Apparently I was conceptualizing the actual trip as some kind of 18th Century sea voyage of many months, because that is how much knitting I pictured I would get done. I planned to do a great amount of the Woven Trellis Scarf. It is awesome looking but way boring with the small strips on dpns and six of them and they are long et cetera. So, I got in my head the crazy notion that the Soft Linen (Reynolds?) I was using would work up at a totally different gauge than the Classic Elite Lush called for in the pattern, so I selected two sets of dpns, each a size smaller than the ones called for in the pattern. But it turns out that a) the scarf is kind of on the small and narrow side as scarves go anyway, so going to a smaller gauge would be kind of stupid, b) the yarn I was using worked up to exactly exactly the gauge called for in the pattern, and c) oh but wait there's this thing you can do where you increase the number of stitches and therefore get a bigger object than you would with your current gauge! Genius! Sign me up!
And it's important to keep in mind here that my thinking at this point was a bit addled. I was on a many-month sea voyage on an average of about 4 hours of sleep a night for the three proceeding nights, all of which would culminate in a big, unfamiliar city with no established means of income and going into a new program that I was pretty sure was what I wanted to do and it god damn had better well be given the crazy debt and massive life-uprooting that was going into it -- which is relevant to the knitting in sheer terms of the amount of mental energy I had available for things like scarves on dpns. Which is to say, not much.
So all of this might have worked out with the thinking and misconceptions and linen, but I dropped one of the dpns of the first set and it fell into the crack between the foot-part of the floor (hey, so my vocabulary is returning slowly) and the kind-of-under-the-door-but-still-inside-the-truck part. Stopping to retrieve it was no kind of option, plus I had figured out the whole gauge issue, both the whoops, I have the wrong size needles issue and the hey I can add more stitches for bigger, woot! issue and also the bigger size that I had brought was actually the smaller size called for in the pattern, so I temporarily abandoned the smaller needle in the door crack, frogged, and cast on more stitches to bigger needles. (Rough, mind-addled math also indicated at this point that I had enough extra yarn that I could add stitches in terms of width and still end up with a scarf-length object rather than a potholder. I still think I'm right about this.)
We stopped for bagels, and as I was getting out of the truck, I heard the working dpn fall somewhere in the truck and after extensive, head-rush-inducing searching, could not turn it up. It is GONE. So I packed up the scarf and put it aside, because really, that was getting ridiculous.
I haven't unpacked it. It won't be terrible, it's not as if the yarn is in a monstrous tangle or anything is irreparable... I think... but I'm not ready to go back to it yet.
THIS pretty-pretty is a froot loop sock in Koigu. Haha funny story about the Koigu -- I originally planned to make this in a slightly darker shade but very similar KPPPM. My work buddy had admired said KPPPM in my stash photos on Ravelry, so as a goodbye gift, I stopped at the shop in my hometown where I'd gotten it, but of course neglected to write down which number it was. It's the purple stuff. Check.
So, at the shop I quickly discovered that there was an abundance of a darker shade (426? Still I can't be arsed to look it up) and only one of this lighter shade, 263 (or something)! So after much scrounging and about 3 false alarms involving whatever the much more expensive part-silk or -vicuna or -whateverthehell Koigu, I found another skein of the lighter stuff! Yay!
And of course I get home and realize that what she originally admired was the darker stuff. So I gave her the darker stuff from my stash and am using the lighter stuff myself. It too is gorgeous, and after some frogging and cursing of dyelots (one sock has more of a grayish tint and is slightly less variegated), I'm to the heels. And since I screwed with the cast-on count, and the heel is carefully worked over a certain number of repeats, I haven't summoned the mental resources to deal with the heel yet.
Aaanyway, zomg I'm still typing, I finished a pair of plain socks during the voyage (I think, who knows, maybe they were done before. Oh yeah, they were, because they would have qualified for Summer of Socks but I didn't get around to posting them) or something blah blah blah. More knitting has happened but I don't have pictures and it might be done tomorrow anyway and I still need to shower tonight and have I mentioned the tired? It is big and heavy.
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