Europe Wool Fesitval Vacation

I can't believe how crafty Vilnius is! Dom sent me a link to this wonderful Baltic travel site, and it has a link to some fantastic information that I wish I had seen before my trip (not that I had much down time to be filled.)

Can you believe I actually missed this? (Because I was already home, pout.)

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Friday 13 July
17:30–19:30 Cast off, Warm up, Stretch and Cast Off, meet at South Hall CAC
Join the preparations for the knitting marathon and swap and lean new techniques while you are at it. Borrow needles and yarn, or bring your own, to knit things for the Knitting Marathon.

Saturday 14 July
11:00–onwards Cast off, Knitting Marathon, starting at CAC front door, Vokieciu 2
Join in the knitting marathon, knit or crochet while running a route leading from the front door of CAC. Bring needles and yarn, or borrow materials when you arrive. If you don’t fancy running, then join the spectators that will line the route knitting orange slices and medals for the winners!

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This knitting marathon was part of Extreme Crafts at the Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius. The Craft Magazine blog posted some photos from the event, taken from a gallery on flicker. I've stolen a few photos for your viewing pleasure. I love that these subversive crafts are cropping up even in Lithuania.

Vilnius has graffiti everywhere, reminding me of the New York of my youth. The grafitti on NY subways in the 1970 led me to be a huge fan and lover of good graffiti. (The ugly tagging of lazy graffiti vandals leaves me cold. I only call them vandals because they create ugliness.) Here is some planned graffiti art by Maija Kurseva (Photo: Catherine Hemelryk):



Here's an artist who is embroidering an entire newspaper, Sonya Schonberger (Photo: Paulius Mazuras):



Here's a linen scarf by Nomeda & Gediminas Urbonas (Photo: Jennie Syson) made in protest of the privitization of a Lithuanian theater:



P.S. If you don't get Craft Magazine, you really should check it out. It's fun, funky, and full of projects made with many different crafting techniques. So far, each of the first three issues has included terrific knitting and crochet projects.

My mind will not settle down into my routine yet. This afternoon, I keep thinking about the details of things I saw in the British Museum and the National Gallery in London.

First, the British Museum. We went there one morning and walked around until our feet were killing us from pounding the hard stone floors. I wanted to visit the British Museum because I'd read that it houses the largest collection of Egyptian artifacts outside of Egypt. I wasn't disappointed by what I found. Dom already posted about seeing the Rosetta Stone and Cleopatra's mummy—both amazing because we hear about them so frequently and never dreamed of seeing both up close and in person. There's nothing quite like reality, not reading, not photographs, not television. The only way to experience things with efficacy is to be in the physical presence of an object. No matter how detailed a description, photo, or video, it cannot replace the actual experience and detail of physical existence.

Here's an example from the Egyptian collection. Look closely at the fine detail inside the hieroglyphic characters on this carving. Many of them are actual pictures of the items that are usually represented by symbols in smaller objects, but on this large carving—as well as on many others that we saw—the characters are articulated with fine details.



Although I was inspired to visit the museum because of the Egyptian collection, I was even more impressed by the Assyrian collection. Here are a couple of photos of a sculpted relief of an Assyrian lion hunt. The relief, taken from a palace in Nineveh (northern Iraq) illustrates lion-hunting expeditions of the last great Assyrian king, Ashurbanipal (668-631 BC). The detail in these carvings is simply amazing and will not show up in photography. You can see the strands of thread on the balls of string this hunger is carrying. The people are drawn with cuticles and lines on their palms, and the animals and people show the shapes of muscles and ligaments under the skin, something I'd thought wasn't adequately shown in artwork until the Renaissance painters started studying anatomy and dissecting bodies to study bone and muscle structure.





The day after we visited the British Museum we had about an hour to kill between a tour of London and getting ready to go see Monty Python's Spamalot (what better place to see Monty Python than London?). With a little time to spare, we decided to stop in at the National Gallery and see the Van Gogh paintings in their collections, Van Gogh being my favorite painter. I have reproductions of several of Van Gogh's sunflower paintings, and was thrilled to find that the National Gallery had one of the paintings on display. I was completely floored to see this painting in person. Not only are the colors more vibrant and alive than on the reproductions, but the texture of the paintings does not show up on photographs at all. Here's what the National Gallery website has to say about that, "The dying flowers are built up with thick brushstrokes (impasto). The impasto evokes the texture of the seed-heads." You can read more on their website. (This photo is from the National Gallery website because no photography is allowed in the museum, but even this photo doesn't show the brilliant colors and bold texture of the actual painting. I've read that Van Gogh used such bright colors so his paintings would still be vibrant even after fading, and his decision was spot-on perfect, if a non-artist like myself is allowed to have an opinion on such a topic.)



Well, that's it for now. I have to do some work and run some errands this afternoon. Plus it's really hot and my laptop is burning a hole in my thighs. But I will conclude by saying I can't believe that it took 45 years for me to get to Europe. From now on, I will be visiting places around the world every year.

