Thursday, April 4, 2013

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.

2 comments:

Stitchmistress said...

Ha! This post made me chuckle. If only the rest of the world would discover the joys of knitting and how it slows you down and calms you. If only. (However, I'm sure the entertainment was SUPER funny).

Jan said...

That's the best part about traveling or getting stuck, anywhere. Have your knitting and it will always be time well spent! I enjoy all your posts, Jaya :)