"City of Owls," and how Manchester Airport hates knitters

I finished the one-patch wonder quilt, now entitled "City of Owls," in time for last night's Zoo Challenge presentation. It wasn't a competitive sort of challenge like some guilds do, but I did get some "ooh"s when I showed it, and some nice feedback afterwards. Here is my fiancé holding it up:

"OK, thanks, that's great--now can you turn it right side up please?" :)

This is the first time I tried a pieced back on a quilt, and I'm pretty happy with the way it turned out. It was actually a bit small, so I really had to stretch the binding in one place, but it's meant to be a wall quilt (hence the visible hanging sleeve at the top), so I think it will be all right.

 Here is a detail of the quilting--stippling all over, and then straight lines in the cube parts.

 Over the course of my recent vacation, I also finished my fingerless gloves!

The fingerless bit is really nice if you want to pick tomatoes with them in 90-degree Georgia heat! (Also, just picked, organic, homegrown tomatoes just taste so much better than what you find in the store. YUM!)

These were made using the "Rose Garden Fingerless Gloves" pattern by Anniki Leppik, from Ravelry.

I really like bringing knitting when traveling because it's a nicely portable craft, unlike quilting (at least for me, since I am too lazy to hand quilt). I also brought along materials for and started work on a little lacy shawlette. I made good progress, and was hoping to get pretty close to finishing it on the flight home, since it was going to be a 9-hour daytime flight, when Manchester Airport security struck! (Cue ominous music.)

That's right, Manchester Airport personnel insisted I put them in checked baggage, giving me a number of reasons when I kept arguing, including "US TSA regulations" (not true; I even produced a printout of this page), "British aviation regulations" (can't be true; Heathrow among others explicitly allows them), "Manchester Airport regulations" (their website does not list them as prohibited), "individual airlines" (ridiculous!), and finally "whether or not the person at the scanner feels like confiscating them" (hardly a sensible way to run airport security). I was trying to bring size 8 circular bamboo needles, by the way. Anyway, rather than risk them being confiscated and ruining my project, I put them in my checked suitcase and proceeded to be bored by hour 6 of the flight, seeing as I read very quickly and had finished my book, and having rapidly exhausted the interesting-sounding movies available.

Congratulations, Manchester Airport--you've replaced Charles de Gaulle in Paris as my most hated airport!