Home again, home again, jiggity jig!

Hello again! I'm back from Poland, and it feels soooooooo good to be home. I love going away, but it's always nice to be back home, surrounded by all my familiar bits and pieces. We had a very relaxing time in Lodz. It's a fascinating city. There are some absolutely stunning buildings. I especially like this one on the main street, Piotrkowska. It's covered in beautiful paintings.

Lodz was the birthplace of the pianist Artur Rubinstein, and there's a statue outside the house he was born in.

We spent a couple of hours wandering around the cemetery on Ogrodowa Street. It's a vast place, split into Catholic, Evangelical and Orthodox sections. We have yet to find any graves for Mr JK's ancestors, but it's rather like looking for a needle in a haystack! Despite the snow, many of the graves had fresh flowers on them, and burning oil lamps too. It seems that you can get a lamp for any occasion - Valentine's, Christmas.....

There are some rather impressive graves complete with statues.

I did manage to squeeze in a trip to a yarn shop. It's a really old fashioned shop, the sort that doesn't exist in the UK anymore. A wall of buttons, another of ribbons and trimmings, and loads and loads of wool; sadly most of the yarn is 100% acrylic, but I did buy some cotton in sugared almond shades to make myself a little bag for the summer. It's going to be crocheted, and based on this one from Attic24.

I also bought some buttons there for my Rainbow cardigan. It's for baby Ida's first birthday next month. I need 4 in total, and I couldn't decide on what colours to get! I ended up buying 2 of each colour! The pattern I'm using is from Drops Design, and the yarn is a Trekking sock yarn. Once I got my head around how the pattern worked, I quite enjoyed knitting it. I needed to read ahead the whole time, because there were great chunks of instructions, followed several times by the words 'AT THE SAME TIME'!! Luckily I didn't miss any of these out. It's knitted in 2 halves, and then joined mid-back. Here is the first half, all stretched out.......

and here it is folded in half, so you can get a better idea of how it's going to work out!

And here are those buttons I mentioned earlier. Which do you think go best? I can't make up my mind at the moment! Let me know which you prefer. See you!