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Off again, this time to Romania

My aunt has been traveling to Romania regularly since I was in grade school since she did Peace Corp there. Both my siblings have been, but until now life hasn’t worked out for me to visit with her.

Last year when she stayed with us for Christmas, we discussed the idea of going to see her this year in Romania, and so right after I got back from the States last month, my husband and I booked our tickets. Thus this blog post comes to you from the Vienna airport as we wait for our 2nd flight.

I took off work on Wednesday for my birthday. With a birthday so close to Christmas, I’ve found over the years that the best thing I can do is just take the day for me since getting a party together in the middle of holiday festivities can be rough. This year TheEnabler also took off the day and we spent the afternoon at the Christmas Market downtown (his unexpected departure from working far too hard and too long left me scrambling the day before to finish making his gift before he got home since I’d planned to do it on my day off).

The other thing I did with my free day was prep my travel projects:

Clockwise from upper left: dark purple/grey socks with pull-skein; grey lavender lace weight hank and matching seed beads; spindle with pale multicolored top; deep teal top and cross-arm spindle with a pink X over it; top in mixed red and deep reds; cream hank; tweed hank in blue, grey, peach, green

The picture above was what I planned. As you can see, as of Wednesday morning several skeins were still unwound. So I pulled out the ball winder to ready them for knitting. I was also able to finish spinning the light purple/yellow and wind the singles into a ply ball. Since that added to my spinning options, I decided to exercise a little self control, and left behind the teal top. So, I have some plying and the red top for spinning.

I also have the socks I’ve been slowly working on, but with metal DPNs (and my fiasco with DPNs on my last sock-knitting flight fresh in my mind), I packed those in checked luggage. The purple laceweight is for a beaded shawl, so that’s a project to start at my Aunts.

What to have as plane knitting? The worsted weight in the lower left is going to be a shawl on nice safe hard to drop circulars. I cast on during the first flight this morning:

A dark brown wood top whorl spindle with light colored shaft and deep red wool being spun sits on top of the start of a cowl in blue and pink worsted yarn being knit in the round. Both projects are on a tweed coat with black, yellow and red patterned project bag in the background

As you can see, I’ve also started spinning the lovely red fluff. I know I only have two handspinning projects finished and hanging on my wall in nearly the same red, but this is to go with the ligher yarn I brought to ply in a brioche scarf, so it’s important to spin a matching yarn.

Next post should be in a couple days from Romania!