Road Trip Socks

Wow, it’s been a while since I posted here! I am fresh back from a road trip to New Orleans, and I have a new pattern for you! It’s summer in the northern hemisphere and for many of us that means road trips. I created this pair of Road Trip Socks on my own road trip and was sufficiently struck by how perfect for travel it is that I decided to share it!

These quick and easy cabled socks are wonderfully portable and not too warm in your hands, making them perfect for that summer road trip! The pattern is easily memorized, and uses a maximum of about 450 yards of yarn – easy packing!

Because the cables are only two stitches wide and repeat frequently, they’re also perfect for learning to cable without a needle, so you can leave one more piece of equipment at home! Instructions for no-needle cabling, if needed, are linked in the pattern and also available on this blog. If you’re doing a traveling this summer, I hope you’ll take Road Trip Socks along for the ride!

A Productive Christmas for a Happy New Year

I’ve gotten SO much knitting done since school let out. Thankfully, I did not run out of knitting while visiting Hubby’s family, but it did get a little dicey one day when I overestimated how much I could safely leave in the hotel room! So what have I gotten done in the last week?

I finished the socks for my sis…

and the gloves for the Husbeast…

and a hat for me! Recognize Brumby Jill from my Sharon Boswell interview?

I’ve also made big progress on an upcoming design that’s not quite ready for sharing yet. So to distract you, look what I got for Christmas!

That’s 3 skeins of Cascades Baby Alpaca Chunky in colorway “Emerald City” and 2 skeins of Art by Eve Anne in colorway “Emerald”. I’m seeing a theme here. Isn’t it interesting though how two different dyers could take the color “emerald” and come up with two such radically different colors? Even funnier, neither one really matches what I think of when I think of emeralds. Colors are such an odd (and fascinating) thing to me.

P.S. Tomorrow is my birthday, and like other years, I will be giving away presents to Feel Good fans! If you’d like a chance at winning free patterns, make sure you have some FGK patterns in your Ravelry wishlist!

Plane Knitting

Hubby and I are about to hop on a plane to visit his sister for a few days, and I’m feeling a little paranoid. There’s the usual “but what if I run out of knitting?” fear I have every time I travel, but also? Every project I have going right now (3!!!) is on dpns. I know the TSA website says knitting needles of all kinds are fine, and I’ve literally never had trouble over it before, but I feel like if they’re going to take exception to any type of knitting needle, it’s pointy little dpns.

The thought of losing my needles this far into a sock this intricate makes me a little panicky, but I’ve discovered it makes me less panicky than the thought of not having anything to knit in the airport. So I’m risking it.

At least, I’m risking it with two of the projects. The third is going in my checked baggage, along with some spare yarn and needles. I’m not that brave.

Williamsburg

Hubby and I had a lovely long weekend away. I did get a few hours of knitting time in, but the sweater really doesn’t look appreciably different so there’s not much point in another photo. I promise it’s in the home stretch though! Since there are no knitting photos to entertain you with, how about some weekend photos?

It was rainy and gross the first evening and morning we were there, but we made up for it by lounging around until embarrassingly late and then getting Duck Donuts. If you are lucky enough to live in an area that has Duck Donuts, you should definitely try them. Such an awesome treat, especially when they’re still warm.

Once the weather cleared up a bit we visited Colonial Williamsburg like always, and watched some re-enactors in town for an event. Being the hockey obsessed household that we are though, we made sure to leave in plenty of time to catch the season home-opener on tv that evening.

After the game we came back and did a ghost tour because…well, because October, that’s why. No ghosts (shocker), but it was fun!

We spent a day at Busch Gardens too, which is always fun but is extra fun this time of year because they’re all decked out for Halloween. Are you noticing a theme on this trip? Every evening they open up a collection of haunted houses and flood the park with actors in spooky costumes, and they really do go all out. So fun!

It was so hard to come back to work yesterday, but so completely worth it. Now to crack down on this sweater…

Montreal

Hubby and I are back from a week in Montreal, and very grateful to my little sis for again house- and pet-sitting! Ready for a few highlights? It’s photo-heavy!

