After spending three weeks being a lady of leisure, I think I have my groove back. With any luck I won't make myself wait nearly 20 years for another real vacation again:) Qatar is a lovely and beautiful country. I would probably cut myself if I had to be a housewife there, but it was certainly a nice place to unwind for a while. Its also a nice place to go and play catch-up on your retirement fund, which is why I am planning a return back, but as an employee this time. 

Being immersed in a different culture is a great way to get inspired, though. Once I was no longer a stressed out city girl, inspiration came quickly, although the means to express it were delayed. There is a distinct shortage of yarn in Qatar, people simply do not knit or crochet there. They buy it from other people, hahaha. In fact, there was a distinct lack of anything hobby related in the city of Doha. Shopping seems to be the hobby. "What do you do in your spare time?" "We go shopping.....look at my shoe collection." LOL, I am so not a clothing hoarder :D

I also had no pattern or stitch books with me, but tonnes of inspiration once I started taking note of my environment and touristing around. This forced the expression of creativity in a different way - I learned to become a better pattern writer because there was no yarn to play wit

h. Normally I hate doing the technical things and I work hard to avoid them, but apparently The Universe had other ideas in mind. If I was to capture with crochet anything that I saw, I was going to have to figure out how to do schematics with a pen and paper or risk having a Xanadu moment when I got home to my Fort Knox collection of books. 

So now I am working through all of my unbalanced little doodles and lumpy circles to correct what seemed like great stitches on paper, to capture some of the beauty in the Islamic tiles from the museum or the unique desert plants that I saw. I did eventually find yarn, in the Singer store there were balls of cheapo acrylic worsted in ice cream colours. One of my mother's friends became a grandmother during my visit, so I crocheted a little pram blanket for her to take back to England. It isn't in the same colours as the desert rose that inspired the shape, but what the heck, when the baby barfs on it, it won't show as badly :)