Travel Post #1: Pittsburgh

I'm back! I survived! It was rough going there for a while though...

1. The first trip was to Pittsburgh with my assistant. We went on a fact-finding mission to Carnegie-Mellon, but also did some campus visiting at Pitt. In my line of work, I spend a lot of time on various campuses talking to professors and trying to get a sense of how the history department functions--what they think is important, how they're teaching, what books they're using, etc.

I've been to Pittsburgh before--Spanky worked in PA one summer, up in the mountains, and we spent one weekend sight-seeing around the city. I really loved it then, but that was in summer, when everything was green and beautiful. This is what it looked like this time:



Not quite the same. It was freezing in the mornings too. The history department at CMU is in a really pretty building:


And then there's this:


This is one of the best pieces of campus artwork I've ever seen. It's not particularly 'arty', but I thought it was hilarious. Matthew is an alum of CMU and finds it slightly embarrassing. Those people at the bottom of the pole looking up are also statues. The ones walking up the pole are all striding to nowhere. The pole just ends. When we'd come out to leave at the end of the day, someone had put a princess hat on the little kid looking up. Love it.

Most importantly, I had a car on this trip, and used it to great effect, finding two really great yarn stores. Pittsburgh is well-served in terms of fiber locations. The first one:



Knit One was a beautiful store. They had tons of yarn and I could have spent so much time there, and dropped some serious cash. As it was, I bought 8 balls of Debbie Bliss Prima yarn, both so I could try it, and so I could knit the wrap that was on the cover of her spring magazine. I love this DB magazine, because I really like DB's style. She seems to create patterns for women around my age. Not as young anymore, but still attempting to be stylish, but not up for a lot of fussiness. These were my favorites (I'll include the wrap here):



I really love both of those sweaters. I almost changed my mind about the wrap, but I only bought 8 balls, and I think in my size, I'd need ten to do the short-sleeved sweater. I may use some of my stash yarn to make the purple one later. The one thing I didn't care for at this store is that she'd marked up all the pattern books by about 4 or 5 dollars. I wanted to buy Nora Gaughan's volume 3, but it was much more expensive than I remember paying for the other two, and when I went to the next yarn store, I checked, and sure enough, she'd marked it up. That's why I didn't spend more there on patterns. I couldn't trust that I was getting them at a fair price.

Anyway, then I carried on to Natural Stitches, which was in a totally different neighborhood. As an aside, I found Pittsburgh a little hard to navigate, seeing as I don't drive much. The streets are vertically oriented, so people speed up over these hills where you don't expect them to be. The streets are also very narrow. I like that there are so many neighborhoods though. Natural Stitches was a nice store too, but by that time, I was overloaded, I think. It didn't stop me from buying some oatmeal-colored Cascade Eco Wool.



I think I'm going to try to make the Hemlock Ring blanket for the back of my couch so I can lose the green and red ugly Old Navy fleece blankie we keep up there now. I also bought that Rowan Anniversary magazine. I don't really know why. It has some really good patterns, and I like the idea of it being a commemorative anniversary edition, but I've never been a Rowan collector, so it was a little out of the ordinary for me to spend the money to buy it. Sometimes when I'm on these trips I come home with strange stuff though.

I really wanted to go up the incline, but Matthew wouldn't go with me, and I didn't want to chance getting lost in the car by myself. We really didn't have but two and a half days there anyway. I used my one free afternoon to go yarn shopping instead. Hopefully I get to come back to Pittsburgh someday, preferably during the summer, and I'll take the ride then. What a great treasure for the city to have! So verdict--Pittsburgh is a nice city. Everyone that lives there seems to love it. I can't believe it really has the most polluted air in the country. The trip was a little difficult, but I did get to see some of the town, and that's always a plus.