SpinnySpinny

I forgot to grab my book so I had nothing to do on the flight except knit. How terrible. Ok, I did a lot of sleeping as well. Eventually we end up on campus in Grignano, outside Trieste.

All these computer people I’m staying with, they know nothing of textiles. But finally I met the biologist (and quilter) who gave me a selection of fabric and knitting shops to try. I don’t know how much shopping I will do but it is nice to see what is around. Getting it all home could well be another issue.

I could go to lectures, but the lab is small and I don’t want to get in the way of the students. Besides, I know most of what they are learning anyway. So while DH teaches people from countries some Americans have never heard of how to build wireless communications networks, I get to entertain myself. A lot of that involves poking around shops and trying to not a) get lost or b) totally butcher the Italian language. I’ve done a bit of knitting and at some point I need to hem the coat that I’ve been wearing with an ugly line of machine basting at the bottom.

If you’d like to see more of the general adventures, you can find that on my other blog. If I score some cool textiles, I’ll tell you about it here. I also will try to get some pictures of the recent garments that were finished for the trip.

This scarf started sometime in 2006 when, sick of spinning nothing but samples for the COE, I started several bobbins of singles from some black merino lamb fleece I had. I still have most of those singles, but I was talked into sending some to the county fair. My previous attempt to do something with it didn’t turn out so well. I’ve been wanting something just big enough to tuck into my coat, so I started a small scarf and have been working on it mainly in meetings. As a result there are plenty of errors, which I’m ignoring.

The yarn is natural color, from a lamb fleece I got a good discount on because it was full of VM. Since I comb a lot of fleece, this didn’t bother me much. This is almost as dark as you get with natural color wool, I could have cut off the tips and it would be a little more but I didn’t want to lose the fiber length.

The pattern is my usual simplified feather and fan with a 12 stitch repeat. One thing I like about this pattern is it’s easy to remember and the small row repeat means I can knit until I run out of yarn. It’s a little over a meter in length and about 16 cm wide, small by scarf standards but just what I was after.

I was at a conference this weekend and, knowing there would be some amount of sitting around listening, I took knitting. One of the other participants, who for reasons I will get to momentarily obviously does no sort of needlework, commented on my project. It’s a dumbed-down feather and fan scarf that takes no thought to do. I am pattern-impaired when it comes to knitting and incapable of memorizing anything but the most simple of designs. If I have to count to more than four in any particular sequence, I will lose it. I use tons of stitch markers too. So while it is indeed a lace pattern, it is a most totally stupid-simple one.

Later at dinner I ended up sitting next to him and he noted that he was surprised that I was paying attention to the sessions while I was knitting. He assumed it took all my concentration. But somehow at various points I managed to say something completely intelligent and relevant.

I haven’t been taking this project to the office, although now that I’ve gotten past the re-used part of the yarn I should. It was taking quite some effort to fix the amount of twist in the yarn due to my weird knitting habits. But there are several people at work who knit in meetings, enough that people have figured out that it is possible to knit and pay attention at the same time. That is nice. I have a bunch of meetings this week, too.

I didn’t do much spinning, but I did bring my wheel to Maker Faire. I ended up working the booth for one of The Boyfriend’s robot projects because they were short-handed. I got to see some people and play with robots a lot. I was Queen of the Flagging Tape and She Who Drives. When I did get a chance to spin, several people stopped by to chat and I taught a few folks how to use a spindle.

There were more fiber people with quite a lot of knitters showing up for a talk by Stephanie Pearl-McPhee, a knitting blogger. Like any good Maker, even one pressed into service at last minute, I was in the booth at the time. Such is life.

The Bizarre Bazaar was larger and had lots of interesting things and even some fiber here and there. I managed to lose my glasses in the craft hall and endured some minutes of panic until I discovered someone had turned them in to the volunteer table. I met dozens of people whose names I may remember if I can figure out where I put their business cards and/or flyers. As a non-tv person I had an interesting conversation with someone from CurrentTV (I work in the same building.)

I am still tired. And, of course, have zero pictures.

With my jury duty date looming, I decided to start a knitting project with the county fair yarn. The rest of it is still on the bobbins but I have tons of the fiber so I can use this and still do something substantial. I’ve been wanting some scarf-like thing but not an actual scarf that will flop around and come undone. So I started knitting a 3-1 rib tube, about the diameter of a hat. There is 78 g and about 250 m so we’ll see how far I get. I have no clue about these sorts of things.