Sunday, June 17, 2007

Wine for knitters

Stephanie Pearl McPhee, the Yarn Harlot, came to our neck of the woods. (http://www.yarnharlot.ca/blog/). She came all the way from Toronto, Canada to Petaluma, California to promote her newest book, The Yarn Harlot Casts Off, right here in our county!

She was delightfully funny and entertaining. Operating on almost NO sleep (see her blog for details), she still managed to project her warm humor to hundreds of people who showed up to hear her. And she stayed at Copperfields bookstore until past 10:30 p.m. to make sure everyone who wanted to got her autograph in their book. She had about a one hour drive back to her hotel in San Francisco, and a 3 a.m. wake-up call to get to the airport to catch her flight on to Seattle the next morning. But still, she remained gracious and kept her good humor. Amazing.

I wanted to share a bit of the wine country with her. WG, as you've probably guessed, works for a winery, so we have no shortage of wine around here. In fact, it's threatening to take over our house. Soon we'll be forced to do what one of the employees of another winery WG worked at did--make furniture out of the cases of wine he was given by the winery in lieu of decent pay.

But what wine to give? Stephanie did not respond to my queries about what wine she likes. I'm not upset, given the huge volume of mail she must deal with every day (she regularly receives HUNDREDS of comments to each of her blog posts). I know she likes beer, but had no idea what kind of wine. Red, white, pink? Sweet or dry? Light or bold???

Finally, it hit me.



(You might have to click the picture to read the label and see what the wine is called)

Well, duh!

The wine maker and WG graciously signed the bottle for her, and I included a corkscrew in case she felt the need to drink it before schlepping it back to Canada.

But just in case,



I whipped up this felted wine tote to protect the bottle in her luggage.

Incidentally, Jazmine, the brain-damaged dog is overly fond of stealing my knitting and chewing on it. so this is what I had to rig up to dry the tote after felting:



Oh, and here's the "before" picture:



The tote was a little wide--I just guessed--but it serves the purpose. I hope Stephanie enjoys it as much as I enjoy her books and her visit here.

Janknitz

Stay tuned--next time more felting.

No comments: