I’m back from my trip! My husband and I had a very nice trip up to the Midwest last week to visit our parents in Wisconsin and Ohio. We also managed to sneak in some hiking, good food, a trip to the Air Force Museum, a stroll through the Chicago Jazz Festival, and a sampling of Stitches Midwest along the way.
From a few conversations I had with friends and family during the trip, I get the impression that they think that all I do these days is knit! I’m sure that this is from reading my knitting blog. I’d like to take a moment and clarify that this is indeed my *knitting* blog – I do have a life outside of crafting; I just don’t talk about it much here.
Now, for the knitting:
I’m not quite sure how both of my travel knitting projects turned out to be tan, but they are. I didn’t plan it this way. I intended to work on a natural-colored shawl and a dark gray sock. The sock yarn, however, decided not to cooperate with the pattern.
I’ve been wanting to do another Cookie A. sock pattern for a while now. I did her Hedera pattern back in 2006 and learned a lot from it; some of the little refinements she used in that pattern have become part of my “standard sock” and I now use those things for every sock I knit. So I purchased the Ornette pattern, printed it out, and stuck it in my suitcase along with two skeins of light charcoal-colored Louet Gems fingering weight yarn.
Well, the Louet yarn didn’t go so well with the pattern. When I purchased the yarn, I somehow assumed that it would be the same as Louet’s sport-weight merino yarn, which is cable-spun, has excellent stitch definition and is fabulous for intricate socks. However, the fingering-weight merino is in fact a 2-ply yarn and not so hot on the stitch definition. So, during the trip, I ran up to Yarnique in Fairborn, Ohio, and picked up some Cascade Heritage sock yarn. The Cascade looks much, much better – the pattern pops and the yarn is much less splitty on the cables.
My other travel project, the Laminaria shawl, has practically been knitting itself. I cast this on a few days before we left for the trip. I didn’t work on it particularly hard before the trip, and didn’t seem to get that much knitting done on the trip, but somehow after being home for 2 days I am all the way out to the edging! All of my large shawls seem to reach an “amorphous blob” state at some point, at which I wonder why I bother taking a photo. Maybe next week I’ll reach into the archives to compare shawl blob photos…
Stitches Midwest was fun to visit. I had neither the time nor inclination to take any classes (which also happen to be fabulously expensive) so my husband dropped me off for just a few hours Saturday afternoon and I bought a ticket at the door to the vendor market. It was great to wander around touching all of the yarns that I’ve only read about on the Internet and talking to some of the vendors. I bought two skeins of laceweight yarns. Yarn Place makes a number 
of laceweight yarns, only one of which I have worked with (and strongly disliked). I’ve heard other lace knitters rave about their other lace yarns, however, so I was very happy to see their booth at the convention. I came away with a skein of “Heaven,” a merino-tencel blend. The skein has a fairly amazing 3100 yards – 2 miles of yarn, right there in one skein! I also got a creamy white skein of JoJoLand cashmere laceweight that should make for a nice little scarf this winter.
A note to my Austin friends: I’m planning to do some cotton dyeing soon. I’ll be doing mostly cotton flannel cloth, but could be persuaded to sneak in some yarn or do some wool with acid dye. Anyone want to get together and make a mess in my kitchen?