First off, the hotel we stayed in had such amazing views we almost didn’t want to leave it! From one side of the impressively affordable suite, we could see Vieux Montreal, the St. Lawrence River, and Habitat 67. From the other side we could see a good chunk of downtown and Mont Royal. It was pretty stunning.

Even though we deliberately got a room with a kitchenette so we could take advantage of Montreal’s famous farmers’ markets and bagels, we had a surprisingly hard time finding any! We did manage to find a few local treats to sample though!

We spent plenty of time touring around Vieux Montreal’s beautiful old buildings and museums (And ice cream shops. So many ice cream shops.)

 

And spent a day exploring Mont Royal too.

Of course, being hockey fans (if not especially Habs fans) we had to go to Centre Bell. We chose to do that on the only day it rained, because the so-called underground city meant we could walk there without ever actually going outside. Pretty amazing.

All in all an excellent week, with plenty of built-in knitting time as well! More on that later!

Vacation Part 3: London

This has been the most fun part of the series to write, not because London was so much more fun than Norway, but because I’ve been back at school for over a week now and all the positive effects of vacation had worn off until I started writing and remembering. Sadly London was also the end of my vacation.

Because we had some time between when the boat got in and when we had to be home, and we didn’t know when we’d be able to afford to come to that side of the world again, we decided to take a whirlwind tour of London before we went home. And I do mean whirlwind. When we got in we dropped our suitcases at the hotel and immediately hopped on the Tube. We set out for Picadilly Circus first.

 

It really was reminiscent of Times Square with more interesting architecture. After that we fought our way through the crowds to get a peek at Buckingham Palace. It was really pretty absurd trying to get any decent pictures of any part of it, because there are always 700 other people trying to get the same exact picture, and they’re usually closer. Then of course there’s the fact that to get the whole palace in a photo, you have to be far enough back to also get the crowds and the traffic lights and street lamps in the photo! I was actually a little surprised not to see a huge green in front of it like you get with old plantation houses(the closest thing to a castle we have here in Virginia)!

 

Since we were there, we decided to hang out in St. James Park for a while afterward and try and regain a little peace, so to speak. We quite enjoyed the famous pelicans and the fuzzy adolescent swans. And yes, that is September Storms in the photo. London was chilly!

 

Our next big visit on the list was Westminster Palace/Abbey and Big Ben. Getting there was just as crowded as Buckingham, but thankfully the area around it wasn’t quite such a zoo. We were also excited to discover Parliament just down the street. I’d never realized just how centralized a lot of the Big Stuff is in the “City of Westminster”, which was another term I’d never heard used before.

 

We were unfortunately unable to visit the Royal Mews (people who know me in real life will know what a horse nut I am and how disappointed that was) because there was a rather large horse show going on, and the line to get in was so long we couldn’t even ask about ticket prices or we may have gone to the show instead. Instead we took some photos of the iconic London Eye across the Thames (I was too chicken to go up in something that high) and then went to the Portrait Gallery.

Imagine pretty much every picture of a historical figure you’ve seen on Wikipedia in one building. That’s London’s Portrait Gallery. It really puts D.C.’s to shame. I was particularly in awe of the Tudor wing.

We also hung out in Seven Dials (how’s that for a neighborhood name?) for a while enjoying their poetry and art festival, and then did some more nothing in Trafalgar Square, because how can you not?

Later that afternoon we wandered into the Theatre District, but sadly did not have time to actually see a play. Instead we enjoyed seeing what was playing where, and then had the most stereotypically British dinner we could manage in one of the nearby pubs. It was pretty crowded, so we wound up sharing our booth with an awesome pair from Scotland who’d come down for a girls’ weekend/ play marathon. That’s Speckled Hen we’re drinking, if you’re interested.

 

You want to know the really amazing part of our stay in London though? Hubby asked for a sweater. Not a store-bought sweater, thank goodness, but for me to make him a sweater. Hubby never wears sweaters, and barely wears hand-knits. But he saw a sweater he actually liked in a store window, looked at it and literally said, “Ew, it’s made of acrylic. You could probably make something like this, right?” Then he asked if we could go yarn shopping for it soon. I about fell over dead. So excited!

