Preparing for Reno!

Tomorrow evening, Bandit and I set out on the seven-hour drive to Reno. We're preparing tonight by getting snacks and drinks for the road, downloading audiobooks for the drive, filling the car up with gas, and, of course, making sure that I'm going to be well supplied with knitting.

When I got my anniversary yarn, I knew that this teal fingering weight yarn would be the perfect color to make something for Luna's birthday. After consulting with her for a while, she settled on the Storm Warning shawl/scarf. I started it with some multicolored metallic beads, but quickly realized that between the color of the yarn and the beads, the project was quickly growing to look like a Christmas tree. I frogged it and started it again with hematite beads, and it's been coming along... slowly.

There's nothing wrong with the yarn, or the beads, or the pattern, or even how all of them fit together. It's just that the project seems to be coming along at a snail's pace. Maybe the slight splittiness of the yarn, which would usually not be a problem, is causing havoc whenever I try to place beads with a too-small crochet hook, and it's making me reluctant to want to knit on it. Maybe it's just that, since the project in progress always has the same dimensions, it always looks the same no matter how much I knit, and it's tricking me into thinking that I'm making no progress. I find myself weighing the remaining yarn after each pattern repeat, eagerly monitoring how close I'm getting to the halfway point. (The pattern is knitted sideways, increasing from a small cast-on to the halfway point of the triangle, then decreased symmetrically to use up yarn as efficiently as possible.) Hopefully fourteen hours in a car will force me to make some progress on it, at least.

Or maybe I'll just ignore it entirely in favor of casting on a new shawl. I plan to knit Out of Darkness out of the yak laceweight that I got at the Estes Park Wool Market this year. The yarn is wound, the pattern bought, and the beads are still waiting in their box from when I used them for Vostok. I just have to decide on what size needles to use - I'm going to downsize the shawl a little bit, just in case, because I'm skirting dangerously close to the required yardage listed on the pattern.

And just in case these two aren't enough to occupy me... I might bring Bandit's sweater with me too.