Monday, August 6, 2007

I'm Here!!!

Whew!

After several HOT HOT HOT days in Minneapolis packing, a visit to the grandparents in North Dakota, and 4 DAYS in the car with The Brain...we finally made it to California!

Sorry that I have no pictures. I'm sitting in the public library near my apartment because I won't have a computer or internet access at home for at least another day (if all goes well and everything is delivered when promised.)

I was really looking forward to having a week off with no responsibilities except to drive and drive and drive. I was planning on catching up with my MS3. I was planning on winding my dozen or so skeins of sock yarn into balls. I was planning on teaching myself to knit socks on two circular needles...

Sadly, none of these things happened. I was too exhausted once we finally reached my grandparents' place to pull out the knitting. Then the rest of my family showed up and I was having too much fun playing poker and going swimming with my brothers to worry about knitting (even though one of my brothers is knitting the MS3 too, and he found time to teach himself how to knit a sock and finished it in 3 days!!!)

Then there was the car ride: 4 days going west across Minnesota, North Dakota, Montana, Idaho, and Washington and south through Oregon and California...with no air conditioning. This meant that all the windows had to be rolled down the entire way. Have you ever tried winding balls of yarn at 90 mph with the windows down? The draft tends to suck everything up to the roof and into the back. Yarn was flying everywhere, getting caught in my sunglasses, flailing out the window, etc. It was NOT FUN. The Brain figured out pretty quickly that this was NOT a situation to laugh at. I managed to wind one ball and then shoved the rest of my knitting away for the duration of the trip.

But now I'm here and even though I don't have furniture or a fridge yet, things are definitely getting back on track. The next week or so will be very busy trying to unload furniture and boxes, buy The Brain a car, get an internship lined up for fall, etc. In between all of that I am logging a lot of knitting time on the air mattress in the living room!

Oh, and if anyone has any suggestions for getting rid of the gap between two circular needles while you're making socks, let me know. My first attempt looks like two pieces of knitting loosely strung together on each side. I could try to pass it off as some lame-looking lace runner or...I could just learn to do it the right way!

Thanks for all the comments everyone! It's fun hearing from other knitters. :)

3 comments:

Sarah said...

To get rid of the "ladders" on the sides when you're working two circs, be sure you have all the stitches on the unused half sitting on the cable, not the needle, and knit the first and last stitches a little tighter. That's what I do, and my side stitches tend to be a little too tight, if anything!

Clumsy Knitter said...

Oh goody, I'll try that. I was at B&N the other day and I pored through all the sock books to look for hints and they didn't say anything about it! The nice thing about knitting is that I always figure I can't be the ONLY person who has a problem! :-P

Dana said...

I think I read this tip in one of the SnB books...it's worked for me:

Knit the first stitch on the new needle normally, and then when you insert the needle into the 2nd stitch, give a little extra tug to the working yarn, which will tighten stitch 1. After a while it will be second nature.

Good luck on your transition to the West Coast.