I'm off travelling to Lübeck, this time with a little more free time to spend in that lovely little city. With me, of course, the big red suitcase (as usual when travelling for workshop purposes) and the indispensable travel companions.

Those are, in the back: a stainless steel water bottle and my battered trusty coffee travel mug. They serve, obviously, to hydrate me during any gallivantings through the countryside.

The jungle flowery thing in front is my travel cutlery in its little bag (and yes, that is a re-purposed folding umbrella cover that I found on the street - a souvenir from one of my England travels before Brexit happened). It holds a small and large spoon (both from wood) and a fork and knife (titanium, because it's cool and lightweight, and that set of cutlery is also my cutlery when we go biking or hiking.) The bag also contains a mini-salt shaker. 

Then there's a silicone pouch - packs small, is completely watertight and thus can carry soup if necessary. Usually it carries the leftovers from restaurant meals that I get, because these days I rarely finish a full portion. A lot of places offer a "small" option these days, but I prefer getting the regular-sized one and having two meals for the price of one. With the pouch, I can be sure that my food is packed up safely, nothing will spill out, I'll enjoy the rest of it the next day and it's not making extra waste because I do not need to ask for a to-go box or other packing material in the restaurant.

And finally, hiding out in the back... that is a travel-sized immersion heater (hence the pouch, which is the original probably vinyl one). I got that on a flea market, they've gotten out of style here. Water kettles have taken over here in Germany as the standard for boiling water many, many years ago already, but I remember that an immersion heater was what we used at home when I was a child. 

This one is actually a larger travel-sized one, and I have an even smaller one for when space is tight, sized to hang on the rim of a regular-sized mug. The heater, accompanied by a few bags of herbal tea, is my guarantee that if I need a cuppa in the evening to wind down, I can. Here in Germany, some rooms in hotels or other accommodations will have the complimentary tea-making facilities, but many don't. Some days I don't need the wind-down tea, but sometimes I do, and then it's just nice to know that I can, whatever happens. (Going into the restaurant or guest room or bar would be a possibility to get a cup of tea, but when I need the tea to wind down, I want to have a closed door between me and other people and no human interaction whatsoever. Which would not be the case in a restaurant, obviously.)

The second, just as important potential use of the water heater? Sometimes I have the cold feet problem. The literal one - my feet, before or when going into bed, are so cold that they will not warm up on their own. That means I'll have trouble falling asleep, will not sleep well, and will wake up in the morning with feet that are just as cold as when I got into bed, and it's not fun and no good thing. 

Entering the scene to rescue the night: the water heater (because tap water might be hot enough, but then it might not) and the steel water bottle. Tada - instant hot water bottle for bed. In theory, I could wrap the hot bottle in a towel to avoid burns on the feet, but I just keep my distance and pay attention. 

Added benefit: If there was sliced ginger in the water bottle before for a bit of flavour, you have nice tangy cold ginger tea in the morning. (I do not recommend leaving lemon slices in, as the rinds will make it bitter.)

A good while ago, I stumbled across a rather unusual centered decrease in Ravelry, dubbed "bunny-ears decrease". It's a centered decrease that reduces three to two knit stitches. The decrease is not hard to work, is perfectly symmetrical, and not very obvious in the finished piece. So it did become one of the tools in my knitting skillset, and I've put it to good use whenever something unobtrusive was needed as a decrease. Slants as in k2tog or ssk are nice, but only if you want a slanty decrease that is rather more than less visible, especially if you have technical reasons that will stack your decreases, or have them placed in a way that will look weird if they slant.

If that sounds interesting for you, I point you to the site of Naomi Parkhurst, String Geekery. You can find her detailed blog post with photos, drawings, and different instructions on how to work this lovely decrease here.  

As I'm preparing the weaving workshop for bow loom weaving that I'll be doing on the weekend, one of the points is "preparing your weft yarn". Now, for a small piece like a band, there's several ways to do this, depending on what you want and how much you mind adding in a new bit of weft. You can just take a length of yarn and use that, no winding, no nothing. 

If you want a lot of yarn for use in one go, you can wind a shuttle. The simplest of these is the humble, but glorious, stick shuttle. Any stick in a length and thickness that suits you and your weaving will do, and you wind the yarn around it, and that's it.

Third option, somewhere inbetween: The yarn butterfly. There are several ways to wind yarn into a butterfly, and the simplest one is wrapping some yarn around your fingers and then wrapping the end around the middle of that mini-skein. That, however, tends to come undone. With a tiny little different way of winding, however, you can have a butterfly bobbin that you can pull more yarn from, which does not come undone, and which will serve beautifully in a lot of instances (not only when weaving). 

Nancy explains this very nicely on YouTube:

Sometimes, there are small changes happening - because of some reason or other. Sometimes, these are just delightful. One of them, which we speculate are due to the pandemic, is the "zu verschenken"-Box. Or, to be more precise, its rise in frequency - the box and the basic concept did exist pre-pandemic, but you can see them much more frequently now.

