, not just because of the lovely materials on offer but also because of the people visiting them, some of them imaginatively dressed. Take this person, all in white with a lace parasol, an antique-looking skirt, and ankle socks with lace. Even the text on the bag is carefully chosen: Once upon a time…

Well, back to spinning. I started with the sky blue-pink fibre, in this case pre-drafting it. I tear off about 30 centimetres (13 inches).

Then carefully pull on it with both hands.

Pulling the fibre out more and more, bit by bit, moving my hands back and forth along its length while taking care not to pull it apart. Until it is about 4 to 5 times the original length.

This blends the colours a little more. And most of all it loosens the fibres, making for easier spinning. I spin it, then tear off another piece and repeat the pre-drafting process, spin that, etc.

(I also spin with both hands, but do not always have an extra pair of hands handy for taking pictures.) After spinning all of the fibre, I’m going to ply it into a 2-ply yarn. I’m aiming for a sport-weight yarn, but always find the final weight hard to predict.

Do you spin, too? If not, why not give it a try? Once you’ve got the hang of it, it’s such a relaxing thing to do. Wool festivals and crafts fairs are ideal for trying out whether it’s something you might enjoy, without immediately investing in all kinds of materials and equipment. There are always people there who are happy to let you take place behind their spinning wheel and tell you what to do.

Well, that’s all for today. I hope there is something else to share here next week and hope to see you then!

Sidetracked

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Hello there! Last Sunday morning we went for a walk in a small out-of-the-way nature reserve. In fact, it’s such an out-of-the-way place that we’ve only ever met two other people there, which is very unusual in this overpopulated little country. It’s an open patch of heathland, with dry and sandy soil, various kinds of heather, grasses and some trees. With thunderstorms forecast for the afternoon and evening, the atmosphere was oppressive.

I was feeling a bit meh. Actually more than just a bit meh – tired and uninspired. I was struggling with the last details on the cardigan for our daughter. The ribbings along the pocket tops, which I would otherwise just have got on with, seemed an insurmountable obstacle.

And there was literally nothing else on my needles. I did have some new knitting projects lined up, but didn’t feel excited about any of them. In short, I’d lost my knitting mojo and also felt like I had nothing left to say. While in the distance sheep were grazing and dozing, and a highland cow was playing hide-and-seek, I was ruminating.

Maybe it was the summer weather, never conducive to knitting. Or maybe it was only to be expected after all the knitting and sewing of the past few months, no matter how much I’ve loved it. One of the things I made that I haven’t shared here yet is this little cardi. I think it’s very sweet, but the pattern could have been a little more detailed.

Walking there, I was thinking, ‘Maybe I should abandon all attempts at making things for a while and take a break from blogging for the rest of July and August.’

And then my husband veered off from the main path to follow a side track, I followed him, and… oh, look!

Thyme!

This is a rare kind of thyme called kleine tijm (small thyme) in Dutch (Thymus serpyllum; Breckland thyme or creeping thyme in English). It’s tiny (about 3 cm/1¼” tall), fragrant and covered in pink flowers at this time of year. So beautiful!

Looking closely, I saw some bees on it with very hairy legs.

The Plant Atlas of the Botanical Society of Britain & Ireland says about this thyme that it grows, ‘…especially in areas disturbed by rabbits or sheep.’ Exactly.

Within seconds the thyme shakes me out of my slump and I begin to notice other small and beautiful things. Like lovely little tufts of lacy lichens.

And small blue butterflies fluttering around the heather. ‘How about making one of those?’ a voice inside of me whispers.

Since our walk, I’ve been hearing more whisperings. It isn’t always clear what they’re telling me, but I feel quite sure I need to listen to them. One of them was very specific, though, and made me cast on a pair of simple socks in a yarn that looks like a water colour painting of a Dutch landscape.

Two takeaways from this walk:

  1. It’s okay to allow yourself to be sidetracked from time to time – it may lead to rabbit or sheep poo, but also to beautiful discoveries.
  2. Small things can bring great happiness.

I can’t say that my knitting mojo has miraculously returned, but I’m feeling more positive. I’d miss chatting with you here on my blog too much, so won’t be taking that break. Only, until my knitting mojo decides to put in an appearance I expect to be writing about side tracks with very little idea of where they’ll be taking us. I hope you don’t mind, hope you’re doing well and hope to see you again next week!

