Packing and Planning

By this time tomorrow, I will be in Maryland, probably with a stomach full of crab cake. Before then, though, I have a lot of packing to do. I've made my list of what to take but there's always that fear that I'll forget something important -- and by "important," I don't mean clean underwear or medication, I mean yarn!

My main project for the trip is the Gramps Cardigan I am knitting for Rainbow as part of the Mad May knitalong in the Ravelry Madelinetosh Lovers group. I'm knitting this in tosh dk in the colorway Robin's Egg. I cast on for it on Tuesday night and worked on it most of the time last night at knit night, and I've made a decent start:

In real life, it's light blue, not mint green.

This will be my car knitting for the drive down and back as well as (most likely) my evening knitting at the hotel.

Because this project requires charts and counting, I didn't think it would be practical to carry around -- and you know that I must have a small project to take to the festival when I need to take a break from the shopping! -- so I printed out the pattern for the Shur'tugal socks (a pattern that's been in my queue for quite some time) and will have to dig in my stash for some appropriate sock yarn.

Finally, because two knitting projects is clearly not enough to keep me busy, I figured I should take a small spinning project as well, because I have no doubt that buying fleece and other spinning stuff is going to make me want to spin. I thought briefly about bringing my miniSpinner along, but I figured it would be just another thing to have to shlep, so instead I am bringing the Jenkins Turkish spindle I bought at last year's festival with 16 grams of what may be bison fiber that I got from Steven when he moved away (that's his best guess, anyway).

Whatever it is, it's very soft and short stapled, so I think this small spindle is a good fit. I'm going to try to finish it this month for the Ravelry Spindlers group monthly spinalong. With such a small amount of fiber, even if I spin it very fine, I don't think it will take me that long to spin.

If you happen to be at the festival this weekend, please say hi if you see me (I will be wearing my Ravelry pin)! If not, stay tuned for a recap and (I hope) lots of pictures on the flip side!