En Route

The first leg of the journey across the pond is complete. We are now pond-adjacent. Greetings from Kennedy Airport, New York City.



As usual, I don't know how I got here. Yes, I know there was an airplane involved. But the bit before that has gone all fuzzy.

I've spent about the past week dancing my customary work-pack-work-pack two-step to the beat of Harry singing "My Old Man Said Follow the Van" and "Land of Hope and Glory" to "get us all into that London-type mood."

And then Mrs Teitelbaum, ever the helpful neighbor, presented him with a copy of Useful English Vocabulary for Americans Abroad. He's been frantically brushing up his English ever since. Our bathroom is the loo; our cookies are biscuits; the grocery delivery truck is a lorry; and when Dolores sent him to the corner store for a pack of cigarettes, his new vocabulary almost got him punched in the mouth.

Speaking of Dolores, she's back. She returned from the ashram two days ago, swathed in a baby blue batik caftan that she claims was dyed to match her newly renovated aura. She doesn't look any different; maybe a trifle thinner, but it's hard to tell with a caftan. Harry says last night he heard her chanting in the shower, and this morning she snapped at me for running over her chi with my roll-aboard.

The most difficult part of packing was, of course, figuring out the knitting. This is going to be a two-week trip.

I envy dedicated sock knitters the ease with which they must pack for this sort of thing. One set of needles, plus maybe a spare set. Chuck in a couple balls of something cute, and close the suitcase.

I brought along the neck warmer that's been my project-in-chief since I finished the Transatlantic Scarf. If you think that sounds like an awful lot of time to spend on a neck warmer, you're right. Unfortunately, after scanning every pattern on Ravelry tagged "cowl," "neck," "warmer," "gaiter," and "dickey," I realized I wasn't going to be happy unless I made up my own. Not because there were no good patterns–there are some spectacular patterns. But somehow nobody has posted a pattern for knitting up the finished object in my brain.

Twelve swatches later, we have this.



I had to take the picture with the computer camera, but perhaps you can still get the idea. I had very particular notions about how I wanted to treat the edges, and spent six of those twelve swatches working on the cast-on and the first eight rows. The other six were swatches were to work out the cables, which I based on a Bavarian twisted stitch motif in the third volume of Liesl Fanderl.

Process knitter heaven. Product knitter hell.

I've also brought along a new lace project: Sharon Miller's Unst Lace Stole from Heirloom Knitting. I keep flitting around that pattern the way some folks put a copy of Middlemarch on their nightstands and leave it there, untouched, for twenty years. I think six days on a boat may help me launch it at last.

I'll report in when I can. E-mail and Internet will be sporadic from here out. At the moment, I see an American Airlines gate attendant motioning frantically from the direction in which Dolores wandered five minutes ago, so I'd better sign off. And Harry says he needs to go to the loo.

Toodle-pip, and what what.