Roadtrip Knitting...

Subtitle: I’m gonna be a photoblogger! For the first time ever on domestic piracy, it's nothing but knitting....with lots and lots of photos!

Continuing in my recent pattern of putting skulls on everything, I recently knit a pair of socks using the skull from the “we call the pirates hat” and some other fair isley type funkiness of my own devising. Here is the first sock sitting on my desk, posed with my Princess Leia pirate doll. Subplot for those of you interested in Princess Leia, , she came out of a 25 cent bin at a thrift shop when I was about 4. She was the scourge of the doll house…co-ruler with Mr. T who was about 2/3’s her height. Anyway, last year for my birthday my Mother dressed her up pirate fashion and sent her back to live with me…she sits on my desk to keep me sane. As you can see the first sock was well on its way in this photo. Because these are flip flop socks, and because I’m making them up as I go along, I decided to knit the second sock before fiddling with the toes so that I would have some hope of remembering what I did when I got to the toe on the second one….not a note taker you see.

And here’s the second sock after about an hour of on the road knitting. That’s southeast Michigan in the background, Monroe Country I think.




And here it is after the heel has been turned, somewhere in the wild backlands of Ohio…a fierce and fulsome place Ohio.





And still in Ohio. Ohio is sort of big and really flat….we drove most of the eastern half on the Tollway, so there’s really nothing but roads, big rigs and flat for as far as the eye can see. I grew up in North Dakota though, so it seemed very lush and interesting. I mean look...aren't those trees?



I think by this point we were finally in Pennsylvania. This ended up being an 11 hour drive, which was considerably better than the 15 hours that we were expecting. This would be the magic “and here's the turkey that we put in the oven 3 hours ago” picture. This is also when Dorothy said. "No, you're not putting pictures of your feet on your blog. There's going to be an intervention. So yeah, these are my feet. Please to note my unshaven legs and my untrimmed toenails. But y'all are knitters, I know you can face foot nudity.


We were alternating between sort of mellow world beat/folky type music and industrial/metal/hardcore punk music. This is one of the things that I like about roadtripping with Dready. I say “what music do you want” and she says “Do we have anymore Slayer?”



Gosh! A Toe! Unfortunately after this point it started going much more poorly. The big toe was fine, only had to frog it once (which is "fine" by my definition). The other half of the toe didn't go so neatly. I'm trying a non-kitchner method and it ended up being much too short and toe squishing. By the time I frogged it the second time it was too dark to knit.

But that's why there's a 11 hour drive back as well! So that you can get those little inconsistances worked out. You probably can't tell from this picture, but the road is going in the other direction! We are on our way home.

Here's my attempt to photograph just how strange a split toe looks when juxtapozed with a map of western Pennsylvania. I don't know why I decided to make the toe red. If I hadn't promised Manimal that I would stop quoting him in the blog I would tell you that when he saw them he said "Uhm, honey, what were you thinking?" My only excuse is that I really love the yarn. Both of these are Kona Superwash dyed by the wonderful owner of my LYS, Woven Art. She does mail order if you'll excuse the shameless plug.

And for those of you who like happy endings...

As you can probably tell from the landscape we're back in Ohio. They would have been done sooner but Dready made me drive. This is another reason why Dready is a great road trip partner. She likes to drive. It makes for a nice division of labor. I knit, she drives.

Tune in tomorrow for blurry photos of the skull shrug...if Blogger continues it's recent streak of photo-cooperation.

Ragnar...see, I can pull it together every once in awhile.