Poor neglected blog

This is the longest I've gone without posting since I started this blog; having three knit projects due in the space of a few weeks which also encompassed Christmas, the New Year, hauling the family from Italy to Boston to Cape Cod to Florida and back, and choosing tile, cabinets, countertops and paint colors for two building projects may have had something to do with that.  Maybe having all that over with is the reason I feel more relaxed than I have in a month, in spite of being jet-lagged and arriving home to no heat this morning.

Anyhoo...(anyone see the Daily Show's Samantha Bee's advice to Al Jazeera on how to appeal to an American audience?  We get Al Jazeera here in Italy so it cracked me up.)...ANYhoo, this photo, taken in early December, shows "Filo e filo", a yarn store in Lucca, a lovely walled city in Tuscany, between Florence and Pisa.  It's fairly small but has a nice selection of yarns and patterns, and it has an unbeatable location:  Piazza Dell' Anfiteatro, a piazza built on the site of an ancient Roman amphitheater.  The piazza is completely walled in, with several tunnel entrances, and retains the oval shape of the amphitheater, as you can see in this photo.  I was so delighted to find a nice yarn shop in a totally cool spot that I bought some totally unneeded (but gorgeous) yarn, Filatura di Crosa Zara, extrafine merino, in a delicious chocolate brown.  I'm sure I'll find some use for it someday!