New York, New York! (and the crochet I left there…)

I was so shocked and saddened to hear of the terrorist attack in New York City which happened earlier this week on 31st October. My family and I had returned from a fabulous trip to New York on 29th October and we had in fact cycled along the same cycle path just days before… 🙁 🙁 🙁

But we had such a great visit to the wonderful city of New York that I’m going to write this blog post as planned…

Wherever I go, ‘Coastal Crochet’ comes too. My passion for crochet means it’s always with me…whether I have crochet in my bag ready to take out, whether I’m wearing something I’ve crocheted, whether I’m looking at yarn shops, whether I’m admiring crocheted things that I see out and about or just thinking up new design ideas in my head, somehow it’s always there. So when we went on an exciting holiday to New York (which had been saved for and planned for a long time!) of course the crochet was going to feature… 🙂 🙂

I’d planned to leave a couple of crocheted ‘yarnbombs’ somewhere in New York and I crocheted these before we left…

They were tucked in my bag and on the first day we went up the Rockefeller centre and I took this photo…

…it wasn’t the right place to leave it though. Security was very high so it wouldn’t have lasted very long.

So it got tucked back in my bag. The next time it came out was when we travelled on the Staten Island Ferry…

…but again this wasn’t it’s permanent home.

Neither was Central Park…

…but when we visited Roosevelt Island on our second to last day, that felt right… and that’s where I left my little sailing boat in the hope of spreading a little crochet joy… 🙂

My Lighthouse was left in Brooklyn overlooking Manhattan.

One day we took the train North from Grand Central Terminal…

…to a place called Cold Spring. It’s about an hour and twenty minutes by train. What a lovely place it is and Oh what a contrast to the busy city…and the Autumn colours were just spectacular (and they weren’t even in full swing yet!)

Now that’s nature at its best for some amazing colour inspiration…

And on our last day we visited The Metropolitan Museum of Art …what an impressive museum! 🙂 We didn’t do it justice at all as it was a fleeting visit just before returning to the airport for our flight back home. But even my children, some of whom are not the keenest museum goers 😉 were super impressed. Shamefully we whizzed past masterpieces by Claude Monet, Van Gogh and sculptures by Rodin to name just a few. But we were heading for the Frank Lloyd Wright room as we have an aspiring architect in the family.

And can you believe that hanging in the MET amongst all those fabulous paintings there’s a painting of  ‘Lydia Crocheting in the Garden at Marly’ painted by a Mary Cassatt in 1880 … now that made me smile!

No it’s certainly not my favourite painting and I didn’t like the way they described crochet as “the sort of old-fashioned handicraft”! It’s my understanding from what I have read elsewhere that crochet is actually the youngest of all needlecraft textiles and hadn’t been around too long in 1880. But how fabulous that even in the MET I came across some crochet.

But just across from this painting was one which really caught my eye…

Just look at the light captured in that painting by Rockwell Kent in 1907! I’ve since looked up some more of this artists work and really love it…

Of course a visit to New York for me wouldn’t be complete without a visit to some local yarn shops and I’ll write about that in a post next week…

Till then, Happy Crocheting Everyone… 🙂 🙂