Stitches West: So much yarn and fiber = so much fun

Skeins and skeins of colorful yarn / The scene outside the Yarnover Truck,
a mobile yarn boutique, on Saturday morning at Stitches West. 

Last Saturday, my wife Jodi and I attended the 2017 Stitches West yarn and fiber exhibition in Santa Clara, Calif., where we connected with many of our fiber friends. When you're the husband of a knitter, like I've been going on nearly 20 years, you set aside the last weekend in February for the fiber arts – and embrace the creative experience.

Ball So Hard /
Neighborhood Fiber Company's slogan.

I've been Jodi's regular companion – and I'm proud to be her yarn enabler, too – at this annual gathering for more years than I can remember. Together, we've seen it grow into one of the West Coast's premiere fiber arts events.

Although husbands and boyfriends makeup a very small percentage of the ever-growing yarn and fiber crowd at Stitches West, I attend willingly and feel uninhibited, totally at ease. If you've ever been tempted by the fiber arts, whether it be knitting, crocheting or spinning, the Stitches West marketplace is the place to go see. After all, there's so much yarn and fiber, which can only mean one thing: So much fun.

Upon entering the Marketplace Hall, which we did when the doors opened at 10 a.m. on Saturday, knitters and their enablers are easily tempted by row upon row of booths filled with colorful and luscious yarn and gorgeous fiber that's not only attractive to look at, it's also lovely to touch, too. It's the place to plan the perfect sweater, find fiber friends, and gain new perspectives – even take an engaging class.

Miss Babs Hand-Dyed Yarns & Fibers /
Inspired by nature.

Our first stop of the day inside the Marketplace Hall was at Miss Babs Hand-Dyed Yarns & Fibers, whose booth is always an inspiration for lovely designs and colorful fibers. Miss Babs is Babs Ausherman, a hard-working, insightful fiber artist and online retailer of hand-dyed yarn and fiber and patterns based in Mountain City, Tenn. I've learned that she was raised in a family of creative types and entrepreneurs – and she believes that a good day's work is good for the soul.

I've had the pleasure to visit and talk with Miss Babs each of the past several years when she comes to California. I appreciate her sharp wit, artistic and creative flair, and her thoughtfulness. From her, I've learned that color ideas come from everywhere – especially when they're inspired by nature.

A Verb For Keeping Warm /
Beautifully decorated and inviting for knitters.

From there, it was on to see our dear friends Kristine Vejar and Adrienne Rodriguez, whose naturally-dyed A Verb For Keeping Warm yarn and fiber have made their bricks-and-mortar shop a haven for knitters and fiber artists close to home in Oakland. Their booth each year is always beautifully decorated and inviting. As always, whenever we drop by the AVFKW booth, it's abuzz with newly designed and naturally dyed yarn and fiber, and plenty of knitters perusing the yarn and fiber as well as patterns and project bags.

We also paid a nice visit to Neighborhood Fiber Co., based in Baltimore, whose uniquely hand-dyed yarn is inspired by urban landscapes.

After a leisurely lunch with a couple of fiber friends, it was time to renew our friendship with Robin Senour, a glasswork artist from Berkeley, whose witty Sacred Laughter artwork and philosophy ("Bring more art into your life") we admire and adore. On Saturday, we bought out tenth piece of Sacred Laughter, a badger from Senour's "Wind and the Willows" fairy tale collection. Over the years, we've made many friends among the yarn and fiber vendors and artisans at Stitches West – and it's always nice to be recognized like an old friend by them.

After one last pass through the aisles, where we renewed our acquaintance with Kira Dulaney of Kira K Designs – she shared with me the great news that she had just completed creating her 100th pattern in 10 years – and we also met the good folks from The Knitting Tree, L.A., it was time to make full circle by returning to Miss Babs to purchase some skeins of lovely and colorful yarn and say goodbye until next year.

Looking back, as my appreciation of the fiber arts continues to grow, I will always enjoy making time to explore the creative process and to find out what inspires these remarkable fiber artists.

