Yellow Rose Mitts from Yarnivore - Day 3

Magic markers...

Magic loop can be confusing.  With socks, you’re just doing the same thing for both pieces—there isn’t a “left” or “right”—and when you get to a “front” or “back” being important, you’ve got the gusset and heel there right in front of you.

Things are a bit different here.  Without a clear front or back, I might misconstrue whether or not I’ve made it clear around a round because every side looks the same.  I have learned this lesson through painful, lopsided experience.  To save myself from myself, I use different color stitch markers for the front and for the back. Since the working yarn always must come from the back to begin at the right side of each mitt, it only takes a few seconds of scanning to know exactly where I am when I return to my work.

My mitts and I traveled to North Carolina this weekend to visit my daughter, and I was once again reminded of the pleasures of travel knitting.  Airports these days are all about the wait—from security lines to boarding to “the fasten your seatbelt sign is still illuminated” to yesterday's 27-minute taxi upon landing (otherwise known as the complete tour of every inch of tarmac in O’Hare).  Did I stress?  Well, maybe a little bit, but mostly I happily knit.  Glad for the guilt-free time where opening my laptop is not permitted, but knitting most certainly is allowed.

Hooray for adventures accompanied by yarn!

The Clincher Bandana Scarf from Ewe-Nique Yarns - Day 2

Colorplay...

The colors.

I can’t get over the colors.  In honesty, I wasn't too thrilled about the green at the beginning.  It felt way too close to the color of my Brassica shawl to be exciting.  Oh, but when it started to change—wow! The photo doesn't do it justice, trust me.  I kept stopping knitting just to stare at it.  If all the color changes I can see in the cake are as luscious as the ones I’ve seen so far, this is going to be one gorgeous shawl.  Between these and the clever i-cord trim, I bet this is going to be one that gets people stopping me on the street (I love that).

This week has been a travel week for me, and my knitting is always close to my heart (literally and figuratively) when I travel.  Nothing else ever softens the blows of travel—airport lines, long flights, endless waits or delays, all that standing around—like knitting.  It never fails to start up a conversation when I take out my knitting.  Either a fellow knitter wants to “talk shop,” or someone tells me a story about their grandmother or aunt or mom who knit them something.  It makes connections.  Even before I began deliberately seeking out yarn shops for DestiKNITions, I have always treasured the way knitting connects perfect strangers.  

Round two of travel starts tomorrow, so I’ll have more treasures in store—and hopefully more breathtaking color changes.

“Selbucozy” bottle cozy from The Sow’s Ear - Day 1

It gets me thinkin'...

Travel knitting is a finely tuned art.  When contemplating air travel, I like to make sure my projects are small and engaging.  Not a good place for endless rows of large-scale garter stitch.  Socks, mitts, hats, certain scarves, and other such small-scale projects are perfect travel knitting.

You get this.  You understand the importance of slating your cue of projects in just the right order.  Unlike my engineer husband, you completely recognize the sanity in my taking 30 minutes and a calendar to decide the order of three pending projects to be sure I’d be tackling the right one at the right point in my travel calendar.  You find it normal that I needed to have these vital issues settled before I packed my suitcase.  Clothes?  You can make that up as you go along.  Knitting?  You gotta have the right project.  And, if you truly a fanatic, you gotta have a spare project just in case you finish your primary project.  Because you never, ever want to get caught without knitting.

Hands up if you’ve ever actually finished the primary project and actually tackled the “in case” project.  Anyone?  Anyone?  Nope, not me either.

It was with great satisfaction of foresight, then, that I cast on the Nordic delight that is the Selbucozy from The Sow's Ear.  A color-work bottle cozy designed to add a spash of panache to your bottle of beer.  A sock for your suds, if you will.  I'm a wordsmith by trade; I could go on--but I’ll spare you.

Now, I am not a beer drinker, but my husband and now-21-year-old-so-I-can-admit-it-in-public daughter are, so they may have to fight over this one.  Still, it’s black and white--one my favorite color combos, so perhaps I will discover a beverage in a suitable bottle to employ this charming project.

Two-handed color work on double pointed needles!  That’s the brain surgery of knitting.  They say you should tax your brain a bit beyond its capabilities every now and then to keep it nimble and stave off dimmentia.  I think I’ve got that covered with this one.

Knit Along: Pimpelliese Shawlette from Grinny Possum - Day 5

Knit or Pay Dearly

Where have I been?  I’ve been in Europe!  I had grand plans to get my blog installments loaded in before we left for Spain and Italy, but that didn’t happen.  And one does not announce one is out of the country on a public blog, even if one does have the most wonderful of house/dogsitters to watch the fort while one is gone.