A Break

We’re getting a teeny little respite from the cold (it’s supposed to snow again Monday) so Husbeast and I decided to take advantage and go to DC for the day with my best friend and her husband.

 

My Flutter is unfortunately not very travel friendly, with it’s current size and the fact that the pattern is in a book instead of in my Kindle. Perhaps that’s why it still looks almost the same as it did last time I posted about it! Not exactly much downtime at home lately. Instead I cast on a new pair of basic socks for the trip. I am determined to use up this stash of purple sock yarn!

 

We tooled around the Museum of the American Indian for a few hours, which is always a nice time. The architecture alone is worth the visit. Hubby had never been before, somehow, so that was a nice bonus. Of course, after we were done seeing all there was to see, we had to grab a bite from their awesome cafe before moving on. Smithsonian food is always pricey, but at this particular museum I do think it’s worth the price. Yum.

 

After that we went to the United States Botanic Garden for a bit. In part we went because it’s always fun to see the coffee trees, and the cacao trees, and to smell the herbs and medicine section of the greenhouse. But mostly we went because…well, where else in this hemisphere are you going to see things like this in February?

This time of year we can all really use a little color injection from time to time, you know? Well worth the trip.

 

Messy Ouch

Perhaps I shouldn’t use this bag for transporting sock WIPs anymore. Ouch.

Packing Light

I’m going out of town for the weekend and this sweater WIP is all the knitting I’m taking with me.

 

There’s no way on earth I’m getting 3/4 of a sweater done in 2 days. Still, I’m a little nervous. One WIP? Really?

Whirlwind West

We are home from a week out west! It was a 5-state whirlwind tour (I really am getting too old for those) but we spent most if it in Wyoming. I’ll try to keep it semi-fiber related, but there really is so much more awesomeness to describe, like every time I travel, that I’m actually thinking about starting a travel blog just so I can ramble on about it without feeling guilty.

We flew into Salt Lake City, where we visited the temple and some lovely gardens and, surprisingly, a really good microbrewery.

 

After only a day in Utah we hurried on through along a stretch of the Oregon Trail in Idaho, including a lunch stop at Soda Springs, aka “the place I always died when playing Oregon Trail”.

 

Then it was into Wyoming. This was about where I became absolutely mesmerized by the way the shawl gleams in the sunlight…and so did several other passengers on our bus.

 

It is also where I fell in love with the Tetons. Yellowstone was amazing, but I expected it to be. The Tetons are seriously undersold here in the east. Boy do I ever have the itch to paint after spending some time there. The knitting may have suffered a little due to my inability to stop staring at everything.

 

Then we spent a few days in Yellowstone, which was not nearly enough. Rather than try to cram the whole park in to so little time, we stuck to the lower loop and still didn’t have nearly enough time. We did do most of the big highlights on the loop though, and saw plenty of critters.

 

Thanks to a “bison jam”, this is also about the point where my shawl stopped fitting in my bag and so I switched projects.

 

Our hunt for something locally made/grown in any of the gift shops at all at Yellowstone also brought us to the conclusion that Wyoming is made in Montana. Certainly all the stuff inside it seems to be. After Yellowstone we hopped over to South Dakota for a few days…just in time for Sturgis.

 

After enjoying some serious noise and the requisite visit to Mt. Rushmore, we headed back through Wyoming on our way to Denver.

 

Our ambling, less-that direct route included stops in old Fort Laramie, aka “that place I always traded away all my clothes in the Oregon Trail game”, and Fort Collins, home of an Anheuser-Bush plant and the best military discount I’ve ever seen.

  

Another day in Denver and it was “hurry past the creepy blue horse and into the circus-tent airport”, and home we went! This is definitely one of those vacations where I’m more tired than I was when I started, but we sure saw some worthwhile things!

 

Knitting project statuseseseseses:

Shawl – done with the center panel; ready to start beading again

 

Wheel cover– complete; will just need to sew it to my sister’s steering wheel when I see her for her birthday

 

Lace Shell Basket – perfect airplane crocheting; probably about halfway done

 

Op Grat scarf – barely touched, either thankfully or unfortunately, depending on how you view the trip!