A trip, a finished object, and a nasty surprise

Last weekend Ken and I made a return trip to London for the wedding of some great friends of ours (one of whom I am inducting into the secret cabal of knitters). The drive was lovely; lots of trees in various states of fall grandeur. It was also really nice to hang out with my school friends again, though, I didn't manage to make it to a knitting get together. Next time.

My camera made the trip with me but I failed to take any pictures. Sorry. Driving is just not conducive to taking nice pictures of the countryside and I was driving the whole way. In fact we were both driving the whole way since we needed two cars to carry all of the stuff we left behind when we moved in August. All of my yarn and fleece is now in Montreal and I really need to work out how I want it all put away. While I'm at it I now have all of my books to house too.

Anyway there was very little knitting over the weekend, but I made up for it by knitting up a quick neck warmer yesterday.

I used some black merino that I spun up last fall (I think). It was about a DK weight 3 ply (navajo plied) but I wanted something chunkier so I added more twist and plied the resulting yarn to itself. I don't think I'd try to make yarn this way again but it worked well enough for my purposes. You can't really tell from the photo (thanks to the lack of light and presence of black yarn) but the scarf is knit in a zig-zag 2x2 ribbing.

I intended to use loops to button it up but Ken asked for button holes. Since I hadn't knit the button holes in and I didn't want to rip back I just stuck my finger in the scarf and pulled at it until I'd made a hole. Then I wrapped some yarn around the hole to keep it open. This is by no means a sophisticated pattern but it sure way quick. Since all of my other knitting seems to be sweaters at the moment, quick is a welcome change of pace.

Between making the neck warmer and managing some progress on a sweater I'd count yesterday a success. It doesn't, however, make up for discovering that someone knocked off our car's side mirror sometime last night/early this morning.

Needless to say there was no note claiming responsibility. Grrr. We now get to find somewhere that will fix this for us (hopefully without charging an arm and a leg). Maybe we can find a mechanic with a strong desire to exchange hand knits for car repair...