Advantages of being stuck in an airport

Yesterday my flight was 3 hours late so I spent quite a bit of time at Beijing airport. Now, I am sure you are all thinking about what a waste of time this must have been. But no. It wasn't.

I fixed my counting issues. I adjusted the sts to the correct number, started the lace pattern on the shawl and am now far enough along that keeping track of it is easy.

I have markers separating each repeat and the pattern is beginning to develop so it is easy to work.

I also found ways to manage my yarn. This yarn is both sticky and slippery.

Loops of yarn come off the ball together and if I am not careful, I end up with a big tangle that takes a long time to fix. The first thing I did was to wear the loops as a bracelet.

This works pretty well as long as you are gentle while rotating it to get the yarn off to knit with. It is a good management technique for the next process I developed, which was to wind the loops back on the ball more tightly and then remove the yarn in a very controlled fashion, a few feet at a time. Unwind, knit, unwind some more worked best. So that is what I ended up doing.

So overall, I have something to show for the extra 3 hours I spent at the airport. Other passengers, not so much. A whole bunch of them raised their blood pressure by yelling at the gate agents for about an hour. I felt very sorry for the gate agents but was quite amused by the whole thing. Entertainment is always good.