Spitting Yarn

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Oh, there’s nothing like a break away from London to redress the cosmic balance and generally make me feel a little more zen. What with having a pretty stinky time at work and then having to deal with London in the midst of “la canicule”, I was very much ready to hop on a BA flight to anywhere (Club class, happily, as we booked the flights a million years ago).

A good friend of ours who is French but was mainly brought up in Scotland managed to persuade the French bureaucrats to let her get wed in France. The event took place in a wee village called la Teste de Buch not too far from Bordeaux. The mayor of the town, a doctor, conducted the ceremony in the wee hôtel de ville, and he was the same chap who brought our friend into the world, which provided lovely symmetry to an already lovely day.

For the first two nights DB and I stayed in a two star guest house called La Maison Du Lierre, which was centrally located in Bordeaux and sweet. We ventured out on the Saturday morning and my yarndar was obviously well atuned to the environment and DB and I found ourselves on rue Judaïque which, having done some homework, I knew to be the residence of a yarn store. However, I was faced with this sight:

That, my friends, is the window of a closed yarn store showing bundles of sale stock. Sigh. The yarn store was Gil et Puce (not the most charmingly named LYS). A little later on our taxi took us past Anny Blatt on Cours Georges-Clémenceau, also closed. I pressed my nose against the cab window wistfully and knew that Bordeaux was not going to be yielding any yarny treats for me.

While la Maison du Lierre was a sweet place, the reception kept inconveniently infrequent hours and was on a street which became noisy after dark. So DB and I found ourselves lulled away to the nearby hamlet of Boulliac and the hotel Hauterive Saint-James, where the wedding reception and most of the weekend’s festivities had taken place. The Saint-James was quite a step up. A beautiful hotel set in a small vineyard, with a beautiful pool. Our room had panoramic views of Bordeaux, and we had a small decked terrace which fronted on the vineyard. The pool was beautiful and we spent much of the remaining two days around it.

Despite having lucked out on the LYS front, I did my bit for knitting in public and tackled a project I had been looking forward to trying out from Mason-Dixon Knitting, the ballband washcloth.

Here are my two efforts (the pictures are WIPs, but they’re both finished now).

The pattern is really addictive and I’m definitely going to knit a bunch more. I’d really like to get hold of some nice brightly coloured Sugar n’ Cream yarn (my cotton stash yarn was a bit too tastefully coloured!), but many of the US online retailers who stock it don’t ship to the UK. I don’t suppose anyone knows of somewhere that does ship to the UK, or alternatively, would anyone based in the US be willing to send some on to me (I’ll reimburse for the yarn and shipping of course – perhaps I can send some UK yarn in exchange?).

Take a look at *this* Flickr gallery of ballband washcloths. They’re so zingy and moreish. I’d like to knit some that are a little larger than my first attempts.

This was my first visit to the south of France and I would love to go back. The food, in particular, was excellent. The breakfast and the wedding dinner at the Saint-James was fantastic, and we made two visits to the restaurant across the road from the Saint-James which specialised in grilled meat. Lovely!

Slightly less lovely was this item on the menu of a brasserie we ate at in Bordeaux:

*click for big*

I was definitely not going to be trying the steack hache a cheval.