Travel Yarn

This post might be a bit fractured because the kitten  two-year-old cat, Sunshine, is being incredibly hyper and skittering across the floor after bits of paper. I've stopped buying her toys except for the occasional crinkly ball because her favorite things remain the rings off of milk bottles and scrunched up bits of receipts and yarn band balls that she can carry in her mouth (and catch).

Sunshine, looking much more adult-like and innocent than she truly is

Anyway, I wanted to talk a bit about travel yarn, vacation yarn, or souvenir yarn.

I wouldn't use those terms interchangeably. I'd save "travel yarn" for something you could take with you on the road easily and "vacation/souvenir yarn" for something you picked up at an LYS to which you normally wouldn't be able to travel.

For me, travel yarn has two important characteristics.
Firstly, it has to be ready for use. I don't have a swift or ball winder, so it's either got to be already balled up by hand or I had to have put it into a cake at the store. I have to have a project in mind for it and want to actually be working on that project (baby items in particular are likely to be half-finished but relegated to the bottom of the interest heap); I have to have the needles to go with it and the pattern printed out or available in some fashion, and, preferably, have the whole thing already cast-on. I usually take socks-in-progress with me because even if I finish the one I have an easy toe-up cast on memorized. Starting a shawl mid-airplane is no fun at all, and if I find myself just freakin' done with that pair of fingerless mitts, they won't be coming with me.
Firstly, it needs to be as unfrustrating as possible. If I'm using it while actively traveling, I'm already in frustrating situations (traffic jams, the passenger seat, a very long train ride, or on a damned airplane). Now my definition of "unfrustrating" also varies given the situation (and my mood). I definitely want the yarn to be as smooth and non-splitty as possible. Splitty yarn just doesn't give me any of the soothing properties that I need from knitting while traveling. But I also want a yarn that is satisfying, and that is highly dependent on my mood. Often all I need is some soothing stockinette in the round for travel (since anything else requires more attention than I have to spare) but occasionally some easily memorized 8 row lace does the trick. If I find my current project unsatisfying, or inaccessible for some reason, I'm likely to scrap the whole thing and just improvise.

This happened with a pair of mitts I knit for a friend. I followed the pattern instructions for the cast-on and got into pattern just before I left on a 7 hour bus trip, but forgot to bring the pattern with me. The resultant mitts are a horribly bastardized version of what I thought the pattern might call for (and the thumbs.... my first thumbs. I shudder to think of them). In cases like that I am overwhelmingly unlikely to undo what I've done, and I'm just lucky my friend didn't care that they'd the worst implementation of the concept of picot edging ever.

WTF even happened here? I can't really remember.

So, to summarize: for me I want accessible simple knits that give me joy while traveling but don't drive me to numbness. Often this is why I do socks. They're so easy to improvise, they're so easy to carry around, and they make such quick progress, they're satisfying and hard to resist.

(this did, however, lead to my first pair of socks having to have the cuffs redone three times because I'd "improvised" mid travel. *sigh*. On the other hand, they got to do this:

Sandhamn, on the Baltic Sea

So they can't really complain, and neither can I.)

edited to add: I can't resist analyzing my current WIPs. I've joined the Knit Girllls stash dash 2012, which is basically about using up stash and making FOs. My primary goals are, as always, to finish a lot of my WIPs. I just finished a baby sweater today (barring some blocking and a ribbon), so that is off the list. I need to put a thumb on two separate fingerless mitts, and knit another one to match one of them; a third set needs only an inch or so of knitting and a thumb as well to be complete. I've started the second sock of a pair of lacework socks that I'm greatly enjoying, and I suspect I'll finish that quite soon, since socks are so fun and portable. I also finally busted out that HUGE blanket I've been working on for over a year now. If I can put three or four more balls of yarn in it I will consider myself done and bind that sucker off. That might take me the rest of the summer, though. I got the beads for my Shipwreck shawl from Knitty Spring 2009--I've already knitted the middle portion, and I get the sense that the netting will be a simple and easy project once I figure out how to get all the beads on and once I finally find my appropriately-sized needles.

So what to work on next? there are things that I consider obligation knitting--some rewards for the Spatterdash KAL (easy; done in a weekend); some toys for my last Knit It Forward 2011 project and for a few friends; a hat for a friend's mum who has cancer; a baby or toddler jacket for my coworkers who have produced offspring. Then there are the fun knitting things I am planning: I want to re-write the pattern for Knitty's Hex shawl for dk/worsted weight instead of fingering/lace, since that's what I have. I want to participate in the mystery shawl KAL starting on the solstice. I have the yarn and patterns in mind for at least three pairs of socks, two pairs of fingerless mitts, and a frickin partridge in a pear tree at this rate. Then there are the sweaters that I've wanted to knit for a while but have never started. Sweaters take foresight, planning, swatching, calculating, and understanding--I prefer to plunge headlong into my knitting when the whim at last seizes me, which is tough to do and still get a fitted garment. Oh, and then there's the spinning--I have probably 20 oz of fiber I'd like to spin up into pretty yarn, but since I can only seem to produce a bulky weight I don't want to waste any of it.