Elder Son graduates from his residency program this weekend, so we are off to Sioux Falls. It’s a six-hour trip one way, more or less, so that means…

NEW PROJECT!

Ahem.

Yeah, I already have a portable project OTN, but it is a pair of socks I am not terribly excited about. I will finish them later, where “later” = “when I feel like it.” In the meantime, I had vague musings about what would be an appropriate, interesting-but-somewhat-mindless project to bring along.

Just because I have about 15 projects sorted and bagged and ready to go with both yarn and pattern, doesn’t mean I have to PICK one of them.

And just because I have 30 31 projects in my Ravelry queue doesn’t mean I have to pick one of them, either.

No, you I am not the boss of me. Ahem.

Remember this traveling project? Well, after knitting about 6″ of it I happened to glance at the pattern…and noticed that it called for a US#6 needles.

For some reason known only to the Knitting Goddess — who was clearly not on my side — I was using a US#4. After a bit of thought I decided that I would probably be happier if I used the needle called for in the pattern, and into the frog pond it went. (The project, not the pattern. Nor the needle.) (Why I didn’t blog about that frogging on an Unraveled Wednesday is another mystery for the Knitting Goddess. I am definitely no good at following the rules.)

I could have restarted that Madison scarf for this trip, but I was not terribly excited about it. Been there, done that, do it again another time. Why start a project that I am not tripping over myself salivating eager to knit?*

Here is what is going with me, a pattern that has been in my Rav favorites for a l-o-ng time.

I cast on for it yesterday afternoon because the beginning looked impossible complicated like something better attacked in solitude and calm. That was a good decision. After seven rows I can see the pattern developing and have a [somewhat tenuous] grasp of its logic.

The yarn is Sunshine Yarns Soft Sock in ‘Brick NSS’, a lovely, slightly mottled rusty red and which colorway Ravelry tells me that I am the only person on the planet (or at least among the 87 gazillion people on Rav)  to own, is fabulous — soft and smushy, perfect for a scarf. And since, for me, knitting is all about the yarn, that means this project should be a win. It was clear to me after perusing the 2,450 other Herbivores on Ravelry  that this pattern looked best in a solid color, or at least in a more-or-less solid color. Thus, the perfect mating of pattern and yarn.

Road trip and knitting — whee!

* I seem to have used up my quota of italics and parentheses and cross-outs in this post. Still have lots of exclamation points, though…