Holiday Knitting

Well we've been back over a month now but I'm still in mourning :-/  it was a lovely holiday - what isn't there to love about France in the spring-time! 

Naturally I did some knitting - can't go anywhere without a suitcase full of knitting projects.  This sock was mostly knitted in Belgium -

Appropriate given it's colour and those famously yummy Belgium chocolates :-)

I finished it in Versailles - also appropriate because of the amount of walking we did about the palace gardens and grounds ... Marie Antoinette's impossibly cute 'hamlet' ... the Petit and Grand Trianons ...

 

The colours of spring in Europe are lovely - and reflected in the clothing worn by many women and children (must be sub-conscious) !   Soft greens, aqua, clear jade, teal colours, apple greens ... the colours of all those new fresh leaves against the freshly washed sky ...

I found those colours in some yarn in the wonderful haby shop in our favourite town in Burgundy - Avallon.

Luckily, one of my daughter's friends is expecting her 2nd bub which provided the excuse I needed to buy it - bought a pattern & the needles ...

 Really European style with all those stripes.

I think I was somewhat obsessed by those colours - bought this deliciously fluffy mohair in Vezelay - 

I bought it from the breeder  :-)  she showed me photos of the goats and everything ... very lovely.

My 2 Blythe Dolls came with us!!   and I did some knitting for them too ...  Lillian needed a chic Parisian dress ... classic, understated elegance - 

figure hugging with 2 little 'Dior pleats' at the back (a bit hard to see in the black yarn) -

Audrey asked for a similar dress - but with bracelet length sleeves and a frilly hem "like the dress in "Breakfast at Tiffany's", the one that other Audrey wears with the big hat" ...

We all did lots of shopping in France and the Blythe Dolls needed a new bag!

I met up with a lovely group of knitters in Paris - a knitting group I met on Ravelry .  Despite my appalling lack of French they were very welcoming and sweet.  As a group they had been knitting shawls and were having a Shawl Fashion Parade in the Palais-Royale.  I took this shawl project but I'd only just started.  I'm not entirely happy with this and it will probably get un-knitted ... not sure about the yarn - I love purple, I love green but I don't love the way they are mixing here.

Breakfast at Tiffany's - a Blythe tribute

My daughter calls the phenomenon "compulsory procrastination" - when you are really really busy but you spend valuable time doing something completely NOT on your To Do list. e.g. when the person up a ladder cleaning the leaves out of their gutter should really be working on their PHD and the only time you feel like cleaning the refrigerator is when you've a project or an essay overdue ...

So when my ToDo list is completely out of control what do I spend time doing? A tribute to That dress from "Breakfast at Tiffany's". My new Blythe doll is called Audrey - she doesn't like the idea of a cigarette holder and tells me that it is actually a magic wand. I'm not telling her that it is really a broken paint-brush!

Though I have a great many 'issues' with the story-line of B@T's, Audrey Hepburn looked completely gorgeous in those Givenchy dresses. I had fun getting the cut-away back looking similar - though it created problems with fastening - snap-studs are quite bulky on the tiny scale of dolly dresses. Audrey Hepburn's pearls etc were a separate necklace - for convenience I've sewn Audrey's to the dress.