Travel Knitting

And the winner of the "Which Yarn Gets to Travel This Summer?" Sweepstakes is...
::drumroll::

The Crazy Zauberball!

This is a really terrible picture. In true life, the yarn colors are a saturated purple and green with hints of gray, navy and black, but my orange-ish kitchen table always throws off the colors in my photos. Darned if I can figure out how to fix it. I suppose that's the punishment for having an orange-ish table in the first place.

The yarn? Eh. Splitty. Like, bad splitty. The lovely, textural, rustic look is achieved by a loose spin and loose plying technique, so even though the finished fabric is very pretty and intriguingly textured, the knitting is a bit tricky. Even with this extremely simple lace pattern, the k2togs frequently are more like k1.5togs.

The pattern? The lacy baktus, a freebie found via ravelry. The pattern is so simple that it hardly rates as a pattern. It's an 8-row garter stitch repeat, with 1-stitch increases on one edge in rows 1 and 5 and lace (yo, k2tog across) in row 7. Then, after the scarf is about as wide as you want it, you work decreases instead of increases in rows 1 and 5. It doesn't get any simpler than this, which is in part why I chose this for travel knitting.

I've knit about 18 inches so far. Maybe more. Would have definitely been more if the flight home had been more, shall we say, peaceful. It was a very stormy evening. My flight was delayed, and the in-flight turbulence was dreadful. It was hard to even read a book, let alone work with a very splitty yarn like this. I ended up ripping about two inches because of a dropped stitch, but it's my own damned fault for trying to knit on that flight in the first place.

I thought about taking Mendocino because I love it so much, but in the end, I didn't want to pack it. I'm already on ball 5 and it's growing -- would've required a good-sized chunk of suitcase space to pack it. That will be fine for Stitches when room and luggage restrictions are not an issue, but for business travel, it just wasn't going to work.

The trip itself was lovely. I accomplished a surprising amount of work for someone who spent so much time in the bars and parks. Many stories to tell, but none of them, alas, suitable for print. ;)