Road knits

We are now in Quito. I’m not going to go into details about how we got here (on the back of a flatbed). I’m not going to detail the outpouring of help that Juan tapped into via the local VW community (one of whose ambassadors is now hosting us at his wonderful flat and where I am busily making pozole blanco). And I’m not going to go on about how beautiful the Old Town is or how I think Quito is one of the cleanest cities we’ve been to thus far.

All that is great and interesting and all, but I am more excited about finding the yarn for my next project. My friend Kate and I learned to knit one snowy season at the University of Chicago, and ever since then I have gone through bouts of knitting with addictive tendencies. I knitted and crocheted my way through college, selling handmade hats with my friend Megan, and making enough money to visit my friend Jennifer in Amsterdam. (Hi ladies!)

Knitting usually costs a lot more money than it makes, and nowadays I choose my projects carefully. My last big project was a green-themed Afghan for my younger brother’s wedding gift. (My older brother got a red-themed one.) These throws are great for people who love to buy yarn. You buy just one or two skeins of your favorite, rather than a dozen to make a sweater, and then when you’ve stockpiled enough, you can make a big, gorgeous blanket with all the goodies you’ve collected. I knitted this blanket in 100-degree heat as we drove from Chicago back to San Francisco on our test-run roadtrip the summer before we left.

I really wanted to do more yarn collecting on this roadtrip, with the idea that I could collect yarns from every country, and then knit them into a big blanket at the end (or even along the way). But this idea died in Mexico and Central America, as I realized that good yarn is hard to find in Central America, and that this amount of yarn would take up far too much space in the van. So, when the knitting urge struck, I decided to make something small: socks.

The only decent yarn store that I visited in Mexico was Kathy’s in San Miguel de Allende (Aldama 27 at Terraplin). Unfortunately, the whole purpose of the yarn-buying is to buy local, and the store was mostly aimed at expats looking to knit from nice imported yarns. The only local thing I could purchase were some jewel-toned acrylics that I thought would be good for making socks. Then the real problem arose: needles.

There are multiple Parisianas (a chain of fabric stores) in every city in Mexico, and I visited most of them, seeking “agujas para tejer.” Finding small needles is difficult, and finding small, double-pointed sets was nearly impossible. When I finally found a set of small needles, I had been toting around my sock yarn hopefully for two months. I bought two pairs–they were extremely cheap (one dollar per set). The problem was that they were so thin that they all broke. I knitted with broken needles until it became too ridiculous, and then begged my friend Marissa to bring me a set of plastic ones from San Francisco.

The yarn I found here in Quito was just a short walk from our new friend’s apartment at Hilana. (Av 6 de Diciembre at Veintimilla) They only carry two blends: pure wool and and one fifty-fifty wool-cotton blend, and only in three colors: white, dark brown, and brownish-grey. But I was so excited to find locally-sourced yarn that I bought a bunch and am now trying to find something suitable to do with them. They worked out to about $2 per 100 grams.

Time to start obsessing…