Travel knitting

I probably spend more time deciding what knitting to take on a trip than picking out my clothes. On our most recent trip, I took along some double knitting and made a scarf. It was a great choice for a travel project.

Travel knitting should be compact, but involve enough knitting to last for the whole trip. For this scarf I used exactly two 50 gram balls of Indiecita Baby Alpaca yarn. I chose a US 3 (3.25mm) circular needle—circular so it couldn't fall out and under the airline seat and in bamboo to decrease the chance of anyone thinking it was a terrorist weapon. I finished about half the scarf while I was away for 2 weeks.

Travel knitting should be challenging enough to be interesting yet easy enough to do just about anywhere even in less than perfect light. My challenge came from never having successfully done double knitting before. There is nothing like sitting in a plane for hours to focus one's mind on the only knitting available.  Squares and rectangles are much easier to double knit than elaborate designs that require you to read a pattern; I added fun by making up the pattern as I went along.  I prefer projects that let me make lots of decisions along the way.

 I love that the scarf is reversible and it drapes well. It's about 5" X 56" (13cm X 142cm). I'm now working on a scarf with dots which is slightly more challenging. (By the way, I also discovered that for beginners at double knitting, it's good to have quite a bit of contrast between the two colors to help one keep track of the pattern.)