Blue sky socks

I never knit at meetings. I know that a lot of people do, and many even say they knit at work, but it's simply not something that you do at a meeting of scientists. Or at least I don't, and I don't know of anyone else that does in my department (and I know several knitters that would if they felt they could). It's just not something that would be favorably received, and I definitely think that it would be perceived as rude and out of place, which makes long meetings much less fun than they would otherwise be.

I've been participating in a three day faculty retreat this week with people from the undergraduate program where I'll be doing my teaching fellowship in the fall. I was looking forward to it as a way to learn more about the program and what to expect of my students, but I was not expecting it to be knitting time.

About 15 mins into the first session, I noticed that someone in the room was doing needlepoint. This was surprising, and I wondered if maybe it would be ok to knit while listening. I left the knitting in my bag. Five minutes later, there was someone crocheting. And another knitter. And someone was hemming a sewing project. By lunchtime, we had 3 knitters, 2 people doing needle work, and one person crocheting, out of about 30 people attending. Twenty percent of the people in the room just happened to have crafts waiting in their bags. I think I'm going to like this group.

Of course, three days of intermittent knitting (the meeting wasn't all talking, thankfully!) has gotten me pretty far in my latest travel knitting:



This is the yarn from the Louet home-dyeing kit that Branden bought me. I've finally gotten around to knitting with it, since I'm still between big projects and haven't felt much like planning and starting a new one. In three days, one sock is done and the other is to the heel turn. This has to be a record for my travel knitting projects, which usually take forever to complete. I'm calling them the blue sky socks. I took a couple of beautiful pictures to show you why they are the blue sky socks yesterday, but that was before I realized that the memory card wasn't in the camera. And then it was too late in the evening to take a new set of pictures. Here's one that's slightly closer-up than the first:



And this one shows the stitch pattern a bit better:



I'm a little disappointed that the stitch pattern isn't showing up more; the color repeats seem to be a little too short for showing texture well. Still, I like the mottled effect, and there definitely isn't any pooling!

It's back to lab tomorrow, so these will probably not finish as fast as they started, but it was definitely an added bonus to have the retreat count as knitting time as well as learning time!