Travel Knitting

I’m going to be traveling more than usual in the next six weeks. This weekend, I’m making a much anticipated trip back home to Madison, where I will get to see many friends. I can’t wait. I’m even going to be going to my actual home town to meet up with some friends from there. I haven’t spent any time in that town for ages and have done little more than drive through it for several years. It’s strange in a way to realize that you could live some place for more than a decade (about thirteen years) and then have it become alien to you so quickly. This trip will be great though. I’m definitely bringing the camera, so you can expect many great pictures of Madison in the near future. If you can’t wait, check out the Madison tag on Flickr to see some great pics from the place I consider my true home town.

It’s amazing how preparing your knitting becomes a part of packing once you’ve become a knitter. At the moment, I’m deciding whether I should just bring the Cold Mountain Stole (I love working on this!) or if I should bring the Back to School Vest along with me as well. I’m still about 2/3 of the way up the ribbing on the vest, but it’s taken a bit of a backseat with my foray into lace knitting. Since it’s such easy knitting, it would be good for any time that I can’t break out my plastic protected lace charts to work on Cold Mountain. But I’m only bringing a small carry on bag and a large purse, so I guess the final decision depends on how much space there is in my bags.

Speaking of the Cold Mountain, here is a picture of my progress after knitting tonight. I finally finished a full repeat of the A chart.

Can you see the slight color variations? It looks great, and the cashmere is delightfully lacy. The only problem is my need to use stitch markers between the three row repeats. It lets me obsessively count to thirty after each repeat and make sure that I haven’t lost or gained an extra stitch, which happens about 1/3 of the time.

You can’t really tell when it’s on the needles, but when stretched out (and blocked in the future) the laddering will definitely be visible. My stitch markers are a little large, but I’m looking for some smaller ones tomorrow. Perhaps my blocking will have to me more length-wise rather than width wise, to de-emphasize the ladders. However, if I get them fixed, I hope to forget about them after all of the rest of the knitting there is to go on this one.