Saturday, September 23, 2006

I'm Back

It was a loaded trip. Businesswise (no knitting related findings. Bummer). I had no dinner meetings, and hotels and their locations were not good. The hotel in Montreal kindly gave me a wake-up call, at 3:20 in the morning. I specifically requested NOT to call me. Especially an hour and forty minutes before I actually had to get up. Gee, thanks.

I missed the flight from Toronto to Montreal, and had to wait in a long, long line to get the next flight available. Even with the commuter flights like this, most everyone needs to check in the luggage because of the newly restricted items on the plane. That makes the check-in line awfully long.


I got a flight an hour later, and there's an hour to go. I drunk beer at the airport and worked on my sock. Beer and knitting make all better. It really does.


This is the state of the socks at the hotel in Toronto.



I left SFO when I was just below the green line of the second sock, so that's a lot of work done in the flight.

And this is Honey Boy, from Future Bakery in Toronto. It's about 1/3 the size of regular Ginger Bread Man. Cute, eh?

I met no other knitters on the trip. No one asked what I was knitting (could have been too obvious), and saw no one working on his/her project. How sad.

One thing I noticed about Telemark from Knitpicks is that for both skein I found a very noticeable yarn joint. I don't see this often with other yarn. The first sock I just didn't do anything and knitted that joint, but after it's knitted the joint is still very noticeable and "pickable."

I ran into another joint as I was starting the toe decrease on the second sock on the Montreal - SFO flight. This time I picked on the joint part, just a little, and it came apart easily. Good thing I had a yarn needle. I did a Russian Join and kept going. But now I'm worried about my first sock getting unraveled. That wouldn't be good.

Here's the joint part on my first sock (the one I didn't do anything). Can you see?

Here's another view in darker color short. This is much closer to the actual color.





I'm really worried about it now. Does anyone know if I should reinforce this part? And how?
I'd recommend anyone using Telemark to watch out for this. Otherwise it's a nice yarn to knit, and it knits up quickly. Oh, also, if you are using Telemark for socks, you may want to get three balls or make the sock shorter than you'd normally do.

This is my fourth pair of socks. One thing about knitting on the road is that I'm more prone to errors -- I didn't make any big errors (aside not doing anything about the dangerous yarn joint), but I did some backwards decreases (like doing SSK on where I should be doing k2tog). I don't usually fix these errors unless I catch it right away. To me socks are socks -- you wear them on your feet and be useful. No point trying to make them perfect. I will work on weaving in ends, and they will be off to Japan to my mom. Hope she'll like them, and also will consider the imperfection as a flavor of handmade socks.






3 comments:

Erin said...

The socks look great - I'm so jealous. You have finished another project! Glad to here that you are back safely. The weeks without knit night are very boring. I'm looking forward to knit night this coming week. By the way, how does Mitch's head look now?

Tamami said...

Hi Erin!! You've been so quiet and I was starting to worry. Mitch is fine... It's still a bit raised, and greenish, but that kid is tough. Again, sorry for all that trouble. Yeah, I need Knit Night every week....!

Tamami said...

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