Wool Gathering

When we were in Chianciano, Eleanor and I chose some lovely wool and cotton yarns at a local yarn store (I never blogged it, but it was a lovely story in and of itself. Briefly, I was standing with my nose pressed against the glass, drooling prodigiously, and whimpering because the shop was closed and we would be leaving that day, a Sunday. A lady came out of a nearby residential door and asked what in the world I was doing, so I explained. She replied that it was an easily solved problem...her cousin, the owner, would be happy to come down and help me, since she didn't get enough business tucked away like that in a small town. After much deliberation, and a lunch that had hilarious mistranslations on the menu, Eleanor and I rang the owner's doorbell, and then proceeded to make it worth her while to emerge from her Sunday torpor). Some of my purchases I knitted up right away (the cotton, obviously), but I saved the wool for when I was in Scandinavia, so it would not be as obnoxiously hot to work with.

Once in Scandinavia, I did a lovely job. Finished the body. The first sleeve. Went to start the second, only to realize that...somewhere along the way, one of the skeins had gone walkabout. SOMEONE in Stockholm or Oslo is about to make a lovely cowl with that wool, but it will not form part of the sleeve for a nearly-completed sweater.

This is what is known as a "yarn emergency".

Now, had I bought the wool here in Todi, there would have been no problem, obviously. But I hadn't. I had no idea of the name of the shop, I had no receipt, and my only immediately apparent recourse was to drive to Chianciano to ring the private doorbell of the lady who owned the place. Bear in mind that of course I had already contacted all the hotels and rail systems we had used throughout Scandinavia, to no avail.

Then I got clever: I used Google maps in the street view to walk myself virtually to her shop, from which I was able to see the name printed over the door: Il Gomitolo ("the skein"). Clever, huh? A quick glance in the Italian version of the online White Pages and I'd be done, right?

Wrong.

Of course, phone lines cost money. And commercial phone lines cost more. So clearly Il Gomitolo does not pay for such extravagances as a commercial phone number! Hmm.

I ended up "walking" across the street to the hairdresser's, which actually did have a listed number and website, so I sent them an email enlisting their help. They were happy to, but informed me that the lady was on vacation, so they would deal with it when she returned.

Several weeks passed.

Not wanting to be a nag, it was time to move to Plan B: I called the restaurant where Eleanor and I had eaten dwarves (one of the more hilarious mistranslations on the menu...I think dwarves were zucchini?). The gentleman who answered the restaurant's phone was absolutely delightful and knew the lady's name right away! He kindly looked her up in his local phone book, and suggested I call her outside of normal business hours since this was actually her home phone number. Great idea!

Well, Aurora picked up the phone, remembered me, and very helpfully offered to call me back when she had checked out her stock. And she did! And she had the wool, even to the correct dye lot! She will be checking out the cost of mailing it to me tomorrow, and then I will be back in business.

Now, if we could just have cooler weather....

Love,

Alexandra