Mûtske

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Hello! Good news from me today! Last weekend our second grandson was born. I am so very relieved, grateful and happy to be able to tell you that mum and baby are doing well.

It is our tradition to give newborns and their families a basket filled with gifts for the first 10 days.

This time, I knit a matching set consisting of a pair of leggings, an asymmetrical cardigan and a hat for gift #1.

To celebrate, I have a wee gift for you, too – the pattern for the hat. Maybe I’ll get round to writing up the patterns for the rest of the set someday as well, but for now it’s just the hat. I’ve named it Mûtske.

Mûtske is the diminutive of the Frisian word mûts, meaning hat. So a mûtske is a small hat – in this case a newborn size one. The ‘û’ is pronounced more or less like the ‘oo’ in good.

The yarn I used is ‘Merci’ from Filcolana – a nice and soft, machine washable wool-and-cotton blend. I purchased the yarn at the yarn shop in my previous post but I believe it’s widely available. And of course it can easily be substituted by a similar fingering-weight yarn.

As a nod to the leggings, the hat has a narrow edge in a contrasting colour.

Mûtske is knit in the round from the brim up, either using double-pointed needles or a circular needle and the magic-loop method. The body of the hat has a simple yet decorative stitch pattern, and the decreases on the crown make lovely swirling rays:

Mûtske is a quick little gift that will fit the average newborn baby head.

The free pattern for Mûtske can be found here on Ravelry.

Happy knitting!

A Yarn Shop on a Terp

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On hot summer days, it’s always a few degrees cooler on the coast and there is often a refreshing sea breeze as well. To escape the heat, we sometimes drive northwards to the coast nearest to us, in Friesland. I thought you might like to join us on one of these trips, especially because it involves yarn.

It is not a coast with sandy beaches and breakers, but a coastline surrounded by dykes with the sea or mud flats right behind them, depending on the tides.

Before the dykes, people built terpen (dwelling mounds) to stay safe when the land was flooded during storms and high tides. We used to live in a village on a terp until we moved to our present home, but it is not that village I am taking you to today. Our destination is the tiny village of Eastrum, with about 190 inhabitants – and a yarn shop. The shop, called Seldensa, is housed in the former village café.

My husband drops me off and drives a few miles on to a good bird-watching spot, so that I can browse around Seldensa at leisure. Owner Nynke is a very friendly person, who gives advice if you need it and doesn’t bother you if you just want to look around, which is just how I like it. Apart from many yarn-filled shelves, she also has plenty of samples to provide inspiration.

Let’s zoom in on the sideways-knit top in the centre:

It is Floatside, designed by Wool & Pine, knit in Kremke’s ‘Morning Salutation’ (a lyocell/cotton blend). So lovely and summery.

In the back of the shop, there is a totally un-summery but equally lovely sample:

This is the Agnes Kofta, designed by Kristin Wiola Odegard. It is knit in the nice and woolly Norwegian ‘Finull’ yarn from Rauma that comes in such a huge range of colours:

Another of my favourite yarn brands here is Filcolana. I love their ‘Merci’ and ‘Anina’ yarns for baby’s and children’s knits. I didn’t take any pictures of those, but will tell you more about something I knit with Merci soon. I did take a photo of some of the gorgeous Holst Garn colours, though:

I can’t tell you what pattern or yarn was used for the Norwegian children’s cardigan next to the Holst yarn, I’m afraid. I do try to remember everything, but every now and then something slips my mind.
ETA: The children’s cardigan above is The Original Cardigan designed by Sophie Ochera knit in Holst Garn supersoft. A great pattern for using up yarn remnants.

After a couple of hours of soaking up colours and inspiration, and choosing some yarn, my husband joins me again and we eat our sandwiches strolling around the village.

The Saint Nicholas church on the top of the terp is a patchwork of bricks from different eras. The oldest part, the tower, dates from the 13th century. Cyclists or hikers following long-distance route Het Ziltepad are welcome to stay the night in the church. I’d love to do that sometime.

But for now, we’re just strolling through the quiet village, where hydrangeas are flowering behind the privet hedges.

Where it is as if time has stood still.

And where everyone seems to be snoozing during this warm lunchtime hour.

So peaceful.

During the summer months, Seldensa is one of the stops along the Vlasroute. This 30-kilometre long route tells the story of flax and the products made from it, like linen and linseed oil. Info about the Vlasroute can be found here. And my earlier blogpost about the route here.  I hope you enjoyed this little outing and hope to see you again soon. Until then, stay cool!

