Mainly so that I could visit the Exploratorium at the Palace of Fine Art and see the Geometric Threads — Artisanal Takes on Pattern, Dimension, and Topology exhibit. From the website:

Explore tessellation through patterns found in quilts, Hawai’ian kapa cloth design, and Moroccan mosaic tiles. Untangle the intricacies of topology looped inside maritime knots and Korean maedeup. Move between dimensions with basket weavers, clothing designers, and upholsterers, and learn how origami artists transform flat shapes into fully realized 3D forms. Discover how similar shapes can give rise to a diversity of artistic expression, from Japanese temari to European lace and crochet.

Through master presentations, skilled artisans illuminate the mathematics inherent in mosaics, origami, and textile arts practiced across the globe.

A combination of mathematics and crafts … sounds like just my kind of thing.

So I didn’t actually do any quilting on holiday but I certainly learned a lot about how it’s done in Hawaii. As you might expect, quilting is a not a native craft in Hawaii but was imported by missionaries.

Despite huge amounts of temptation, I managed to restrain myself and came back with only two books on the subject. Unfortunately, I also managed to resist the urge to go into any of the many fabric shops we saw so I don’t have any beautiful Hawaiian fabrics to show you.

The first book is Hawaiian Quilts: Tradition and Transition. A bilingual (English and Japanese) book that was written to accompany a touring exhibition of vintage and modern Hawaiian quilts. It has a good description of the history and progression of quilting in Hawaii right up to the modern day but my favourite section  is the beautiful pictures of the quilts that formed the exhibition. Some of the vintage quilts can be seen online at the Bishop Museum website or there’s a glimpse of two of the modern ones below.

The second book is The Pillows to Patch Quilt Collection: The Hawaiian Way. It is a beautifully illustrated quilt pattern book full of quilt squares and applique patterns based on Hawaiian motifs. Other reviews say that the instructions are clear and easy to follow, even for beginners, but I will report back after my exams when I actually have time to try them.

The picture shows a section of the table of contents. I’m already enjoying planning a quilt with this book; I just hope making one is as much fun!

Where everything else covers hiking, eating, volcanoes and surfing.

These posts have turned out to be much harder to write than I thought they would so this is going to be a summary of the highlights or I’ll be here until next year!

Hiking

We managed quite a lot of hiking in our two weeks (even on days that had previously been planned as sitting on the beach days).

One of the highlights was hiking on Kauai from Ke’e Beach to Hanakapi’ai Beach and then inland to Hanakapi’ai Falls. It started with scenery like this:

and ended with an amazing swim under the falls themselves. This was our first full day on Kauai, our first ‘proper’ day of honeymoon and we spent the next two weeks saying “Can you believe we swam under a waterfall?”

Eating

We were mainly too busy/tired to worry about going anywhere particular fancy for eating but there are a couple of places that stood out.

Eggs ‘n Things in Honolulu: Brilliant American breakfasts, pancakes, waffles, omelettes and plenty of other stuff. Perfect either before or after a surf lesson at Waikiki beach.

3660 On The Rise in Honolulu: Hawaiian fusion of Western and Oriental cooking at its finest. We had a taster menu complete with accompanying wines and it was the best meal of the holiday, if not the year.

I should also mention Ken’s House of Pancakes and the Garden Snack Club in Hilo. Both were brilliant, in very different ways!

Volcanoes and lava

We spent a couple of days exploring the Hawaii Volcanoes National Park and could have spent much longer if we had had the time.

 There was more hiking, this time down, across and back up a volcanic crater. The crater in the photo below is 2 miles across. To really appreciate the scale on this picture, take a look at the largest size that I uploaded to Flickr and see if you can spot the tiny little people.

We also did some volcano exploring outside of the park, including a lava tube cave (Steven included in picture for scale)

and a visit to see hot lava entering the ocean. This was fairly impressive even during daylight hours…

…but magical after sunset.

Surfing

There are deliberately no photographs of Steven and I surfing, despite the desperate efforts of the company we booked our lesson with to take some decent ones. We had our first (but definitely not last) lesson on our last full day in Hawaii and it was even more fun than we thought it was going to be. We weren’t brilliant but both managed to catch a couple of waves to the point of actually standing on the board. Now we just need to go back for long enough to learn to do it properly!

I’ve been fascinated by the stars and space since a school project that I did at about age 7. The fascination stayed with me, even surviving my astronomy degree, to the extent that our wedding present from my sister was a telescope. Fortunately, Steven shares my fascination (especially considering the wedding present!) so we took some time to indulge it while we were on Hawai’i.

