We had a packed two days in Chicago:
- Field Museum – lots of cool textiles
- Shedd Aquarium – devoid of textiles
- Yarnify – surprise! This is a yarn store
- Deep dish pizza – key textile tip: eat carefully so as not to get it on knitting but bring your knitting cause there will be a long wait
- Museum of Industry and Science – very cool, I suspect somewhere there was something about high tech fabrics but we didn’t find it
- Art Institute of Chicago – small section on textiles, cool special exhibit
I’m going to need to sort through all the photos I took to tell you more about the textiles exhibits we saw. Here’s a quick collage to give you a sneak peek:
Clockwise from upper left: Tapa bark cloth from Polynesia, Chapan from Uzbekistan (1840s), close up of a Peruvian Tunic (1000-1400 AD), ankle bracelets from Hawaii of human hair, coca bag from Peru (800 AD), Tibetan robes early 20th cent., child’s patchwork robe from China late 19th cent.
I tried to be seletive in my aquisitions but there were a few things too cool to pass up.
The Field Museum had a really cool exhibit on mummies from Egypt and Peru, which included a fair number of textile examples (I promise more detail in a later post). It also meant that the museum shop had a cool book: Secrets of Spinning, Weaving and Knitting in the Peruvian Highlands.
At the yarn store I picked up two skeins of sock yarn with yak, (one was for AwesomeE) and a couple little kits from Mochi Mochi Land. My sister asked for the “Tiny Puppy” kit to be made for her husband. Tuesday morning when I woke up at 5am I decided to see if I could get it done, having accpeted around 6:30am that I wasn’t going to get back to sleep and knowing my sibs wouldn’t be ready for breakfast until 9am (if I was lucky). It’s the first time I’ve made an amiguri, and it took about 70-80 min to complete. The instructions must have been clear and easy to follow since I completed it without incident or swearing despite my groggy pre-caffeinated state.
I have been planning on getting a new Swatch watch for a while. I have a nice watch, but it’s metal and too heavy to wear when typing or doing crafts, so the funky light weight plastic watches Swatch makes are appealing. Why am I telling you about a watch? Look closely – they made a knitting themed watch. Yeah, it took me a looonnnggg time to decide which to get.