Rest for the Restless

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Together, my daughter and I have taken out a subscription to The Simple Things for a year. She gets the magazine in her letterbox first, and I get it when she’s read it. That means I’m always behind, but I don’t mind. I’m now reading the April issue, which contains an interview with James and Helen Rebanks. They have a farm in the English Lake District, are both authors and have four children aged 7 to 19.

One of the things that come up in the article is how they find balance in their busy lives, and Helen says something that really strikes a chord with me: “Rest is a huge part of regenerative agriculture. Plants need time to grow, time to flower,

time to set seed

and time to recuperate. […] People are the same. We can’t push our bodies and minds to the max all the time. We need periods where things are slower and quieter, particularly as creative people. Sometimes we just need to stare out of the window

or take a walk and let things mull.” (Quote The Simple Things, April 2025, p. 49; photos mine.)

Yes, absolutely, hmm (can you see me nodding in agreement?). But what if you are too restless to rest? Hot summer weather does that to me. I really struggle with that, but have found some ways of dealing with it:

  • Take a walk every day no matter what.
  • Wear sunglasses. On the one hand, I hate having a barrier between myself and others and not being able to see the world in its true colours. On the other hand, aside from protecting my eyes, sunglasses also seem to give my brain some rest.
  • Snatch brief moments of rest and have a list at hand of small things to do during those moments. That may sound like a contradiction (resting – doing), but doing certain things (see below) can be more restful to me than just sitting around doing nothing.
  • Read one article in a magazine. Or, if even too restless for that, just look at the pictures and/or cut some out and stick them in a scrapbook.
  • Listen to one song. Three of my favourites (in random order):
  1. Dùn – Ailie Robertson
  2. Chord Left – Agnes Obel
  3. On the Nature of Daylight – Max Richter
  • KNIT!!! (even if it is just a couple of rows).
  • Spin (even if it is just for five minutes).
  • Play with colour – with pencils, water colours or yarn.

These beautiful little hanks were hand-dyed by Marianne of Lindelicht (who is taking the entire month of June off to rest). It is a blend of blue-faced Leicester wool and silk, and each hank is 3 g/24 m/26 yds.

Some yarns are so beautiful that I don’t use them because I’m afraid of ‘wasting’ them, but what’s the use of that when they are then languishing away in a dark corner? So I’m determined to do something with this yarn this summer, but what? It is sold as embroidery yarn, so that’s an option. Or could I use it for knitting or crochet? Or a combination of several techniques?

Something outside my comfort zone?
Or something inside my comfort zone?

Well, I hope this summer will bring you some time to rest, whether at home or away. We’re not going anywhere this summer, but I may take a short rest from blogging now and then. Or I may not – I just don’t know yet and don’t have a plan at all (eek! – that’s very unusual for me). Anyway, I hope to see you here from time to time. xxx

A Green Yarn

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Hello! There is a green knitting project on my needles that I don’t think I’ve mentioned before. It’s a cardigan for our daughter – Be Mine, from Swedish designer Matilda Kruse. It’s a fairly long cardigan knit on smallish needles (3.5 mm/US 4), with an intricate stitch pattern on the back. The pattern is well-written but complicated, and I’m using all kinds of aids so as not to lose the way.

  • A row counter to remind me when to knit in button holes.
  • A sticky note for keeping track of where I am in the stitch-pattern diagram.
  • Another sticky note with the number of pattern repeats I need to knit written out, so that I can cross them off once I’ve knit them.

The yarn I’m using is ‘Cheeky Merino Joy’ from Rosy Green Wool in a greyish green shade called Reed.

It’s a sport-weight 100% merino yarn – a finer version of the yarn I’ve used for my OXOX XL shawl. Cheeky Merino Joy is very soft and gives great stitch definition. Plus it’s organic. And that brings me to my second subject for today.

The organic farm that delivers groceries to our door every other week held an Open Day, together with 3 other organic farms within walking distance.

We buy organic because we think it’s better for our own health and that of the planet, but I’m not rigid in that. Often organic options just aren’t available or affordable. Not everything we eat is organic, I don’t wear organic lingerie and most of the yarns I knit with are not organic. Speaking with Kermit, ‘It’s not easy being green’.

