Canada re-opened and we headed east to check on our church. What with the anxiety about whether or not the border would open, how best to plot our trip, and the process to enter in a bit of a flux, we didn’t really pack with our normal thoughtfulness. I almost always bring enough projects to last a year and do maybe one of them. Ha! This time, it proved to be a good plan.

First, because we had to cross within 72 hours of our negative test, we knew we would have to drive most of the way in Canada adding miles to our journey. More knitting time, right? I cast on for a short-sleeved sweater (still summer after all) with some yarn I had been saving for just such an opportunity (Grey Drizzle Fibers). Their yarn has so much depth of color. Once we crossed the border, I was able to knit my away across the great Northern Plains of Canada.  It is beautiful and very, very flat. Truly big sky country. I had three colors for the sweater’s contrasting stripes and I wanted to transition between them slowly so Stripe One was solid gold, Stripe Two transition from gold to orange, and Stripe Three… oops! The third ball was not to be found! After much searching and frustration, I had to admit defeat and think of a new project. We had a lot of driving ahead of us, after all.

Digging through my packing, I found some special yarn from Mothy and the Squid. I love this dyer, their colors have a great intensity while still blending smoothly from color to color. Unfortunately I only had a 16″ size 4 needle – way too short for sweater knitting past the shoulders but not impossible if one is determined. I cast on. Of course I did. And it went pretty well across the rest of the continent. But really it was hard to see what I was doing with everything scrunched up on the 16″ needle – we are, after all, 30-plus inches around at torso so twice as big as the needles I was using.

After a while, I admitted defeat. Despite last ditch attempts to find needles (Michaels had nothing under a size 7) I went to work on my third project. Blanket design: from PurlSoho. My yarn: Mothy and the Squid has a yarn club – once a month a skein of yarn based on (last year) sea creatures or rain forest creatures (this year) in the colors of the rainbow. Because the colors change for each square, it wasn’t a great traveling project but in a pinch, anything would do, right?

The blanket has 192 squares and each square has 882 stitches requiring 2 balls of yarn, so it is the knitting version of slow-cooking. Assuming I do not run out of yarn, this should be a beautiful and colorful knit and perfect for a fall or winter evening (or more like several months of fall and winter evenings) of knitting.

When we arrived at the church, the good news is that it was still standing here waiting for us. Two years unattended was nothing in the life of this building – it had been through much worse.  And the eastern shore was as beautiful as we remembered. Sure, there was work to be done, but no varmits had invaded and everything was dry and (mostly) unscathed. Really it was a homecoming of sorts. Cozy under the arches of our grand little building, we dreamt of what would come next. (Next time: the saga continues…)