Happy 1500th post!

Back in September 2009 we celebrated Blog post #1000 with a foodie celebration of  Richard Till and Heston Blumenthal – Culinary mashup.
Now we are proud to say we’ve reached another milestone – Post #1500.

Some Christchurch City Libraries blog factoids:

• We started off by reporting back from the 2007 Auckland Writers and Readers Festival and have kept up our roving reporter role ever since.
• Regular blog features include cool Christchurch images of the week and a bit of a memento mori/death theme with Recent necrology and Dead dames and dudes.
• Stats wise – Post with most comments: “The whited air”- books about snow and our most read post was about a cat and this made for our busiest blog day.

There’s plenty more good stuff to come in the following months – on movies, Maori Language Week, Poetry Day, graphic novels, mysteries – and more.

We’ve got a great group of blog readers and supporters – widening out from the local Christchurch readers to New Zealand and even international. We love it that authors pop in and add their two pence worth in the comments.

So thanks to our blogging team, and to you our wonderful readers and commenters – Keep it coming, keep on reading.

Knitting on Top of the World

Sorry, this is NOT a blog about knitting on top of big mountains, or even particularly about knitting from mountainous countries. It is however a blog about a woman who likes to knit. And since this Saturday is Knit in Public Day (event at the City Art Gallery), it’s a knitting blog post.

Recently, I came across a small article in Vogue Knitting about Mary Taylor, who was inspired by the film Julie and Julia – the story of Julie Powell who blogged about mastering every recipe in Julia Child’s 1961 classic in one year. Julie’s blog became a book, and then became a movie.

So inspired was Mary that she has decided to replicate Julie’s experiences and “blog her way through a masterwork by one of her favourite authors”.

In Mary’s case, she’s a knitter, not a cook. So she chose a work by Nicky Epstein, a well-known knitwear designer. And she chose a real doozy of a work to replicate!

Knitting on Top of the World : a global guide to traditions, techniques and design is visually stunning, craftily inspiring, richly illustrated and a real work of passion and love for all things knitted.

It’s also full of very complicated, increasingly complex and explosively coloured knitted garments from all parts of the globe. There’s fifty patterns. She’s given herself four years to work her way through the different patterns in the book. She’s has allocated one month per garment. That’s a heck of a lot of wool, not to mention the amount of knitting to be done!

For someone who is still mastering the basics of knitting (and has been for over twenty years!), I can’t imagine what would possess someone to set themselves such a mountainous task. I’ll be watching her progress along the way to see how she gets on over the coming months and years. You too can follow her woollen adventures on her blog : www.knittingontopoftheworldknitathon.typepad.com