What to Take...

At my Tuesday night craft group, Annie was knitting her first ever dishcloth with some cotton yarn. Dishcloths are fun to knit. They don't take long and they're quite useful. While driving to our winter holiday in south Texas, I would knit a dishcloth to use in our condo. These were two of my favourite patterns.

'The Cotton Dishcloth' and 

'Grandmother's Favorite The Original' -  both available on Ravelry.

Dishcloths are also a fun way to make a useful swatch while learning a new pattern, such as entrelac.

'Garterlac Dishcloth' by Criminy Jickets.

As I've been finding my Regia wool/nylon/yak sock project to be uninspiring, I needed to find something to work on while sitting in airports and on flights on my upcoming trip. Because of my vast stash of yarn, I don't plan to buy much more than a ball of sock yarn while on my knitting tour of Spain. I'll be keeping my eye out for the new Arne and Carlos line of sock yarns. 

Going back to the dishcloth idea, I have selected two projects to take with me. Of course, I had the cotton yarn in my stash.

First is (of all things)  Dishcloth by the Bernat Design Studio.

I'll be using some Bernat Cottontots Ombre yarn in the Very Berry colourway. I got it started. 

It's basically a crocheted linen stitch pattern - sc1, ch1 - with the sc in the chain space from the row below. I'll probably finish this before I get to Madrid.

I'm also taking a knitted dishcloth project because I liked the texture. It's 'Dishcloth 22' by nalhcib.

I found some plain pink cotton yarn all ready made into a yarn cake which I will use for this project.

It uses 4.5mm needles which I already had packed for my knitting class with Carol Feller on the tour.

There are no direct flights from Toronto to Madrid at this time of year so we have a stopover in Frankfurt. We'll arrive there at about 1am our time. Then we'll continue to Madrid 3.5h later. We built in a long stopover in case of bad weather. So basically it'll be the middle of the night from Frankfurt and on. It'll be 7am our time when we land in Madrid. 

I doubt I'll be able to sleep on the first leg but hopefully the second leg of our trip I'll be able to get some shuteye. I'm taking my noise-cancelling headphones (although I'll probably be loaned a set on the plane). They're WAY better than the earbuds for getting rid of ambient sounds.

I still have all day tomorrow to go over my many checklists and pack. I also need to write up the instructions for my house-sitter.

Another thing I did today was post some pics of Ernest (or 'Ernesto' as he wants to be called on the trip) on Instagram. I think he needs his own Instagram page, though. I'm having trouble selecting a username that hasn't already been taken.

He is looking forward to sashaying around Madrid in his spiffy torero outfit.

¡Ole!