Mauna Kea on the island of Hawai’i is quite possibly the best place on Earth for making astronomical observations and since the 1960′s several of the world’s most advanced land-based telescopes have been built on its summit. The summit itself is at around 14,000 feet meaning that, while it’s possible to take a day-trip up there, it’s not really convenient or comfortable thanks to low temperatures and thinner air.

Fortunately, there is an alternative in the form of the snappily-named Onizuka Center for International Astronomy Visitor Information Station. The station is situated on the slopes of Mauna Kea at around 9300 feet and provides all the information you could possibly need on the mountain, the telescopes, weather and road conditions. Every evening, their volunteers provide a free star-gazing session including guidance on the best place to watch the sunset, a tour of the constellations and other objects that are visible with the naked eye and several high-quality telescopes that they will set up to view the most interesting things visible that night (or anything else that you ask them to).

Steven and I enjoyed our first evening up there so much that we went back a second night while we were there, even though it was a 3.5 hour round-trip from the town that we were staying in. The sunsets were amazing (there are a couple of pictures below, some more in my Flickr set and even more that I haven’t uploaded yet), the volunteers were friendly and knowledgeable and the night skies were like nothing I’ve ever seen. The combination of being above the cloud level, as seen in the picture below, no light pollution and the thinner air creates the ideal viewing conditions. Also, because Hawai’i is much further south than London, we got to see constellations and objects that it is just not possible to see from home. We saw Saturn and some of its moons, the Jewel Box open cluster (not visible from the UK) and many, many other things, including the best views of the Milky Way I’ve ever seen.

If you have any interest in star-gazing at all and you get the opportunity to visit Mauna Kea then you absolutely must. Don’t take one of the tours however. They’re very expensive, especially compared to the cost of petrol to drive yourself to the information centre, and the observing from the summit isn’t actually as good as the observing from the information centre thanks to the fact that your brain is much less good at processing information at 14,000 feet than it is as 9,000 feet and to the fact that the information center have better telescopes than most of the tours carry.

Another must-do if you’re interested in astronomy is the ‘Imiloa Astronomy Center of Hawai’i in Hilo. They try to combine Hawai’ian cultural traditions with modern-day astronomy. The mixture doesn’t always quite work but they have an excellent planetarium, some interesting information on Polynesian celestial navigation and great exhibits. Their hands-on exhibits are fantastic and had Steven and I running round like kids to see what we could play with next. Our guidebook described it as being so good that you shouldn’t necessarily wait for a rainy day to go, which was absolutely true. However, since statistically it rains in Hilo two days out of three, you probably wouldn’t have a long wait anyway.

A series of posts coming up on some of the best bits of our recent honeymoon trip to Hawaii. The first and last posts are even going to be craft-related!

I had decided before the start of the trip that I wanted to bring back some souvenir yarn and my plan was to buy a couple of skeins of laceweight to turn into a shawl. Since Hawaii isn’t known for its yarn production, my only preference was for an American yarn that isn’t readily available in the UK.  I checked KnitMap for yarn shops in Hawaii, compiled a list of possible options and then promptly forgot to take my list with me.

Fortunately, Steven had his laptop and we found a wireless connection that I could use and towards the end of the trip, while we were staying in Hilo on the Big Island, I managed to squeeze in a quick trip to the Bernina Yarn Basket. It wasn’t the most attractive or best-organised yarn shop that I’ve ever been to (I still have no idea if there was any system behind where the yarn was stored or if it just got stuck wherever there was space) but I did find a couple of yarns to take home with me.

First up were two skeins of Knit Picks Gloss Lace in colour Chipotle.

Closely followed by three skeins of Plymouth Yarn Baby Alpaca Lace in the snappily-named colour 2055.

I’ve added so many shawl patterns to my Ravelry queue since bringing these yarns home and I still have no idea which ones I’ll end up using. Watch this space.

We heard a great story from the sales assistant in the yarn shop when she found out that we were Scottish. Apparently, her husband’s grandparents were Scottish and emigrated to the States in the early 20th century. They were booked to be travelling out on the Titanic but her husband’s aunt (who was 4 at the time) caught chicken pox the week before they were due to travel and his grandmother refused to travel until she was better. It’s not often chicken pox are considered lucky.

Another amusing story: as we were driving away from the yarn shop, Steven asked if I’d bought enough yarn. I launched into a long explanation of why, even though it was much cheaper than in the UK, I didn’t want to spend much money or have to carry lots of yarn back in my suitcase, etc., etc. When I finally finished justifying ‘only’ buying 5 skeins of yarn, Steven carefully explained that he was only checking I’d bought enough of the ones I wanted to actually make something. Oops!