For those of you not familiar with this (and it might be a German thing, I don't know), "zu verschenken" means "free to a new home". So if you de-clutter your kitchen, or your living room, or whatever, and there are things you'd like to get rid of but that are too good to throw away, and yet not valuable enough that putting them on a portal like ebay would be worth it, and not copious enough to make for a table at a flea market, or or you are just too lazy for all of that.... there's a very quick and easy way to deal with them.

You take a large enough cardboard box and a thick sharpie and write "zu verschenken" on the box. Then you place all the things inside the box and put everything on the curb (preferably to the side, so that there's still space for traffic to pass by) or in a suitable similar place. If there's a lot of stuff, a table and a sign will work as well. If you're living in the end of a little-frequented cul de sac, it might be worth it to carry the box to the next street corner. 

This has been seen occasionally before the pandemic, but since that time period when everyone was cooped up inside and a lot of time was spent going through stuff... they have proliferated. There was a time when you'd see them at about every second street corner, and now they are still much more common a sight than just a few years ago. Much to my delight, because I love the idea of this very low-key exchange, and I enjoy looking at the things offered (even if it's clear from 10 m away that there's nothing for me in the pile), and quite often we've taken off with a thing or two from the box. Our cat litter bin, for instance. Some of our flower pots. A few kitchen items. 

Today we took a little walk and came home with another large flower pot - very timely, as one of the old ones broke just two days ago. And then, just at the street corner at the start of the cul de sac that we live in, there was another box... containing, among more kitchen equipment, glasses and cups.

Those were a very welcome surprise, as the Textile Forum will take place, and we'll be a few more people than the place usually handles (or houses), so glasses were a little scarce. With the glasses and cups donated by my friends and those from the box, though, we'll now be  more than comfortably equipped... and I suspect that if someone wants to take a cup home as a souvenir, that might also be possible.

So hooray for the "zu verschenken"-Box - one of the good things caused by the pandemic.

I like music, I like funny stuff done with language, and puns, and good rhyming. So it's a small wonder that I enjoy a lot what the comedian Bodo Wartke does. You can call it "Klavierkabarett" - as in he's doing funny things with a piano as his trusty sidekick. (He's also doing a few non-funny or only half-funny things handling heavier topics, but, if you ask me, he's doing it exceedingly well. A bit like a German version of Tim Minchin, only with less swearing and less explicit.)

Love, of course, is one of the topics that are important in life, so it's also a small wonder that this comes up in his songs again and again. And because a deep fascination with language usually does not limit itself to just one's mother tongue, but to the whole concept, you can find something very special on Bodo Wartke's website: a Love Song Generator. There's seven different languages for the chorus (which means you'll probably find one that you will understand) and more than 80 languages and dialects for the stanzas (including Latin, Middle High German, and Middle English) and you can mix and match to your heart's content. Or to the content of your beloved, if you're making one for somebody else...

Holiday travels are wonderful - seeing new places, meeting new people, eating new and different foods, talking different languages (or at least trying to). Then you arrive home again, eventually, bringing with you... well, what do you bring with you from holiday trips? Memories, of course - which may or may not fade over time. I'm not a diary person, but when we are on holidays, I write a little travel diary. That is something my mum always did, and because memories may fade, or it could be handy to look up where one stayed a few years ago, or some highlight of a trip, I also made this a habit. 

Then, of course, there's photographs. When I was a teenager and in my early twenties, I really enjoyed taking pictures during holidays, but somehow, that enjoyment got less and less over the years. Maybe it has something to do with me taking the camera mostly for work purposes, more and more so as time progressed. Mostly, though, the reason is that when I'm taking photos, some part of my brain gets obsessed with looking at things only in "will that make a good picture"-mode, and that distracts me from actually enjoying things, or looking at stuff just so. Fortunately, the Most Patient Husband of Them All does not have a similarly weird brain, and he takes a picture here and there and now and then, so we go home with a few images for our collection and to keep memories alive and to show them to friends and family.

Sometimes there's also something that we buy to take home with us. I have blind-baking ceramic "beans" that we bought on one of our England journeys years ago, and when I take them out to use them, I remember that trip. 

There's only so much you need for a household, though, and only so much stuff you want to buy and lug home from travelling. So my most favourite type of holiday souvenir is... a recipe.

I'm fond of good food, and I very much enjoy eating "foreign" things when abroad, and trying stuff that is a regional speciality. And sometimes, something is delicious enough for me to look up the recipe (or several of them, since, you know, Internet recipe search) and integrate it into our portfolio of things to cook here. Which means that I both get new ideas on what to cook or bake, and I have something reminding me of glorious times in other places, and it's something that does not need storage space (apart from the bit of space in my cook book).

Cinnamon rolls remind me of trips to the North - Scandinavia or Finland. Scones are, of course, England and Ireland. Just like pies, which I make way too rarely. There's Sächsische Quarkkeulchen, from our hiking through the Sachsenforst, there's Crostata reminding me of the Embroidery School in Muro Leccese this spring, and most recently there's Pressgurka, from our stop in Sweden on the way back home this summer.

Definitely my favourite kind of holiday souvenir, these recipes!