Quality of Life: Naming the best places to call home

No. 1 Tokyo / Provides great quality of life for those who live and visit.

"What makes the good life and where can we find it?" asks Monocle, the global affairs and culture magazine that's published in London. While great cities adapt and change like their residents, it's worth asking: How do we create cities that deliver quality of life for everyone?

Stanley Park / Vancouver, B.C. 

It's no secret that the best cities in the world are ones which are vibrant and offer the best quality of life for their residents. The best city environments are those which are tolerant and open-minded, celebrate diversity, have great universities and welcome creativity. Having quality independent bookshops, green spaces and clean streets as well as efficient transportation systems are big pluses, too.

In summer 2007 when the magazine was still just a few months old, Monocle launched its inaugural Quality of Life list, naming the best global cities to call home. Munich was the first No. 1. Over the years, its added new metrics that take into account both intangibles and infrastructure which have led to some dramatic changes and brought about a new world order. While London, Paris and Rome remain three of the biggest tourist destinations in the world, their popularity doesn't necessarily translate into great places to live.

Place de la Concorde / Paris

"Now we know we are not the only people to draw up a ranking of great metropolises but ours is different," writes Monocle editor Andrew Tuck, in the preface to this year's Quality of Life list. "For a start we ensure that we are not just looking at data about the quality of education or the cleanliness of the streets but also the softer elements that inspire you to make a city your base: cinemas, bars, opening hours. And while much of our survey is pretty data-driven we are happy to say that a good amount comes from the views of our correspondents and editors. And it is also tilted to our readers' needs; we know, for example, that while that Alpine city is cute it's also woefully disconnected and lacks even a modest airport -- so it's not in the running for us."

This year, Monocle also took into account another annoyance: "cities where the cost of living prohibits old bookshops from staying in business or young entrepreneurs finding a start-up space." I guess that's why San Francisco didn't make the Top 25 and Portland, Oregon did.

So, when the ninth annual Quality of Life list was published in Monocle's July/August issue, a new number one emerged for 2015 -- say hello to world No. 1 Tokyo.

On Tokyo, Monocle wrote: "A new and worthy winner. Monocle has made little secret of its love for Tokyo through the years and it does something no other global city can: provides great quality of life for those who live and visit. London and New York, take note.

"Tokyo has appealed to many outsiders and for many different reasons: its cleanliness, tolerance, politeness and difference, as well as its sheer scale, which has always allowed foreigners to bathe in comfortable anonymity. ... It was recently identified as the world's safest city, a stereotype that residents can happily attest to. ... At the heart of this unexpected sense of security is Tokyo's defining paradox: its heart-stopping size and concurrent feeling of peace and quiet."

Powell's City of Books / Portland, Oregon

Monocle asked its contributors, which included architects, chefs, writers and directors, to consider what draws them to their favorite cities and what quality of life means to them.

"Quality of life is ... simple pleasures," wrote Mari Shapiro, founding director of Protocinema, which creates contemporary-art exhibitions. "What makes life good is simultaneously a very simple and complicated question. It is about being in a city that allows you to do or have what makes you happy. Ultimately, this issue often comes down to class and economy and the cities with the best quality of life are those in which the basic pleasures -- to be safe, to have the time to enjoy food, to be engaged with culture, with friends and family -- are available to people of any means. At the top of my list is Istanbul: a strong cay or a grilled fish for a few lira by the Bosphorus is available to anyone."

Bloemenmarkt / Amsterdam 

One thing Monocle hopes, as in previous years, is that the Quality of Life list provokes a stimulating and lively debate.

At the very least, for me, it's always interesting to pour over the list and see how many of the cities I've visited in person -- six (Vancouver, Helsinki, Copenhagen, Paris, Amsterdam and Portland).


