The pace of my blog posts here reflects the pace of my finishing in the last months. A colleague at work had a baby and I thought I'd whip up a quick little baby gift. After all, that
Mason-Dixon baby kimono doesn't take any time at all, right? Alas, I have had even less time than "no time at all" in the last couple of months. By the time I finished it the baby had almost outgrown it. (Her father tactfully described it as "snug," but was touched by the gesture.) Worse still, I did a truly crappy finishing job. An heirloom it ain't, handspun or no. But here 'tis.

This is made from the leftovers of the
BFL I spun up for my mom's birthday shawl last year... well, the spinning happened two years ago. How time flies.
And the
post I linked above (but hey, I'll link to it again for good measure) also documents a cliffhanger: the time I ran out of handspun yarn when my Melon Shawl (from
Victorian Lace Today) was nearly completed.
Fortunately I can report a happy ending.


A little blurry, but hey, it's done.

It's a sign of my current state of overextension that I finished this on vacation in March, but didn't block it til May. What kind of obsessed-knitter behavior is that?
Gratuitous vacation shot to distract me from my woeful lack of knitters' OCD:

This is Tulum, Mexico, before swine flu, but not before drug-related violence that kept the tourist crowds to manageable proportions. Please note that this is a last-minute vacation booked on Travelocity. On a Wednesday night, my husband found an amazing deal for flight plus four nights in a really nice hotel in Coba, and we flew on Friday morning. And it was one of our best vacations ever. Muy bien.
In other travel news, I'm leaving in a week for China (there's a temptation here to insert lots of exclamation points and smiley faces to indicate the monumentality of this news in blog terms, but I am resisting). And on this blog, as nowhere else, I can discuss the all-important question about this trip: what knitting do I take for a 14-hour flight? (Plus sundry other three-hour flights once we get to Asia.) I'm thinking I'll be able to finish my
Surface: I just have the sleeves and the collar to go, and then the wrap. Even that monstrous wrap might be doable in 28 hours of flying, though the dreaded blister stich (which requires a string of p4tog every six rows) has put off better knitters than I, and I'm not sure my fingertips would survive several consecutive hours of it.
(A side note: I worry a bit about this sweater. It looks like it could either look really cool when it's done, or really weird and homemade and never, ever get worn.)
But I can't only take Surface - there has to be some variety. I'm wavering between
the Belinda wrap, which seems like nice thoughtless travel knitting, and the
Leyburn Socks. (I'm so used to
Ravelry that it's frustrating to try to find non-Rav images on the web for blog purposes. All you Rav readers know where to find better information.) My urge is to compromise and take both, but I'm not sure how much yarn I'll have room for in my luggage. And the sad reality is that this is a work trip and I'll probably spend most of my time on the computer, and get much less knitting done than I hope.