I guess the trip is officially over, since I have to go back to my regularly scheduled routine tomorrow, and switch gears to work on my next book, two editing projects, and second-quarter bookkeeping. Before I close out this blog, I'd like to add a few thoughts after taking another look through my photo album.

Fiber in England
This is really about Lithuania, but I saw it at the Woolfest in England, so I'm posting it here. (You may be able to tell from my previous postings that, although I had a fabulous time in England, Lithuania had a much bigger impact on me.) June Hall, one of the organizers of Woolfest, has been researching knitting traditions in Lithuania for several years. She's put together a wonderful exhibit showcasing her discoveries, and she gave a talk about her research at Woolfest as well. Here are some photos we took of the exhibit. I hope you can read the text on the posters. I want to collaborate with June on a book about traditional Lithuanian knitting, and I hope we can travel together in Lithuania sometime soon to continue with the research and to take photos for the book.







Fiber in Lithuania
As we walked around the streets of Vilnius, we discovered four yarn shops. I noted the locations of the last three, but could not relocate the first shop we found when we tried to visit them all again on our shopping day. As with other businesses, some of the yarn shops are well hidden. If you're looking for big doors and lots of windows, you won't find most businesses in old-town Vilnius. Many shops are in old buildings with small windows and wooden doors. It looks like there will be nothing but tiny rooms inside, but once you go through the door, you will be amazed by the big spaces hidden inside. In some areas outside of the old town, shops with bigger windows and glass doors are prevalent, and the look is more like what you'd expect in a U.S. shopping center.

Geros Akys Yarn Shop is one of the hidden treasures:


Casa Lana has one of the more modern store fronts:


The shops are mostly full of imported Italian yarns, and some German and Russian knitting magazines. I only saw domestic linen thread on cones, but nothing that could be used as knitting yarn, except for a scratchy linen-acrylic blend at the first shop that I could not find again when looking for it. I did find some laceweight mohair from one shop, with a shop label on it, but I suspect that the yarn is also imported and just labeled for the shop. I bought it anyway.



In the market, we saw hand knitted mittens and socks at almost every vendor booth. These items are so popular, that my Lithuanian language book includes a photo of the hand-made mittens in the chapter called "Šandien tu puikiai atrodai!" ("You look really fine today!")



We also saw a huge variety of linen garments made in Lithuania, as well as wooden dolls dressed in the Lithuanian National Costume, in the market, retail shops, and local artists' galleries.

Vilnius University
On our penultimate day in Vilnius, we visited the Presidential Palace (the president's offices, not living quarters) and Vilnius University. I'm planning to attend the summer language program at Vilnius University next year, and was excited to be able to tour the campus. The main university is actually a maze of courtyards connecting small buildings. Departments are spread out around the city in other buildings as well, and dorms are on the outskirts of town, along Trolley Bus Route #2, or so I'm told. Like the rest of the city, the University is in various states of disrepair and restoration. 2009 is the one-thousand year anniversary of the first mention of Lithuania in print, and in that year Vilnius will be featured as the European Capital of Culture, and the whole city is being prettied up in preparation.

Because my sister loves doors, I provide a tour of the gorgeous doors at the University.

The most popular part of the university self-guided tour is the church. Here are the doors that go into the building:


Once inside the church, you discover more doors, this time in the floor. I could not help thinking about Indiana Jones and The Da Vinci Code:


And then you have to go out through the massive doors again:


Here's a part of the doors to the library, the oldest one in Europe. I hope you can see the founding date of 1547 at the top of the door:


For my thoughts on religion in the US, the UK, and Lithuania, see my Skepchick post.

That's it. I hate to sign off of this blog, because it means putting my trip in the past and returning to my regular blog and my regular life, alas. I love my life, but I'd rather have spent another month in Lithuania. I guess it will have to wait until next year.

Well, we're home and skipping email wasn't really the best part of the trip. I'm feeling pretty good, having slept all night last night. Dom was up most of the night, and fell asleep this afternoon and is still sleeping, so we'll see how long it takes him to get over his jetlag. That's it for now. I'm still writing about the trip in my journal and my add some posts to this blog as an afterthought, but no promises. I hope you all enjoyed traveling with us via this blog.

Donna

I think the best thing about this trip was that I only checked email once a day, or once every few days. And the times between wifi hot spots with no access to email were quite liberating (although I do like to be able to research things online at will). I'm tired of being tied to my computer all the time. When I get home, I think I'm only going to check my email once every afternoon. How's that for sticking it to the man? I already don't carry a mobile phone, so I'm a communications rebel anyway. Email was more fun when it was an oddity like ham radios. Now it's just a boring and often annoying form of communications, where you feel like you owe it to everybody to be "on" all the time. Blech. I think I'm going to go back to writing letters by hand on paper.

Well, that has nothing to do with Europe, per se, but there you have it. Will be offline for 24+ hours soon, en route from Lithuania to Longmont via trains, planes, and automobiles... TTYL!