Here is Monocle's 2015 Quality of Life ranking of the top 25 cities in the world:

• 1. Tokyo
• 2. Vienna
• 3. Berlin
• 4. Melbourne
• 5. Sydney
• 6. Stockholm
• 7. Vancouver
• 8. Helsinki
• 9. Munich
• 10. (tie) Zürich and Copenhagen
• 12. Fukuoka
• 13. Singapore
• 14. Kyoto
• 15. Paris
• 16. Madrid
• 17. Auckland
• 18. Lisbon
• 19. Hong Kong
• 20. Amsterdam
• 21. Hamburg
• 22. Geneva
• 23. Oslo
• 24. Barcelona
• 25. Portland

To watch a film on the Monocle Quality of Life Survey 2015:
http://monocle.com/film/affairs/the-monocle-quality-of-life-survey-2015/

Photographs: Tokyo - Google Images; Amsterdam, Paris, Portland, and Vancouver by Michael Dickens © 2012 and 2015.

Bruce Hornsby: Broadening his full range by exploring many winding roads on a wonderful music journey

Bruce Hornsby /Deftly swinging a tune from one style to another
without ever missing an internal beat.

Bruce Hornsby is an American singer and keyboardist who draws from a variety of musical traditions, among them rock, jazz, classical, bluegrass, hymns and folk, that shape his songwriting talent. The Virginia-born composer has explored songs with Southern themes about race, religion, judgement and tolerance -- even penning a song "Sneaking Up on Boo Radley," that's a reference to a character from Harper Lee's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel To Kill a Mockingbird. 

An avid basketball fan, Hornsby is just as comfortable blending and re-working the melodies of legendary jam band Grateful Dead, whom he will sit in as a guest keyboardist during their 50th anniversary farewell concerts this summer, as he is paying homage to bluegrass legend Bill Monroe. In addition to collaborating with the Grateful Dead, Hornsby's creative interest has also sparked working with Rickie Lee Jones, Ornette Coleman, Bela Fleck, Ricky Skaggs and Pat Metheny on various projects over the years as well as on his own in a career that has spanned two and one-half decades.

The spontaneity and creativity of Hornsby's live performances are loose and playful, and he welcomes requests from his audiences, which are collected before the start of each show and sit visible across the top of his Steinway & Sons grand piano.

Bruce Hornsby / Exploring and improving.impr

The 60-year-old Hornsby's solo performances, such as the one I attended last week in Zellerbach Hall at the University of California, Berkeley, offer him a limitless opportunity to challenge himself: through reworking originals, segueing songs into other songs, and blurring the lines of classical compositions and jazz standards.

Performing solo, as he did for two hours on a recent Wednesday evening in Berkeley, has allowed him to "recommit (himself) to the study of piano" and "take (his) piano playing to a whole new level."

"My standard line," Hornsby says of his solo concerts, "is: I'm not the vehicle for your nostalgic night out. But I will be kind."

These explorations and improvisations culminated in Hornsby's first entirely live solo piano album, entitled Solo Concerts, released in August 2014, which was given out to all ticket holders the night I saw him perform in Berkeley.

The 21 tracks which comprise the album were culled from solo concerts performed by Hornsby throughout the U.S. in 2012 and 2013. They bring together "disparate information from musical languages often thought to be opposed: Americana roots music, folk-pop, film scores and modern classical, what Hornsby calls an 'unholy alliance.'"

There are solo renditions of recognizable Hornsby chestnuts ("Mandolin Rain" and "The Valley Road") as well as boogie-woogie ("Preacher in the Ring"), a Spike Lee film score ("Song E {Hymn in E-Flat}") and modern classical with the "dissonance and expressive chromatics" of 20th century 12-tone experimental composers such as Austrians Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern, as well as the American modernist Elliot Carter, Hungarian György Ligeti and Frenchman Olivier Messaien.

"There's often a bias in the rock or pop world against virtuosity," said Hornsby, in the program notes for his Cal Performances concert in Berkeley. "I understand that mindset: expression over virtuosity. But my feeling is, why not both?"

After all, it's not clinical, what Hornsby does as well and as enjoyable as anyone. His two-handed independence at the keyboard is really vibrant and emotional. It's what he calls the pursuit of the unattainable. And, yet, his solo concerts turn his audiences into adventurous music listeners.

That's the way it is.

Photos: Courtesy of Google images and © Kirk Stauffer Photography.