Kaye
Superwash merino? $2.25?! Seriously?
“I wanted to see what people would do with it.” It had been sitting in the back unnoticed for awhile but now everybody was going through it and stacks of skeins were going home.
Thus this hat, and as I finished up the simple pattern my brain had time to think of other hands around the world, busily creating…
All these years that I’ve bought those sweet little fingerpuppets knit in Peru by women able to put food on their tables for my purchases. All the small children and their tired parents here who have received one of those puppets, meltdowns diverted.
I was chatting with one of Sahar‘s American friends last night and asked her if she knew Truman Madsen, the late BYU professor who used to run tour groups in Israel in the summers. Turns out she had been in Israel just after he retired.
He was my mom’s cousin, I told her, and my folks went on the last tour he gave. He took Mom into a shop owned by Palestinian women selling their handicrafts (what town was that, Mom?) and Mom picked out a hand-embroidered apron (purple stitches, if I remember right) and then one for each of her daughters. I treasure mine.
I know there are talented women in the West Bank and Gaza and I wonder how much of a difference we could make by buying from them, whether we could help make their lives easier–I would certainly think so. (Typing that and going looking…) I found this and oh look! This!
It says their embroidery work is a connection to their mothers and their grandmothers.
As it is, now, to my own.
Five dollars for a small olivewood bowl made in Bethlehem from locally sourced wood, ten for a carved candlestick, beautiful. One to fourteen of those bowls is $30 shipping, the fifteenth kicks it up to $40.
I am suddenly wondering who around here would go in on an order with me.
And I wonder what it must be like to get a package to the postal service there. Any arriving order would surely have its own story to tell.