A Knitters Trip Abroad

This time last week I was on a plane somewhere over the Atlantic.  Actually, its possible that I was running around the airport in Dublin.  All the flights and all the time changes made the timeline go a bit fuzzy.  Either way, I was traveling, and I was not at all happy about it.

Jason and I spent 10 days overseas, visiting Dublin (and its surrounding countryside) and Rome.  It was a grand adventure, and the sort of vacation I never expected to be able to have, and a week later I am still a little bitter about having left the Roman sunshine and dry heat and chaos and ruins and three hour dinners.  (Also, I need a scooter.)

If you’ve come from Ravelry and you’re just here for the knitting, this post is for you.  I’m sure that more will follow that don’t talk about knitting at all, so if you’re not from Rav and you don’t care about the wool, your time will come.

I cast on for a sock (Cotty, in Waterlilies on 3IG Kells Sport merino) sitting on the runway at Dulles.  There are always questions about knitting on airplanes.  Within the US, on multiple airlines, I have never had an issue.  I had heard that Irish airlines and the airport in particular had a different way of seeing things, but Aer Lingus attendants, at least, seemed to not have any objections to my knitting on any of their flights the whole trip.  Its the airport in Dublin that’s a problem, but I’ll get in to that later.

I didn’t get terribly far before I decided that I should try to sleep on the plane.  It was only 9 or 10:00 my time, but we were going to be landing at something like 9 a.m. Irish time, and wouldn’t be able to check in to our hotel right away.  It seemed to be in my best interest to get a little sleep before I tromped all over the city.

By the time the hotel called at 1:00 (my body thought it was about 8 a.m. and it was going on about two hours of broken sleep), we had already had breakfast (who knew black pudding was actually good), walked to and around Merrion Square, discovered the Dublin drivers’ habit of parallel parking with their car facing any direction they fancied, found Trinity College and seen the Book of Kells (which was nothing compared to the Long Room in the library).

After a nap and further urban exploration, Jason, the sock and I shared a Guinness at The Brazen Head.

Guinness in Dublin is really, really good.  All of the things you hear about how its just better in Ireland are absolutely true.

I worked on the sock on the bus trip to Newgrange, which was spectactuar.

A group of about fifteen of us crammed inside, and even surrounded by strangers, the energy in the old passages gave me chills.  I could have sat and stared at the stones all afternoon, even in the rain and chill.  (I knew Ireland wasn’t going to be warm, but I underestimated how cool it actually was.)

I finished the leg of the sock on the way back to the city, where we saw sheep (who I wanted to play with):

And stopped at Monasterboice, a monastery founded in 521 AD that was home to some of the countries most highly regarded High Crosses.

After that, the sock was mostly put away until we got to Rome.  I brought it along for our Ghost Bus tour of the city, but was too engaged by what wa sgoing on to want to work on it (and that’s saying something).  I would have liked to have knit on the flight to Rome, but the security signs at the ticket desks very clearly said, “No Knitting Needles” right under the bits about how small bottles of liquids and gels must be in a quart sized Ziploc, and that guns and knives are not welcome  on board.  Clearly,  Irish airline security isn’t aware that a knitter without their knitting is more dangerous than the tiny sock needles they are forced to check in their luggage.

At any rate, I had a book with me, and the plane have televisions at each seat (unlike the plane we took from DC to Dublin), and I survived.

It was good that I survived because Rome was really, really wonderful and I am deeply committed to figuring out how I can live there.  Or at least live someplace that has the same energy as Rome (which I’m not sure is possible) since Jason tells me that its “really not his kind of place.”  (I will grant him that it is warm, and that it is difficult to get water at a restaurant without having to pay at least 3 euro for it.  Other than that, I really just can’t see what’s not to love.)

Very little knitting happened in Rome.  We did a lot of walking and a lot of exploring, and there wasn’t very much time to sit still.  The really wild part, though, was that when we had occasion to sit still, I was okay with it.  I didn’t feel like I had to be doing something with my hands, and I didn’t have that nagging feeling that sitting and waiting or standing in line was lost time.

