We have a winner!

Due to a brain blip, I forgot to draw the winner for the Hawaiian earrings until today. My apologies!






The Random Number Generator chose lucky number 13 in my entry list: Adrienne Fong. Congratulations, Adrienne! Email me your snail mail address and I'll send them your way! My email is nancy@nancyherkness.com.

Hawaii Chronicles: fiber of a different sort

For all you fiber addicts out there (and I know who you are), here's a beautiful native Hawaiian craft I discovered at Honolulu's Bishop Museum: lauhala weaving. These particular hats and baskets were made by Elizabeth Maluihi Lee, a "Living Treasure of Hawaii" and a native of Kona, the Big Island (where the volcanos still erupt but more on that another day). She once traded her gorgeous hats (which she learned to make at the age of 10!) for salt, kerosene and matches at a local store. Now they sell for thousands of dollars and reside in museums.







The fiber (which is very durable and resistant to rot) used in lauhala weaving comes from hala, or pandanus, trees, which were once plentiful on the Big Island but are now falling to development. The leaves are picked after they turn brown and then cleaned and prepped, a process which constitutes about three-quarters of the weaver's job. Once the hala is pliable, it takes one to two days to make a hat.





Photo: crescent baskets



Originally lauhala weaving was purely functional. Farm workers needed hats to protect them from the sun and baskets to put the coffee beans in. Mats and fans are also woven from the hala fibers but hats are the crowning (sorry, bad pun alert!) project for a lauhala weaver. Only a select few rise to that level. (Equivalent to lace knitting perhaps?)







Elizabeth Lee saw knowledge of this Hawaiian craft beginning to disappear so she started the Ka Ulu Lauhala o Kona Weaving Conference on Kona, the center of lauhala. It now attracts weavers from all over the Hawaiian Islands and the world. I'd love to see the gorgeous artifacts that gathering must produce!



Has anyone here done weaving with a similar sort of fiber? I'd love to hear more about it!

Lace Knitting in Paradise

That's my Arctic Lace scarf draped over a sculptural piece of driftwood on the North Shore of Oahu. Beside it is the gorgeous lei I was presented with at our hotel's luau.

I am happy to report that my No. 3 bamboo needles passed the airport security inspection and accompanied me on my looooooooong flight to Hawaii. Lace knitting is a perfect way to pass the time on a ten-hour flight; it requires just enough concentration to keep your mind off the fact that you're 36,000 feet up with nothing between you and the ground except very thin air (can you tell I'm a white-knuckle flyer?) but doesn't tax the mind overmuch the way revising a book proposal does (can you also tell that I took the book proposal on the flight and didn't touch it?)

I wasn't sure if the needles would get through so I had my lifeline threaded through the last row, ends securely tied together, just in case I had to sacrifice the needles to the war on terrorism. But the screener didn't even flinch.

One evening I was so exhausted by the delights of Hawaii that I even sat and knitted on our lanai overlooking the blue, blue sea. Mostly though I was out on the beach or kayaking to a volcanic island or eating sushi so fresh it practically swam off the plate. Can you tell I really liked Hawaii? There will be more on that later, after I sort through all the photos I took (over 700, but, don't worry, you won't have to look at all of them).

Because I love you guys on RTY, I thought of you even whilst immersed in paradise. I couldn't find a knitting shop but I did find these beautiful earrings which are based on a Hawaiian quilt design and brought them back as a prize for some lucky knitter.




If you'd like to enter the drawing to win them, send me an email at nancy@nancyherkness.com. I'll draw a winner on Monday, August 11th. (I don't want anyone to miss the drawing due to a vacation!)

Aloha!