Knitting in France

What an ordeal it is it knit in France! I brought two sets of knitting needles with me. I figured I would knit myself a blanket to protect me from the winter I am going to face. For some reason there is no Michaels craft store here. Instead you have to find speciality shops for the crafts you would like to do. There are scrapbooking stores (although I still haven't found them) and I imagine there are other hobby stores. I have been looking online for about two weeks for stores that sell yarn in Geneva. After 30 minutes of web browsing I found a blog posting on a knitting forum about yarn in Switzerland. From there I found two stores that carry Laine yarn. I'm not picky about yarn, and I don't know what's so great about Laine. I google map searched the distance between my house and the shops, searched on the public transportation website to see what tram I needed to take, and finally searched to see if any of them had a website. The one that was the furthest away did, so I decided to go there because I knew the hours of operation.

Ronny worked the night shift (midnight to 7) all last week, but he wanted to go with me into the city. If you aren't used to it, which neither of us really are, it's hard to navigate the streets of Geneva. The street signs are really small blue squares with white letters that may or may not be in an obvious location. We went on Thursday. It rained all day Thursday and the temperature decreased from 90 degrees to 65 degrees. When we reached our stop my directions told us to "walk 12 minutes". It did not indicate a direction. It's pouring down rain, we have one, broken umbrella, and we have no idea where to walk. By some act of God we ended up finding the place, but not before I started crying that I couldn't even ask for directions and all I wanted to do was knit a blanket.

At the store, Claudine, the owner, greeted me in French. She doesn't speak English. As a result of our communication barrier I am now knitting a shawl. It's almost a blanket. Claudine was very helpful and quickly showed me how to knit the shawl. She copied a picture of what the finished product should look like and wrote out some directions for me...in French. She even encouraged me to come to her shop and knit with her if I needed help. When I got home I tried to translate her directions, but she used abbreviations. Therefore I searched online for "knitting in French" and found a glossary of French knitting terms and abbreviations translated into English. (You can find anything on the Internet). And now I can knit! I knit 4 rows and on the 5th row I knit 5 stiches then knit two together, yarn over, knit two together...and repeat.

Who knew that my "simple" knitting project would be such an ordeal or such a long post?!