At long last, I'm embarking on a project I've meant to tackle for a long time: Elizabeth Zimmermann's Pi Shawl. This iconic knit is from her book Knitter's Almanac, and I've had it bookmarked for more than three years. It took me ages to choose a colour, but in the end I went with TFA Deep Sea. I finally wound it up last week. Then I made a gauge swatch. Most unusually for an EZ pattern, she's not fussy about gauge. "Gauge, for once in your life, is unimportant, except that it be loose," she writes. I tried out a couple of needle sizes, threw in a couple rows of yarnovers, and practiced the knitted-on garter stitch edging, too. The shawl starts with just 9 stitches, on 3 needles. That took some concentration, I'll admit, but it wasn't long before I'd transferred my work to a circular needle. This shawl is mostly plain knitting, and it goes on and on – the final rounds have 576 stitches in them! I'm going to be doing a lot of travel in the next week or so, and I think that this will be the perfect travel companion. Plenty to occupy my fingers, but not much to occupy my mind. What's your perfect travel project?