No-Daisy Daisy

I wound a bunch of skeins into center-pull balls before going on vacation, thinking I'd be knitting up a storm. After all, I had an 8-hour flight to Madrid, two one-hour flights within Europe, and a 9-hour flight back from Nice. I could easily finish a baby's cardigan and at least one sock, right? Wrong. I cast on for and knitted a bit of the No-Daisy Daisy early on but was then distracted by sight-seeing, sleep, and fiction (a treat!) until the last night when I decided to cast on for a sock. (I also worked on the NDD on the way home.) Oh well.

This week--back at work and still jet-lagged--the plain old stockinette of the baby cardigan was a treat at lunch. I worked on it a bit each day and, combined with the plane knitting, have gotten quite a bit done. The blue is a lovely shade and I really hope that I've calculated correctly so it fits my nephew properly. My gauge is somewhere between 5.5 and 6 sts per inch (instead of 5 sts/in) and I'm trying to make the sweater just a little smaller than the pattern calls for because Nicholas is a small baby.

The back and fronts of the cardigan are knit in one piece up until the armholes. I'm there now and trying to decide whether or not to start working the pieces separately. Chriss's Ravelry page tells how she made it seamless but I don't know if I'm up for trying it. I don't want anything to go wrong because I'd like to give the sweater to Nicholas mid-September. Grad school starts up again Monday so I don't have as much time as it sounds like.

Ahhh....Europe

I'm back from my trip to Madrid, Barcelona, and Nice. Spain & France were amazing and Dennis and I are seriously entertaining thoughts of going back to Spain next summer for an extended stay. *sigh* Back to the real world tomorrow but I was glad to have a three-day weekend to recuperate. We picked Hazel up from our friend's house Thursday afternoon & my parents brought Penny here yesterday. We missed both the dogs while we were away, and it didn't help that Europeans bring their (very well-behaved) dogs everywhere, including restaurants, fancy buildings, and beaches.

Anyway, on to the knitting content. Though I prepped for and packed three projects, I barely did any knitting. I CO for the No-Daisy Daisy en route to Madrid (our first stop) and CO for Sunday Swing Socks on the last night in Nice (our third stop). I didn't get much knitting done at all but did increase my stash.

We were window-shopping in Nice on our last day and I spotted a yarn store. I was excited to see that it was open and managed to ask the nice French-speaking lady where the sock yarn was. On the flight home the next day I realized I didn't have to point at my foot--I knew the French word for socks because of my trip to Montreal in April & the chaussettes that followed from that souvenir yarn. Oh well. I bought two balls of Anny Blatt yarn (Baby Blatt in a neutral color called "Mastic").