Yap & Yarn

It's time!

Get your needles at the ready for Yap & Yarn, which starts again on Monday 28th September at the Warehouse Buildings, Stromness, from 5pm - 7pm.

Pop along with your knitting or crochet and enjoy a chat and a cup of tea with fellow yarn lovers. All ages and abilities welcome and there will be help on hand for beginners to get you started.

You may remember the fantastic knitted Christmas tree that the Kirkwall group produced last year, and we thought it would be nice to have one of our own for our lovely new building.

If you would like to help us with this project then we would be delighted to receive donations of squares up to a maximum size of 21cm x 21cm (8 inches) in any shade of green and in various weights of yarn and stitch patterns. We would also love any knitted/crochet decorations for the finished tree.

Let the knitting begin!

Sarah and Carol are working today and this book is available.  Juxtaposition or Oxymoron? 

You decide.

Wi-fi notice

 

 

 

Notice to our customers, but please don't let that put you off.  We have still have a large selection of books, cds, audio books, news papers and magazines for your delectation. (Sarah)

A Room with a View

It's been a glorious day here and the sunshine most welcome.  It's hard to believe that the Warehouse buildings have been open now for almost three months and we have all been incredibly busy.  We are delighted to say the new facility has been very well recieved with lots of positive feedback.  The biggest oohs and aahs come when people go to the adult lending area up the stairs and see the fantastic view from the seating area. This photo really doesn't do it justice, you'll have to come in and see it for yourselves!

Many people comment how they could easily sit up there all day.  There is a lovely library atmosphere and the upstairs facilities are being well used for people studying as there are also desks in the reference area and GMB room. If you are able to tear yourself away from the upstairs there are many other facilities available including a large junior library selection on the ground floor as well as large print, Orkney books, audio books, public computers, and coucil services.

It's been a real priviledge to be part of a fantastic new set up and thank you all so much for your lovely feed back and positive remarks about the building.  If you haven't been in a look yet we would love to see you so please do pop in and say hello.  Sarah

A New Chapter

Well here we are in our new home!

A warm welcome to all our readers, new and old, as we start the next chapter of the Stromness Library story in our lovely new home at the Warehouse Buildings in Victoria Street.

As with all moves there has been a period of transition as we get used to the new building, and our new roles as library assistants/customer service assistants.

With the expanded range of services on offer  there are now two of us working at the reception desk. This means the team has grown, with Carol and Becky being joined by Soo and Sarah, along with our relief staff Keely, Angela, Lara and Evelyn. 

We've been enjoying welcoming old and new faces to our fantastic new facilities and services, which include three public meeting rooms, a range of council customer services, comfortable reading and study spaces, and even a coffee machine!
As the weeks go by we'll introduce you to the team on the blog and learn a bit more about life in the Warehouse Buildings.

In the meantime you can read more about the history of the library, and both old and new buildings on the New Chapter website,which was developed for the library by Rebecca Marr, and features an original audio piece First Lines, produced for the project by Mark Jenkins.

Having a yarn

We are always delighted to welcome visitors to the Stromness Library, and even more delighted when they come back for a return visit.

In the last couple of weeks we've had visits from two former writers in residence at Stromness Library, Jan Natanson, and Nalini Paul , as well as our Ravelry friend Westendangela.

While Jan and Nalini shared news of recent writing projects - Jan has a community play in production, and Nalini has a poetry book coming out soon - when knitters get together the talk soon turns to work in progress and recent projects on the knitting needles. 

We were rather pleased to be able to show off our library cushions, and Becky even posed for a photo beside the windows which were the inspiration for the design. 

photo by Westendangela

Watch this space for news about the date of our move to the new building, but in the meantime here is a sneaky preview of the cushions in their new home.

Now doesn't that look comfy?

Just perfect for relaxing with a good book, or even a bit of knitting!

Bookmarks and biscuits.

As we continue our preparations for the move to our lovely new building, we've been reflecting on our favourite memories of Stromness Library, and we would love to hear yours. 

Perhaps you remember coming to the library as a child and have memories of previous librarians, or you visited us while you were in Stromness on holiday. We would love to hear your stories, memories, favourite books and encounters with the library cats. 

Do please get in touch, either through the comments below or by dropping us an email. We are gathering all these stories from and about the library for our New Chapter exhibition which will celebrate the history of the library in Stromness when we move to the new building. We want to capture as many stories as we can from the most important part of any library - you, the people who visit it. 

Over the years we have worked here there have been many memorable moments, some funny, some sad, and some unrepeatable! 

Today we were recalling the many items we have found inside returned books. Along with the more predictable discoveries of bookmarks, letters, bills and the like, we can reveal that we once opened a book to discover a custard cream biscuit between the pages. Whether this had been inserted as makeshift book mark, or left behind by accident during a particularly exciting reading-while-biscuit-eating-session, we will never know. 

When we mentioned our find to a colleague in Kirkwall library, he claimed to have once come across a rasher of streaky bacon being used as a book mark. While we were unable to verify this claim, we would strongly discourage our readers from reading while eating a fried breakfast  - just in case.

If you are in need of a bookmark we have lots here to choose from, including our very own Orkney library bookmarks -  save the custard creams to go with your cup of tea!