Preparing Yarn for Travelling

 

Over the past few years, most of our vacations have involved driving to our destination. This is very convenient as you can just throw whatever you want in the car. Though I am at the stage where I know what I will need and pack just that; from a knitting/crochet point of view it means that I can take all my tools and just in case projects. I have gone away from the cast-on-something-new-on-the-first-day as this has not always worked out for me and now I am just as likely to take a work in progress in addition to unused yarn.

But what to do if the journey involves different forms of transport, you are limiting your luggage but you want to use your stash?

Over the past couple of months I have been thinking about what I would like to knit when I am away and what yarn I would like to knit with. At first I thought it would be fun to make a garment but there are too many down sides to that. What if I run out of yarn, what if there is a problem with the pattern and I can’t or don’t want to continue. I would have to work an easy pattern knit in pieces so that it covered all knitting occasions but did not become too big to carry around. In the same way I dismissed a crochet blanket as an option because the yarn could be spread around the luggage but a crocheted blanket would get big quickly.

I am not against buying yarn while we are away but I’d rather not be in a position where I have to buy yarn. Plus it would be nice to come back to a diminished stash.

Looking at my stash, socks and hats it is. Wouldn’t it be nice to use up all the sock yarn I have purchased? For a flight last year I knit on a double layer hat and I have plans for that again this year and I will get it started before we leave so that I am confident with the needle size and number of stitches.

I had put to one side all the yarn I was considering and last week I spent a morning evaluating what I had chosen and winding up the yarn that had passed the extended vacation test. I immediately dismissed one option – the leftover Advent yarn - I would like to make a cowl with it but this will definitely be a project where I will worry about running out of yarn.

I wound up a few skeins of sock yarn and a couple of skeins of DK weight yarn. There were a couple of skeins that I had originally chosen that I did not wind, I have a picture in my mind of the type of pattern that they would be suited for and I do not want to take them and then be forced to use them in a less than ideal pattern. Never fear, a couple of other skeins replaced them.

Before we leave I will get some projects started - the aforementioned hat, some socks and a crochet project. That way I will always have something to work on.