a Lo-Kal (<- ha!)

So here in the Netherlands - wait, gotta back up.

So there's this KAL - no wait, gotta back up more.

So there's this video podcast, called The Fat Squirrel Speaks, that I stumbled across a little over a month ago. I generally don't like video podcasts, because I want to look at my knitting while I listen, at least that's nominally the reason although now that I think of it, the real problem is that I'm incredibly picky and there are only two podcasts that I've stuck with for more than a few months, and those both happened to be audio podcasts. And lo, a prejudice is born without me even noticing. And is hereby discarded, poof!

So anyway, Cast On and Sticks and String are fab, but somewhat infrequent of update, which I totally understand (not quite understanding why S&S's latest is only available in iTunes, grr, because I hate iTunes and therefore do not have it), which is why I was superduper happy to stumble across this podcast which I love so much that I'm now going through back episodes. She makes me laugh, and talk to the screen, and want to know more about lots and lots of things! Love it!

Sheep with water

Sheep with windmill

Sheep with tulips

Amy Beth, aka the Fat Squirrel, is running a KAL soon wherein you knit something with locally sourced yarn. And I'm all, hey my friend has a yarn shop but no that's not what she means. No, it should be from local animals (or, um, plants, I guess), spun, processed and dyed at a place near you. And I was all, easy-peasey, the Netherlands is all over grass, and you see sheep everywhere, and they are so cute which is perhaps not relevant here. But Google searches, even in Dutch, turned up useless information like "how to say 'wool' in Dutch" (it's wol, if you're interested). So of course I asked my knitting group (breigroep - don't try to pronounce that unless you have a degree in Klingon) and of course they had the answer!

Andrea said that in a colder climate you tend to get sheep with coarser wool, which is not suitable for clothing. So it's used for carpets and duvet covers said Hilde, which I would think would need to be soft but maybe I'm wrong. And that wool production is not big here, the sheep are mainly for meat (ew!) and milk, they even make hand cream from sheep's milk, Vera told me! And those fleecy slippers. And probably a lot of cheese because this country is BIG on cheese - there were whole lessons about cheese in both of my Dutch language courses. Isn't that interesting! I think it's awesome. Also Andrea and Patricia have offered to bring actual wool from actual real Dutch-speaking sheep* to our Saturday group so that'll be yayfun.

*I'm pretty sure they say "BAAAGGHKXKGXH."

Another interesting Dutch factoid: breeding is "fokken," so sheep breeders are "schapen fokkers."