And because I know you’re asking, no, there will not be a DestiKNITions Italy or Spain episode.  That’s right, in a fit of uncharacteristic restraint, I did not research the local yarn shops in Rome, Florence, Barcelona, or Naples.  I did not force my family to accompany me into a foreign fiber frenzy (but I did have clearance to go inside should we happen across one...and no, I didn’t stack the travel deck in that regard).  I might write a little note to Norwegian Cruise Line, however, about how they could install an awesome on-board fiber shop with a certain highly entertaining blog host as celebrity endorser.

With a double round of transatlantic air travel, you can imagine I planned for loads of knitting time.  We had a ten-hour layover in Newark waiting for us, not to mention all those lines and flights. A gold-mine of knitting productivity. 

Yep, that was the plan.

Didn’t happen.

While I was smart enough to get lots of knitting done on the cruise excursion tour bus, I didn’t use my “drug of choice” when I needed it most: airports and airplanes.  Instead, I let the trip turn into a bleary parade of creeping lines, frantic phone calls, multi-flight re-routing, and other associated travel disasters rendering me too fried to knit.  I got in a couple of pattern repeats on the outgoing flight, and that was it.  The rest was a fatigue-soaked blur of cramped, pressurized, and dehydrated stress.  At least the Barcelona authorities didn’t make me surrender my circular needles (we worried about those metal tips).  

The point here is that I should have knit.  I should have pulled out my knitting in the hour-long customs line that forced us to miss our flight.  In the 11-hour fatigue-fest that was our Barcelona-to-Newark return flight.  In the unplanned detour to Houston while trying to find a way to Newark out of Chicago’s flood-induced flight cancellations.  I could have knit.  Yes, we were shuffling along every minute or so, and I let that goad me into thinking knitting was impossible.  Why?  When, short of driving or conducting surgery or meeting the Queen, is knitting ever “impossible?”  

So what did I do instead?  What I always do when I have to wait without knitting: work myself into a lather.  Really, I should have some kind of label pinned to my shirt that says “Tell this lady to knit OR ELSE EVERYONE WILL PAY DEARLY.”

Lesson learned.  Next trip, I WILL KNIT.  Or else.  Because it’s best for everyone, including me.

Knit Along: Peony Scarf from Gabriella's - Day 6 DETOUR!

Gadget Girl Scores Big!

Now, I could bore you with the endless rows of stockinette stitch I’m currently enduring in the pursuit of my sure-to-be lovely Peony Scarf, but I doubt that would make for good reading. So, trust me when I say I’m kitting my fingers off to get to the next section of my scarf and will provide you with all the fluffy details when I get there, but today we’re going to take a detour.

On my very favorite subject: gadgets!

I love gadgets. The Container Store, Brookstone, Sharper Image, cooking gadgets, my beloved Blackberry Storm, I love ‘em all. But a cool knitting gadget? Well, that about blows me away. And so my squeal of delight could probably be heard in Detroit when I encountered The Knit Kit. It didn’t matter that I hardly needed it--because I wanted it. And (worth mentioning because those kind of impulse buys don’t always work out well for me) it was a great find. All the do-dads you need in one kit. I’d show you a photo of mine, but I pulled this one off the website (credit for this image to theknitkit.com) because I saw they now come in cool black, and I have to say my one gripe with this marvel was the pink-and-white color scheme. I’m just not a pink-and-white gal, and I really like the black model. You can bet I’ll snatch up the first one I come across.

The scissors actually work quite well. You can bet a parent invented this because not many other people would understand the importance of a locking row counter (“Hey mom? click, click What’s this cool clicky thing?” click, click, click). Ha, no toddler scares me now. The curvy crochet hook comes in handy when you drop a stitch, and can switch hit as a cable needle on occasion. I tucked a craft needle in mine, but am wondering if the friendly folks at airline security won’t take to that (which is why I guessed there wasn’t one already inside--it seemed the only standard knitting accessory missing).

I love this thing. Okay, more than one person commented it looks a bit too much like a package of birth control pills, but I like the thing enough to defend it from its rude detractors. Besides, the addition of a black-and-white model takes care of that nicely anyway. It’s designed for air travel, it slips easily from one project bag to another, and it’s just plain COOL.

‘Nuff said. Here’s the website to help you get your own--I’m sure not lending you mine....