I know, I know, bad blogger. I’ve got some perfectly reasonable excuses, though! And I’m going to skip over them entirely. (besides, you’ve heard them before. Show, travel, blah, blah.)

I did do some knitting in South America. I knit a lovely sock from Cherry Tree Hill yarn, and left the half-completed mate for it (and all the rest of the yarn) on the bus back to Santiago. *sigh* oh well. At least I didn’t lose Icarus, which I also took and managed a few rows on. What was really exciting was the textiles and whatnot that I got to see in Lima (and a few in Santiago, but not as many.) I saw one of the finest pieces of handweaving known- my sheets are coarser than that piece of cloth is. It’s only some 1500 years old, no big deal, right? I also saw a number of Pre-Colombian spindles, which was amazing. They’re so thin! I described them as beads stuck on those bamboo skewers you get at the supermarket for summer kebab-BQ’s. It made me itch to get back to my spinning. Unfortunately, I didn’t see much in the way of yarn OR fiber for spinning, although on one walk my buddy and I collected several handfuls of wool off of fences and bushes in sheep country.

So there you go, the short, short version of my trip for the fiber-inclined. If any of you find yourselves in Lima, I reccommend Museo Amano. They have a room full of fabrics and fiber arts type stuff- and the guide kept opening drawer after drawer of it, to show the many techniques used by the Pre-Columbian cultures of Peru. Truly impressive.