planes, trains and starbucks . november 19 . 2006—
A few days ago I returned from a short business trip to New York City.
Oh how I love New York City. And though I miss my family dreadfully (really, from stem to stern), oh how I love a good business trip! It's so wonderful to have my arms, hands, and face free from encumbrance for many hours running. In the past few trips I've taken, I've gotten so much knitting done I can't decide which yarn to put in my bag and end up stuffing my checked luggage full of potential knitting projects, too.
Most fun of all is taking knitting in public. In the past few days, I knitted on planes, I knitted on trains, I knitted in Starbucks. I knitted at touristy bars, I knitted in expensive seafood restaurants, I knitted at a diner at 2 a.m. I knitted in hotels, airports, and train stations. I knitted at every hour of the day and night.
To show for it, most notably, I finished three hats for Larissa's meathead knitalong. Want to understand my mania? That may be impossible, but here are my offerings to the project (all yarns are Lamb's Pride Bulky):
- snow elf. In honor of our love of all things recycled, this hat is knit up mostly of little swatches of Lamb's Pride Bulky I found in the bins, in turquoise, hot pink, and dark purple, topped off with the roving left over from Larissa's first meathead knitalong. It's embellished with a mess of curly yarns and named thus because, first, it looks elfin and, second, the woman sitting next to me on the airplane said it looked like a great hat to wear snowboarding. Yes.
- native boy. Knit entirely of 'wild oak' yarn found at School Products in New York, this hat should be seen running in the woods on the head of a swift-footed, brown-skinned boy. The color is entirely not something I would have chosen -- I picked it for Larissa -- and yet it's absolutely lovely. I embellished it with two fabric feathers I made, even though one of them does bear a more-than-passing resemblance to a banana... It's the most 'booky' of all the hats.
- Santa's helper. This hat was started first, with a half-skein of 'raspberry' left over from Jaime's scarf (two years ago?), and then I bought a skein of 'ruby red.' After knitting up to the tippy-top I realized that (a) I'd been knitting on 17s, not 15s, all along -- making the hat gigantic and (b) I didn't like the 'ruby red' at all. I bought a skein of 'spice' in New York, tore out the 'ruby red' portion, and then used 15s to knit it up, topping the hat with a bit of a variegated bulky wool I had left over from another project to seem ultra-Christmassy. It turns out this hat, with its generous brim proportions, looks fabulous on me, so I'm the Santa's helper here. I haven't embellished it yet, but it will probably get a little bobble on the end of a length of yarn, hanging from the top.
I also knitted up a pattern from Larissa's book (well, based on a pattern from Larissa's book) that's going to be a secret. But I can tell you one thing. Larissa named this pattern after a certain coffee drink that's rarely ordered. And as I sat in Manhattan the morning of the 15th, binding off Larissa's pattern, someone loudly and happily ordered said coffee drink. The stars, they were aligned.
