“We are pretending that it is not raining”

This June, Hong Kong has experienced its heaviest rainfall in 125 years of recorded weather.  Yesterday, the South China Morning Post reported that over 1245 mm had fallen in June (that is over 49 inches). I have a 4 and 5 year old home on school holidays. While I realise that there are people in much more trying circumstances, I have fallen prey to self pity from time to time this month.

The girls spent most of yesterday wandering around the flat with their umbrellas up, “pretending that it is not raining”.  Because they have grown up in Asia, they think that a usual response to sunshine is to put up an umbrella. The fashion for parasols has not faded in Hong Kong and Singapore. 

Even this game wore thin eventually, and I had to fall back on my last (guilty) resource to entertain small children, and put on a “High School Musical” DVD purchased for this kind of emergency.  I was then able to make progress on the second sock of this pair.  I apologise for the quality of the photos, but the socks are too big (they are for my husband), and he is not around to pose, having swanned off to Sydney for the week. I imagine that he would dispute the level of “swanning” going on in Sydney, and mutter something about “business trip” and “lots of meetings”, but it is not raining in Sydney!

Project Details

Pattern Primavera Socks (free Ravelry download) – inspired by my friend Yam, and Franklin.

Yarn  Yarn Workshop Footscray (that’s my yarn!), hand dyed by me, using a very un-scientific kettle dye technique.

Needles  Addi Turbos size 2.5 mm, also from the store.

Alterations Knitted “magic loop”, which required some deep thought when it came to turning the heel. While I found this pattern very pretty, I would not recommend it for beginner sock knitters.  Sometimes the stitch counts were not specified, and I had to fudge it based on my experience of knitting other socks.

I want to be in Finland

It has been raining a lot here in Hong Kong. For nearly three weeks we have had rain every day, and on some days, spectacularly heavy rain. The usual is fairly constant, driving rain.  There are floods in southern China, and it has been a long while since I have been able to get out for a walk. I am wearing Crocs, because I don’t want my shoes to get ruined in the rain.  When we wake up in the morning, the weather man usually says something cheerful like “it is 98% humidity” and it is hot – often over 30 degrees celsius.  Hong Kong is beginning to smell of mildew. While there is a wet season every summer in Hong Kong, it is early this year.   Everyone is losing patience,  and there eons to go before ”summer” is over.  We often need all the lights on in the middle of the day. I don’t want to even talk about what it is like having a 4 and 5 year old constantly indoors.

Instead, I will show you pictures of Finland.  We were there in late May 2007, and the tulips were in bloom.  The photo below looks fake, but I was there while my husband took it!  It was still cool enough to wear woolies.

When I visited Helsinki, I fell in love with the city - it has the most amazing parks, and amazing interesting playground equipment for kids (and yes, older daughter is wearing an un-blogged hand knit, of my own design). She is not actually standing amongst the flowers! 

Helsinki also obviously places value on the hand made, and is not as consumeristic as Hong Kong.  In Hong Kong, you are hard pressed to find anything second hand, where in Helsinki, the second hand markets were curated with pride. I loved it (I also enjoyed my time in Novita, but did not bring a camera). It also helped that I was a normal size in Helsinki, and could shop without feeling ridiculously oversized.

My love affair with Finland has been reignited by all the supercool Finnish knit bloggers, and my discovery of Ulla. The patterns in Ulla, are lovely, all free, and it is all in Finnish. The page that I directed you to is the only page in English. Luckily, Google translate has just started offering Finnish to English translation, but with some severe hiccups with knitting terminology. I really like this pattern, but Google translate only helps a bit to make it clearer. It also destroys the charts and pictures.  I know that I sound like the Yarn Harlot, but I think that I could knit this scarf in Finnish!

I shouldn’t complain, I really do love Hong Kong. I had a lovely time on WWKIP day, as I do every Friday with our knitting group, who happily knit in public frequently. Of course, we couldn’t knit outdoors, because of the rain! I will just keep using my Marimekko umbrella, and hope that the rains stops soon.

Knitting World – a shop in Hong Kong

It has only recently occurred to me that while I write about knitting shops in my travels, that I have omitted to describe any of the yarn shops that I visit in Hong Kong. There are many good yarn shops in Hong Kong, unless you want hand dyed sock yarn – and then you had better speak to me! A Bluestocking Knits had compiled a list of yarn shops in Hong Kong in 2005, which was my saviour when I moved to Hong Kong.

A few weeks back, my friend, and knitting guru, Yam took V and me to a new shop in Mongkok called Knitting World (site in Chinese only). I had previously tried to find the shop on my own, but had been flummoxed when the directions left me in the middle of a Mong Kok market street.

While it seems improbable, I was actually in the right place. Knitting World is located on the 3rd floor of the Prosper Commercial Building, at 9 Yin Chong St in Mong Kok.  For people visiting Hong Kong, I highly recommend using the YP Map site, and keeping in mind that when you see the market, you are in the right place.  It is any easy walk from Mong Kok MTR station, and car traffic is a nightmare in this part of town.  I read somewhere (no doubt NOT authoritative) that Mong Kok has the highest population density on earth, and I believe it (well – a bit). You will need to peer between the market stalls, the building numbers are not at all clear. When you see the door below, take the lift to the third floor, and you will see a very large (by Hong Kong standards) wool store.

Knitting World stocks a lot of yarns – including bamboo blends, organic cotton, and a wide variety of pure wool yarns, including some lovely soft merino. They also have a very good selection of Japanese knitting patterns – I was very tempted by a lace pattern dictionary (despite the fact that I can read no Japanese at all). Very little English is spoken, but prices are reasonable and we received a 20% discount for reasons that were not clear to us.  We didn’t argue!

I purchased some white merino sport weight wool to make the Estonian Baby Blanket (Ravelry link), and persuaded Yam that she really could knit socks out of some red 4 ply merino.  The staff were as helpful as they could be given the limitations with our Cantonese – I only have enough to barely communicate with a taxi driver, and to order my favorite dishes at Dim Sum.

Talking of taxi drivers, my knitting output has been almost non-existent because en-route to meeting Yam and V, my taxi driver had an accident. He had decided that he would drive down the middle of a two way street, causing a problem when he was faced with on-coming traffic, resulting in an altercation with the curb. Luckily, I did not tense up before the accident because I was opening my copy of Knit so Fine. More commentary on that book to follow. I was gibbering when I met Yam and V at the Mong Kok MTR, and by the next day had a very sore neck and shoulder that persisted for over a week.

Saturday is World Wide Knit in Public Day, and I will be meeting up with some of the Hong Kong knit bloggers in Mong Kok. I’m not sure why I am so excited by this, because I knit in public all the time.  This afternoon a very pleasant Japanese woman was enquiring about my socks that I was finishing during younger daughter’s swimming lesson. I wonder if I could get her to help me with the Japanese pattern books….