Travel knitting

The Reluctant Farmer and I are heading out on a bit of a road trip tomorrow morning: we are going to visit his parents (yes, I actually like m in-laws a lot) and on our way back we plan to take a couple of extra nights to see some parts of the province we’ve not visited before.

Of course, this means I need to pack travel knitting.

I have the alpaca yarn I’ve spun, which needs to be transmogrified into a shawl by November, as well as the pattern I designed loaded onto my eReader for ready reference.

I have stitch markers, and my tapestry needles. I have scissors, interchangeable needles, and my DPNs.

I also have sock yarn (enough for 3 pair of socks – this might be ambitious, but I really don’t know for sure). I even took the big balls of sock yarn and wound them into two smaller balls, evenly divided, so I’d know I have this much yarn for each sock. I’m also taking this book along:

My friend gave this to me at Fibre Week a couple of years back and I’ve been meaning to try some “real patterned socks” ever since. Now seems like a good time!

I’m starting with Spey Valley, as almost all the sock yarn I have is self patterning in some fashion or other and I figured a fairly simple sock design was best. This sock has a really neat horizontal chain of stitches in a couple of spots up by the cuff, done in a rather ingenious fashion that is sort of like binding off without binding off. I love learning new tricks.

Progress so far (it was important to be sure it was a workable project before embarking on the journey):

Seems to be working with the patterning yarn so far. We’ll see how it is once we get a little further along!