Casting-on!

Lately, I've been trying to get things squared away for vacation.  I was very happy to find out that my kids don't need passports since we're driving across the border.  Apparently Americans can bring their under-16-year-old children into Canada with them using just an official copy of their birth certificate.

Other preparations have not gone so smoothly.  To avoid foreign transaction fees on every vacation purchase we make, we decided to just convert some cash and use that while we're gone.  Trouble is, our "bank" is actually a credit union, and they don't convert currency.  So we had to pay extra to have it done by a bank through a system that takes a week to process your order.  I'm glad we didn't wait for the last minute on that one!

It occurred to my husband that our phone plans might not work out of our own country, and when he called the phone company to ask, his concern was confirmed.  We can add 1000 Canadian minutes for just $25, which seems reasonable, but if we want data (you know, to use the driving directions or to look up locations and hours of the places we want to go), they charge $25 for every 100MB (which is not a lot of data).  Luckily, we still have our Garmin GPS from our pre-smart-phone days, so we'll be carrying that around with us to use for directions, and we'll just be as stingy as possible with our other data use.  First world problems, right?

One thing that I'm very happy to report is going well is the vacation knitting projects I've cast on!  These projects will also help me fulfill my goal of "knit a couple things by other designers" that I laid out at the beginning of the summer.  I chose this first project because it has an elegant construction that I can see myself using in a future design project.  It also has a chart that is laid out in a fairly unique way (not that I'm an expert on shawl charts, but I thought the writer did a good job of making something that could have looked complicated, look pretty simple.)

The project is the Crooked Cathedral Shawl written by Marisa Hernandez.  One look at her designer page will tell you that she is all about the shawls.

I am working this shawl in a skein of Cherry Tree Hill Supersock Select yarn from my stash.  The colorway is called "Cornflower", and it reminds me of the sky on a perfect summer's day - bright sky blue mixed with white bits to represent puffy summer clouds.










I cast on while watching my daughter's softball practice the other day.  I like to get a little bit into a project before I take it with me somewhere.  That way I've already done the work of reading the pattern and decoding anything that I don't understand.  The lace chart took me a few minutes to really understand how to read it, but the info is all there.  I was just being impatient and wanting to start before I read it all!  (Bad knitter!)  Anyway, what you see here represents about 2 hours of work.

My husband is taking is as some sort of personal test of strength and manliness to do all the driving himself.  We have two long driving days (8-10 hours), one on the way there, one on the way back, but our second day of driving will be a "wake up, drive 2-4 hours, and we're there!" sort of situation.  So I guess I'd better make sure we're stocked up on caffeine and my needle tips are pointy in case I need to keep him awake.