The sock was in my bag the whole time, though, and it did visit the Colosseum:

The majority of that picture is of the area under the arena, where animals and slaves and Gladiators were held between matches.  The wooden floor at the top is a reconstruction of what the arena floor would have looked like, except that it would have been covered in sand.  The whole place completely blew my mind.

Rome had no qualms about my knitting needles, and in fact, I brought three sets on the plane.  One with the Cotty socks, one attached to a pair of plain vanilla socks that could easily worked on in lines, and a third set for a fresh cake of yarn in case I finished a project on the long trip home and felt compelled to start something new.

That all felt like a very good plan until we landed in Dublin to meet our connecting flight.  We had to pick up tickets at a customer service desk, clear customs, and then go back into the main departures area to get to our gate.  That meant clearing security all over again (the second of three times that day).  I was not a happy camper.  Not only did I face seven hours confined on an airplane without my knitting and with only half a book to finish, but I had all three sets of my favorite needles on my person, and I was just sure that security was going to take them away.  It was too late to find an envelope and postage and try to mail them home if that happened.  I started mentally taking stock of where things were.  The loose dpns were in my purse, and they were long and thin in a pouch with pens and all sorts of random things, and besides, they were bamboo and maybe they wouldn’t turn up.  The needles in the Cotty socks were in the socks, in my purse, and they were thicker, and there probably wasn’t much hope for those, except that again, they were bamboo and I’ve heard rumors (that I’m pretty sure aren’t true) that airport x-ray machines can’t pick those up.  The other needles were short circs, and they were in my backpack and were metal, and I was just positive those were going to be taken.

Except that they weren’t.  Everything went right on through without so much as a second glance.  Security was more alarmed by Jason’s umbrella than my contraband needles.  I knit on an off on the flight between Dublin and JFK, where our flight to Dulles was delayed.  I finished the sock waiting there, but by then my body thought it was 4 a.m. and that I had been awake since 7 a.m. and there was just no hope of casting on for the second.

I still don’t have pictures of the finished product (though I have started its mate), mostly because its been muggy and grey here since we got home so the light is bad, and I’ve been busy uploading trip photos to Flickr, and anyway, I can’t find my camera.

FO: Ohm’s Blankie

A couple of months ago, a friend on Ravelry posted a note to the Three Irish Girls group.  The topic was simple enough.  “Let’s help Ohm.”

[Sidebar: If you are Ohm and you are reading this before you have gotten your blanket, don't.  Maybe go read this instead. Or you could try playing here. You can come back and read when there is no more surprise to spoil.]

Ohm is another member of the group, and without giving away too many personal details, she is going through some Stuff.  Some of it is medical stuff and some of it is military wife stuff, and all of it is stuff that made many of her friends from afar wish they could be there to help her out.  She planned to spend the time during her husband’s pending deployment knitting him socks.  (In case you don’t know, boysocks can be quite large and take a very long time to knit.)

It was quickly agreed that we would begin making some crazy striped socks for Ohm’s husband.  We would each knit a few inches, and then send the socks-in-progress along to another group member until they were finished and could be send to keep his feet happy while he was away.   Somewhere in the midst of that conversation, a second plan was concocted.  We didn’t just want to help Ohm help her husband–we wanted to help her, as well.  After kicking around a few ideas, we decided that we would make her a patchwork blanket.  Everyone would send me a 10″ square of their choice to be assembled into an afghan.

Before much longer, squares started showing up in my mailbox, many with cards for Ohm.  We knew what her favorite colors were, but there was no real discussion about what patterns or colors to use.  The only real instruction was that squares should be 10″ and have a clean edge for sewing together.  Given that, I thought it was interesting to see how many people chose the same pattern to knit, and how many people worked in the blue spectrum.