I do think it’s a good direction to go in, though, and aside from the saving-the-earth aspects, it can also be very enjoyable. The green yarn I’m using is utterly lovely to knit with. It’s very nice to know the people who grow our vegetables…

…and make our cheese.

And it’s great to see the cows producing the milk for the cheese grazing on pasture land with all kinds of herbs among the grass.

Many of them are the well-known black-and-white Friesian Holsteins, but not all of them.

Two of the farms along our route are dairy farms. “Our” farm is mixed, with cattle, chickens, a few pigs, vegetables, herbs and a shop. And the fourth is a vegetable grower. At this one, I got to try my hand at harvesting white asparagus, cutting it below the soil with a special pronged cutting tool – not as easy as it looks!

At the end of our walk along all four of the farms, we stopped at the farm shop to buy some tea, biscuits and chocolates for friends we were going to visit.

It’s more convenient to have groceries delivered and I don’t visit the shop often, but it’s nice to see everything they have in person from time to time. And sometimes you find something unexpected – like organic cotton yarn.

I didn’t buy any because I rarely knit with cotton, but it felt very nice. I’m keeping it in mind for a summery knit sometime.

Today’s organic-farm-walk was in the polder, land reclaimed from a former sea. A landscape as flat as a pancake with big open skies.

I always feel it’s rather special to be walking on the seabed, 3 metres below sea level. I hope you’ve enjoyed this short walk, too, and hope to see you again next week. Till then, keep well.

Imker Socks

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Hello, I hope you’ve had a good week so far. I’ve been busy as a bee this week, and have finished another pair of socks from the wonderful 52 Weeks of Socks book – the Imker socks. As you can see, they are slightly too long for me, but they are for someone with feet two shoe sizes up so that’s fine.

Imker is the Dutch word for beekeeper and I think the design idea is brilliant, with honeycomb cables on feet and legs…

…and even a kind of tiny honeycomb stitch on the heel flaps.

I knit the backs of the legs in plain stocking stitch, because I’d read in other people’s Ravelry notes that with cables all round, the legs get too narrow to get your feet into the socks. The other modification I’ve made is using German short rows on the heels instead of the Wrap-&-Turn method (a great post about the how and why of that can be found here.)

The only thing I’m not very enthusiastic about is the very short heel flap. Having said that, the socks do fit very well around the heel and foot.

The yarn I used is Onion Nettle Sock, a blend of 70% wool and 30% nettle fibres, in shade 1032, a warm honey brown.

The stinging nettle fibre is added for durability as a sustainable alternative to nylon. The wool-and-nettle blend looks and feels like wool blends with other plant fibres in them, like cotton or linen. The nettle fibre takes the dye differently than the wool, which gives an ever so slightly marled effect.

While I was knitting these socks, I was thinking about bees and remembered a book I’ve loved reading – Linnets and Valerians by Elizabeth Goudge.

It’s a children’s classic from 1964, about Nan, Robert, Timothy and Betsy, who come to live with their eccentric uncle somewhere in the English countryside. Uncle’s cook/housekeeper/gardener Ezra is also an imker, and bees play an important role in the story.

Ezra teaches the children “Bees understand every word you say. They be the most wonderful creatures God ever made. If men were to ‘ave one-quarter o’ the wisdom o’ the bees this wicked world would be a better place…”

Ezra’s philosophy is, “If you’re good to the bees the bees they’ll be good to you.” He also warns the children, “you must mind your manners with ‘em. They like a bit o’ courtesy.”

Heeding Ezra’s warning, I asked some of the bees in our garden very politely if they’d please sit still for a moment, so that I could take a picture of them. But either they speak a different language here or they just weren’t listening, because I haven’t been able to capture them. My husband was more succesful as a honey bee whisperer and took this photo:

Isn’t it gorgeous? The orange clumps on the bee’s legs are pollen. To be honest, I had to look that up and found out that some species of bees actually have baskets on their legs for collecting pollen. Amazing! There is so much about bees that I don’t know yet. What I do know is that I love some of their honey in my ginger-and-lemon tea.

I don’t know exactly how consuming honey relates to Ezra’s philosophy about being good to the bees, though. Sigh, life can get very complicated once you start thinking about things. Wishing you a great weekend, with hopefully time to enjoy some knitting and a nice cup of tea (with or without honey).

