Knitting in transit

I flew to Boston last week to attend a conference, then took the train up Maine to spend the weekend with my sister. Usually trips like these provide an occasion to do lots of reading, and while I did read one book, I spent much of my travel time working on this pair of socks.

Made from Steinbach Wolle "Stapaz Cotton Effekt." My mom prefers cotton socks, and I like this yarn more than some others I've used, but I'm not thrilled with this colorway. I also think the heels would look better using the after-thought heel method.

The book was Counting Heads by David Marusek. It's the first book reviewed in the new science fiction column "Across the Universe" in the New York Times Book Review. The review wasn't glowing, but I was intrigued enough to give this a try. Densely imaginative, with nanotech, artificial intelligence, cloning, medical immortality, and a planet colonization subplot, it reminded me a bit of Neil Stephenson's Diamond Age. I liked the short story that began the novel, but I thought that later the book gets cluttered, and our emotional attention shifts too much to really care about anyone in the end (kind of like "Diamond Age," now that I think about it).

While in Maine, I stopped into Halcyon Yarn to pick up a skein for replacing the neck of my enormous green sweater. I finished this sweater in October 2004, and was fretting because it was entirely too big. This was before I started keeping the blog, so I created a "Can this sweater be saved?" webpage and asked for advice from the GLBT-Knit crowd. In exchange for a pair of fingerless gloves, a seamstress did the tailoring work to help make the sweater wearable.

As a sweater, it's still a failure, but it makes a nice, big hiking sweater. The neckline was bad though -- too low and too tight. So I decided to unpick the collar and make a turtleneck in dark gray yarn. The picture documents the wad of unraveled collar yarn, and the new charcoal yarn that will become the turtleneck.