Our Trip To Arkansas

The judge, our two littlest ones, and I have spent the better part of the last week on a roadtrip to Arkansas for the wedding of a very dear friend.  Nine hours, two small children, and an exceedingly poor traveler of a husband in a minivan, with gas at $4 a gallon, did not sound like my idea of nirvana.  So, I carefully stocked the car with candy, drinks, small toys, and an enormous quantity of junk food and baby wipes.  My Mother in law threw in a Harry Potter book on tape for good measure.

Amazingly, it was a fantastic trip.  The wedding was beautiful and it would have been worth a nasty trip to be there, but the drive turned out to be lots of fun and we had a great time all around.

This is the bride and groom (with Ellie).  She's so beautiful that I have to include this picture (she is also a knitter).

Here, Ellie and Ollie after six hours in the car.  I anticipated horrors, but instead, they emerged quite happy.

Here they are with Katie, one of the other flower girls, and Catherine, the bride, at the rehearsal.

The wedding itself was at an incredibly beautiful chapel in the middle of the woods (the Judge was in charge of the camera, so we have no pictures of the wedding itself, naturally).  It was the kind of wedding that really reminds you of what matters in life.

Despite the Judge's decision that we would do the drive home in one day, it was fine.  We had a great time stoping in Memphis for a brief walk along the Mississippi River.  The kids enjoyed this a lot more than the stop at the Clinton Library on the way out.

And knitting — do you realize how much knitting you can accomplish during 18 hours of driving?  Sadly, I had focused so much on getting the kids's stuff together for the drive, that about 10 minutes away from home, I realized I had left the needles for Ellie's skirt, which I had intended to knit, at home.  I did have the cuffs for my Rock and Weave socks, and a feather and fan scarf from Sea Silk I have been working on, in my bag.  So I knit on them on and off while mostly enjoying the drive.  The linen stitch on the Rock and Weave cuffs has been a natural disaster for me — I rip as much as I knit, so it has been slow going.  However after the trip out, the cuffs are about 2" shy of being done. 

I got online after our first day of driving, found a knitting store in Fayetteville and emailed them with a desperate request for size 6 addi turbos.  About midway through driving the next day, I had the nicest phone call from them!  They assured me they had the needles set aside for me.  We made a quick run by the store on the way into town, and I got the needles, along with two skeins of Koigu and a really lovely alpaca/silk yarn I had never seen before.

The ladies at Hand Held were incredibly nice and helpful.  And I was blown away by the great yarn they have in their store.  I would put this store on my list of yarn shops it's worth driving significantly out of your way to see.  I was really sorry I couldn't just sit there and knit for awhile!

And, on the way home, I started Ellie's skirt.  The waist band is made to contain the elastic — I left a hole on the back to insert the elastic threw and then two eyelets on the front that I'm going to thread a silk ribbon tie through.  This part of the skirt is a bamboo/merino blend.  I am also hoping my plan to tie a few silk ribbon bows along the yoke of the skirt (you can see a few places were I made eyelets) will work.  Now I'm just on to the fun part — I've got several balls of Be Sweet's Magic Ball yarn that I'm going to use for most of the skirt, balancing it out with some silk I've dyed and a few more balls of coordinating Be Sweet yarn.