Contest #2

My favorite coffee, day in and day out, is made with Sumatran beans brewed in a Melita filter. I love Sumatran because it's very strong, but it's also very smooth and low acid so it doesn't bother my stomach. I prefer to buy beans from a local roaster, but that hasn't always worked out. For many years, when I lived in San Francisco, that local roaster was Spinelli Coffee, until they were bought out by Tully's and turned into a big chain. Then I moved to Minneapolis and fell in love with the originally-local-but-now-a-chain Dunn Bros.. And then I moved to New Hampshire and found fair trade Green Mountain Coffee. Now I live in Switzerland where there is no such thing as a local roaster, nor is there the option of buying beans from a particular region, except at Starbucks.

Normally, being kind of high maintenance about coffee :) , I would buy whole beans and grind them in my Zassenhaus grinder:



but lately it seems to be on the fritz and I can't get the fine grind I need, so I've been buying ground beans. I drink it with a lot of cream:





As for favorite yarn--this is far harder to choose!! I guess, all in all, I'd have to go for either Bartlett Yarns or Harrisville's New England Highland. The Harrisville is the ball on the left, and the Bartlett is the brown in the mitten:



I love these yarns because I find them very easy to knit with--good stitch definition, the right amount of friction so the stitches don't go sliding all over the place (especially when my needle falls out!!), and the best part is the things I make wear like iron!!! These yarns are indestructable, which is key for me, as I tend to be very hard on the things I own.