Today I visited the Nordic Heritage Museum here in Seattle. It’s a wonderful museum with special exhibits for each of the Nordic countries. I was particularly pleased to see so many spinning wheels and examples of knitting. And one of the visitors was wearing a very nice Lopi sweater – perfect in that setting.
In the Iceland room there was a long poem about the tradition of the Christmas cat – evidently a black cat who can be extremely mean to children at Christmas time. I felt that there is a dark side to human nature to develop and perpetrate belief in such things. As you know, I have a black cat named Slinky Malinki after the Slinky Malinki in Lynley Dodd’s books.
My Slinky Malinki is a lovely cat and I miss her – and I suspect she is missing lying on my knitting, as pictured here.
What I particularly want to call attention to here though is a knitting workshop which was held in the Museum in early October. I was talking with one of the attendants about it, and she said it was one of the most popular events ever held at the museum. They had over 200 knitters from all over the world. And she was particularly amazed to see such a large group of women knitting while they queued for their meals and even when they were at the dining tables. I told my sister about this and her quip was “oh, knit a stitch, take a bite”, hence the title of this entry. It is hoped that the event will be staged again in another year or two – sounds good to me. There is a booklet for sale with some of the patterns developed during the workshop – I might go back to the shop there to buy it – and while I’m there I just might succumb to buying one or even both of the Norwegian knitting books by Annemor Sundbo – Setesdal sweaters: the history of the Norwegian lice pattern and Invisible Threads in Knitting.
A book I did buy today though is a little book called The Literary Cat – here is a quote from it: “There are people who reshape the world by force or argument, but the cat just lies there, dozing, and the world quietly reshapes itself to suit his comfort and convenience.” (Allen and Ivy Dodd, American writers)