We camped in the Black Hills for the first couple nights. These two boxes, one packed by each son for himself, demonstrate some of the differences between my boys. The upper box is #2's -- lots of clothes.
The lower box is #1's -- 75 pounds of books. His [few] clothes are packed in a small backpack somewhere.
You already saw what I packed for amusement; besides the yarn I've also got six or eight books. Smokey brought a portable DVD player and a 3-disc set of 20 John Wayne movies. #2 brought his bike and Quake and Home World to play on one of the computers.*
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Guess what?! We have knitting!
#2 modeled it for me.
The sweater is sized for a 10 - 12 year-old child. #2 is 18. The sweater is a tad small on him.
But it should keep some 10-year-old Mongolian child mighty toasty next winter.
Yarn: 1 strand Reynolds Lopi Light held together throughout with 1 strand worsted weight wool: teal Lopi with KnitPicks Wool of the Andes "Artic Pool Heather", creamy white Lopi with the same color of Bernat Lana merino, Oxford gray Lopi with camel-y brown Ella Rae (I couldn't locate a KP WotA the right shade of gray).
Needles: KP Options, US10.
Pattern: seamless yoke raglan from Ann Budd's Handy Book of Sweater Patterns, size 34". (My gauge is a bit tight; the sweater doesn't look that big to me. Must measure before I send it.) I didn't use that pattern's yoke decreasing, though. It has you do four decreasing rounds spaced evenly up the yoke. That wouldn't work very well with my planned yoke color work, so instead I used Elizabeth Zimmerman's system of decreasing, which I got from the handout at a class I took from Meg Swanson for EZ's percentage system updated. In that you do three decreasing rounds, at halfway, three-quarters of the way, and at the top of the yoke; that way I could put the decreasing rounds in the two-round strip of solid blue between the color work rounds. (In the photo it looks like those blue strips and decreasing rounds are lower in the yoke; it's because the crew neck makes the top of the yoke look taller.) I made up the fair isle pattern as I went. :-) Simple as it is, I am inordinately proud of it.
Here is a close look at the fair isle (please click to embiggen and truly appreciate the fuzzy wooliness).
Now, y'all have seen fair isle done by really good knitters, where the pattern lies smoothly even before it is blocked and the floats are perfectly even. My knitting is not like that. These are the kind of floats done by a rank beginner. Here is the first set:
And here is the back of the yoke. I can see improvement there, even if you can't see it in the photo.
As I said, I am inordinately proud of the this sweater. Color work no longer scares me. I can slip stitch and I can fair isle. As they say here in the west, yahoo!
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After the Black Hills we moved on to our main camping venue in the Big Horn mountains near Buffalo, Wyoming. Friday night we went to a rodeo in nearby Kaycee. There were cowboys
and cowgirls.
There was bronc riding, both with and without a saddle.
There was calf roping.
There were bull riding and other kinds of roping and trying out some new bucking horses without riders. It was especially interesting to watch the pick-up riders take the bronc rider off the bucking bronco once the whistle had blown.
We are definitely in The West.
* Although we are camping in a National Forest campground with outhouses, no electric hook-ups, and only a hand pump for water, we are not exactly roughing it. We have with us a small generator** with which to power and recharge our two computers, three iPods, DVD player, two cell phones, camera, hair dryer, and waffle iron :)
** If you have ever been camping next to someone with a generator, you are probably shaking your head right now. Let me reassure you that ours is a small and fairly quiet generator, plus we have 120' of extension cord so we set it up f-a-r from the nearest campsite.
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ETA: The first hot spot we found here in Buffalo was the McDonald's by the interstate, $2.95 for two hours. The price was very reasonable, but the place was a little lacking in ambience. Today we found that the (sadly website-less) Deerfield Boutique & Espresso Bar, est.1994, on Main Street has excellent cappucinos and scones and comfy couches and little tables and free high-speed internet. Woot! It is a totally charming splace, very spacious and full of plants and works by local artists and a bookcase of paperbacks and games and chess boards and a fenced-off play area full of toys for the littlies. This shows about a third of the space.