Time Travelling

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Hello! We’re in the Moselle region again, where people have lived for thousands and thousands of years, leaving some of the things they made behind as evidence. We’re going for a walk that’ll be like time travelling. Don’t worry, it’s all downhill and not too strenuous. Our starting point is a place of contemplation that has drawn pilgrims for almost 800 years.

From here, a narrow track is taking us back in time…

…until we arrive in the 4th century BC. This is when the Treveri tribe lived here – farmers , traders and craftsmen known for their metalwork. They built a drystone wall with wooden posts to protect their settlement. I wonder what my life would have looked like had I lived here then. As a woman, I would probably not have been a metalworker, and nobody was knitting yet. So what would I have done with my hands instead? I can’t imagine not making something – maybe I’d have been a basket weaver?

A little further down the track, we are suddenly going 800.000 years back in time for a visit to a very early ancestor, the homo erectus. Pebble tools they made and left behind show that they had a camp here – all kinds of different tools used for hacking, cutting, scraping and chopping. In a reconstruction of the camp a corten steel woman is starting a fire. What is she going to make for dinner?

A man holding a spear is looking on, in front of their shelter. It looks quite cosy, really – a bit like the dome tent we camped in for years.

That is, until you zoom out and see the giant elephant looming behind their shelter.

Life must have been unimaginably hard all those millennia ago. Let’s quickly descend a little further to get back to the present day. Uhm, where exactly are we going next? I think we need to take a look at the map.

Ah, the trail is leading us to a big red dot with an S in Oberfell. I recognize most of the symbols on the map, but where does the S stand for? Oh, I see, the key tells us that the S stands for Stricken – German for knitting!

We’ve arrived at the home and business premises of the Trapp family (not Von Trapp as in The Sound of Music, just Trapp).

Their lovely, old-fashioned shop stocks clothes, table cloths and other textiles, and yarn. The yarn section is small, but if you’ve forgotten to bring your knitting, you’ll certainly find needles and yarn for a nice pair of socks, a scarf or a shawl here.

As happens so often among knitters, I got chatting with owner Bernadette and she told me about the knitwear manufacturing business her family used to run. Would I like to see the old knitting machines in the basement, perhaps? Yes please!

A sleeve is hanging over a knitting machine driven by what looks like a bicycle chain. Bernadette tells me how they knit their items from extremely fine yarn, with two or three threads combined.

She also tells me that the knitting business was founded by her grandmother in 1924. Another family member in the nearby city of Koblenz (I believe it was grandmother’s uncle) already had a knitting business farming out the knitting among many women in the region. This made him a wealthy man but didn’t bring in all that much for the knitters. Grandmother Veronika decided that it would be more profitable to start her own knitting business and so she did.

She had a large family (13 children if I remember correctly) and all of the children had their little jobs in the business, like winding the yarn from hanks onto cones.

One of these children later continued the business. An example of the style of jackets they knit hangs on another, slightly more modern-looking knitting machine.

Sewing on buttons and ribbons, and adding embroidery was all done by hand by members of the family, in this case by Bernadette herself. She also crocheted the lace on the pocket square in the breast pocket.

For the bakers in the region they knit jackets with beautiful stitch patterns on the front. White jackets, so that the bakers would still look presentable even though they were all covered in flour. People also came to Trapp when the cuffs on their sweaters were frayed or the elbows worn through, and new sleeves would be knit on. In the 1960s the family stopped producing knitwear as they were unable to compete with the mass produced items flooding the market, but the shop is still going strong.

I’ve loved getting a glimpse into this knitting business and didn’t leave empty-handed either – sock yarn always comes in handy.

Many old houses in the Moselle region have sayings on their gables. The saying on a gable a few houses down from the Trapp family business seems apt for closing off today’s post: “Wenn in der Welt ein Handwerksmann sein Mut und Fleiß tut wenden an, tragt solches ihm sein Nahrung ein, wie immer mag das Wetter sein.”

Roughly translated it means: “When a craftsman shows up in the world diligent and able, he will always have food on the table, no matter what the weather.” I’d love to have a saying like that on my gable, only I’d phrase it slightly differently:

Going through the world as a maker
Whether as a knitter, gardener or baker
Will keep you from feeling lost and blue
No matter what life throws at you

Well, it doesn’t always work, but I’m sure you’ll agree that making things often helps make things better. Now, back to my own knitting and I hope to tell you a bit about some of that next week. See you then!