Helen FieldsScience Writer

I’ve heard from a couple of scientists on this Bering Sea trip that on last year’s cruise, there was a knitting group. Knitting! I love knitting! This leads to an important decision: What projects to take with me?

I knit really fast – one scarf is not going to entertain me for six weeks. I’m kind of on a wristwarmer kick right now, but I can make a pair of wristwarmers in two days. I could go through a lot of alpaca yarn in six weeks, and that stuff is not cheap. Anyway, I don’t know that anyone besides me actually wears wristwarmers.

Maybe this is the time to learn how to make socks. But I think knitting socks is kind of impractical, because then you end up with a sock that has to be treated with tender love, and I don’t know about you, but I’m kind of hard on socks. Also, I assume once I learn how to make them, they’ll go too fast, too.

Another option is lace. Lace knitting takes a lot of counting (knit two three four yarnover knit yarnover knit two three slipslipknit knittwotogether repeat), so it’s slow, but on the other hand, it requires concentration, which isn’t the best for sitting around watching shipboard movies.

And there’s my sweater. It’s a big project. But it requires a lot of things I don’t know how to do, which means frequent references to YouTube, and the ship isn’t going to have that kind of bandwidth. With all of these, I’m kind of worried that whatever I’m working on will get wet and/or greasy, but particularly with my precious sweater.

I could also just take all the yarn from an unraveled sweater and mess around with it. Or knit, unravel, and reknit the same yarn over and over and over.

Any ideas? (It’s also possible that my work will keep me too busy for knitting. That would be tragic.)