What resulted was this:

My husband–who very patiently helped me block the finished product and turned out to be much better and coaxing it into shape than I could be–looks at it and thinks.  “Well.  That’s…special.”  And I’m sure that to the casual observer, that’s true.  But I know better.  Sure, there’s woodland camouflage colors in the same blanket as lime green and pink.  And maybe the edges didn’t work out to be all exactly even.  There’s no way that fourteen different hands can touch a piece of knitting and have all the colors and all the stitches jive.  What makes it come together is that, as fourteen different people sat down with some sticks and string, they were all thinking of the same two people and how much kindness they hoped to share with a couple they had never met.  I think that’s pretty huge.

The grey square at the bottom left came from Oslo, Norway.  Its the piece that traveled the farthest, and it was accompanied by the ball band, which I couldn’t read a word of, and a local newspaper, which I looked through and then included in the package for Ohm to see.  The block in the second row with the duplicate stitched heart is from Sharon, the Grand High Yarnista of Three Irish Girls.   Over the course of the blanket’s assembly, two of the knitters relocated–one left my area to move back to Illinois, and another left Texas to move back to this area.  Someone else came through with her squares at the last minute even though she was home with two very sick children, and had even offered to drive the squares to my house if I needed them quickly.  I’m pretty sure that one knitter’s daughter moved to DC from WV during the process of this blanket, and I was sitting on the floor sewing strips together when I got the phone call to come to the hospital for my nephew’s birth.  There is a whole lot of special wrapped up in this blanket.

When someone else’s squares because a casualty of the postal system, she came through at the last minute with a package of six more.  By then, the blanket was in its final, border-adding stage, so it was too late to include them.  They were cotton, though, and easily suited to washcloths.  Plan B was quickly formed, and some handmade soap was added to the box to go with handknit cloths.  Six washcloths for one girl seemed like overkill, so the extras are going to be paired with more handmade soap, and they will come with me to the next Marine Moms Bethesda luncheon at Mercy Hall.  It seems fitting that they go to the Marines recovering there.

I’ve gotten lots of thanks on the 3IG board for “all the work” I did putting the blanket together.  Its nice to hear and I’m glad to know that the effort was appreciated, but it also kind of floors me.  I’m happy that I could help, and I feel extremely lucky to be involved with a group of people who are so generous and thoughtful to have come up with this idea in the first place, and been so eager to run with it.

Slacker.

I was vaguely aware that it had been A While since I’d posted anything here, but I only just realized that it had been nearly three weeks.  Probably there has been plenty to talk about, but I haven’t had the inclination to sit down and write about it.

Knitting has been a little stagnant.  I’ve been working almost exclusively on a laceweight shawl.  It looks like absolutely nothing right now.  Beyond boring.

(Do you like how I show you anyway?)  The pattern is Jeanne from Through the Loops.  I love the yarn that I’m using–a laceweight version of McClellan from Three Irish Girls, one of my most favoritest yarns ever.  Because the pattern calls for fingering weight yarn, I expect my large version of the shawl to turn out somewhat smaller than a large shawl.  I’m starting to suspect that I’m purling the yarn overs wrong, or maybe my needles are too small.  Something, because the other WIPs I’m beginning to see on Ravelry look much more open and lacey, even in their early, unblocked stages.  I don’t have the heart to frog it back, though, so I’m just hoping for the best and telling myself that I’m not making a mistake–I’m creatively interpreting the pattern.

The weather in DC has been amazing for the past few weeks, so a lot of my usual knitting time has been taken up by jogging, riding my bike, walking in to town with my husband, visiting farmers markets, walking along the canal, preparing fresh meals and doing all the things that gorgeous weather inspires me to do.

There were fireworks in Takoma Park with gaming friends on the 4th of July.   Its been a few years since we’ve made a point to see fireworks, and after Disney and the National Mall, it was nice to go back to a small town show.

There were stool races in the parking lot at the massage school while the offices were closed.

(I have lost all ability to take a photo that isn’t at least slightly blurry.  No idea what that’s about.)

Now, we’re getting ready for vacation, to Dublin and Rome.  We leave on Wednesday, so I’m busy trying to decide what knitting projects I want to bring with me.  Socks for the plane, for sure.  I’m thinking maybe something from Cookie’s sock book.  Possibly with some Bugga! from Sanguine Gryphon.