Happy Lupercalia: was this the boisterous precursor to St. Valentine’s Day?
I don’t know about you, but I’m not planning to sacrifice a goat today nor, fun though it sounds, run semi-naked through the city flaying bystanders with strips from the…
Category Archives: Knitting Holidays
I’m no spring chicken but I love this idiomatic poultry
If you love words as I do, and enjoy a little offbeat, quirky, start to your day, then you need to look no further than a recent post on…
Cool and Green, thanks to solar-powered electricity
Cool and Green: Solar power at the Watermill In the last six years our hidden array of photovoltaic panels has produced more than 90,000* KwH, (kilowatt hours) of electricity from…
An unique Taste of Tuscany and intriguing ‘taste’ of AI
[It really is Bill writing this blog!] I never use Artificial Intelligence (AI) in my Watermill blogs, believing that la voce narrante, the narrator’s voice, should be individual and idiosyncratic:…
A ‘Zen’ experience beside a Tuscan river: The Watermill’s bamboo glade
Silently and unseen, the leaves have fallen for more than half a century in our bamboo glade between the millstream and the river, creating a cushioned pathway through the towering…
A bicycle made for two
A tandem bicycle, a friend, and a spark of creativity I don’t know whether you have ever been on a tandem bicycle, but in my experience, you need a good…
Bring your NPP to the Watermill. Latest attraction: bicycling in the hills around us, without the hard work
Do you have an NPP? We are always delighted to welcome them to the Watermill, as well as NKPs, NWPs and NILPs! (For the uninitiated, that’s Non-Painting Partners, Non-Knitting Partners,…
Jim’s fashionable knitting designs are timeless
The Fair Isle cardigan above was designed and knitted by our world-renowned Watermill tutor Jim Cox 45 years ago – and he‘s still wearing it! Like all of Jim’s renowned…
How much does it cost to send a postcard home from the Watermill at Posara? Absolutely nothing!
We suppose, in this age of instant communications on social media, that postcard-sending, like letter-writing, is a dying art. But we think there’s nothing nicer, especially for the children and…
It’s bad luck to wish Italians good luck. Cry wolf instead
In our part of Italy most people think that wishing somebody ‘good luck’ is bad news, believing that doing so is likely to have precisely the opposite effect. So when it…
Sprezzatura! A cool Italian word that could have been invented for Lois
We don’t have a specific word for it in English, but sprezzatura, first coined by an Italian diplomat in the 16th Century, could have been invented for Lois. It…
Irresistib-eel!
Yes, when Flavio Terenzoni, our gardener, brought in the pumpkin and the sinuous squash, and when painting tutor Crystal Beshara arranged them in an artistic still-life, Bill couldn’t resist…