We went on vacation. I bought yarn. The yarn saved our vacation.
Let’s step back. D and I went to Italy last week. Midweek we rented a place in Tuscany with my BIL and SIL. When we got the keys, we were told that we should keep the doors locked at all times as there had been some crime in the area.
To get an idea of what happened, here’s a view of the apartment. We were in the upper apartment in this view, the window with the curved top was the apartment we rented..
One morning, I went out to take the compost out to the compost bin and to look around. It was early, D was in the shower, my BIL and SIL were asleep. I locked the doors behind me as instructed, and went wandering. On my return I realised I had a problem. I couldn’t get the outer door unlocked. The key had to be rotated 4 or 5 times to unlock all the deadbolts. There were deadbolts in both sides of the door as well as the top and bottom. I turned and turned and turned the key, but it wasn’t opening. the problem is that I had also locked the inner door, so there was a hall with locked doors on each end between me and D, BIL and SIL. What to do?
I called out, but D was in the shower, so he couldn’t answer. BIL thought the Tuscan birds had very weird calls – they were calling his name! Took him a while to realise the birds were also calling his wife’s name. Hmmm. Maybe he should investigate. Finally the window opened and I explained the situation. I had the only set of keys, they were locked in behind two doors, and I couldn’t get the first door opened.
The view from the window was like this. How do we solve this problem?
The yarn came to the rescue of course. I had purchased 1500 m of fingering weight yarn in Florence. BIL and SIL thought I was crazy when they saw it, but boy were they happy to have it at this point. A bag was tied to the end of the ball and the keys were hoisted back up to the apartment. Doors were opened (turns out I wasn’t strong enough to make the final 1/2 turn), we were reunited. The one casualty was the ball of yarn. It tumbled out the window. I had to either lower myself out the window onto the tile roof, then climb back in or reball the yarn. I chose rewinding as the attendant paramedic and neurosurgeon (aka. BIL and SIL) told me they didn’t have their equipment handy and they aren’t licensed in Italy.
The saviour yarn is Trilli Merinos Extrafine Baby Irrestringibile by Campolmi R. Filati. I purchased it at the factory store in Florence. It was a very cool experience, very different to shopping in a Canadian yarn store. The yarn was all behind the counter and I had to ask to see a ball, then the saleslady found the balls I wanted. Doing this through a language barrier was a challenge, but it worked out. The yarn is very soft and a lovely olive green. There is one very big ~1000 ball and three small 150 m balls.
And our saviour ball, up front and centre.
