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WIP Wednesday: Spinzilla is Over, Get Back to the Knitting

I was spinning furiously Sunday evening before Spinzilla drew to a close at midnight and managed to spin nearly all of the fibers I had earmarked for the event (only a half-pound of dyed merino remained unspun). I was hoping to double my usual 3,000-ish yardage of the past few years, but managed to only add about 1k to the usual yardage, finishing at 4034.

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I probably could have gotten that last bit of fiber spun up if I hadn't taken an ill-fated excursion to Windy Knitty in Andersonville on the same day as the Chicago Marathon (a journey that requires two bus lines, or a bus and a train, if you prefer). Though the event was in the morning and I wasn't trying to take mass transit til the afternoon, the effects of many main streets in Chicago being shut down for the runners could be felt, even at 3pm that same afternoon. Honestly, I'd done ok until the final leg, when the bus I was waiting for wasn't slated to show up for 30 minutes (with an immediate follower - how helpful).

I decided to walk a few blocks to see if a "phantom bus" materialized, as sometimes they show up IRL without being detected by the iffy CTA bus tracker technology. That didn't happen, but I did find myself near a bar with some very good beers on draft, and I treated myself to one while knitting a few rows and checking on the progress of what must have been the slowest moving bus in existence. It did eventually show up, and I got on it and eventually arrived home, a little wiser (lesson learned: just don't leave the house on marathon day unless you're actually running in it).

ript> Though my afternoon was totally a bust for spinning, I did have a few things to show for the effort: first, the return of one of my favorite pattern samples, the Like the Tides Cowl:

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It uses two skeins of the beautiful sport weight gradient yarn from Freia Fiber Arts and the pattern is available here.

Second, I got a big bag of some rather nice yarn which was on sale because Windy Knitty is closing its doors at the end of the month:

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I do love a good sale, but not under those circumstances, of course. It was some seriously bittersweet yarn shopping (The Cure's "Pictures of You" was playing for almost the entire time I was there, I kid you not) and I will be sad to see them go.

Now it's time to get back to knitting, I suppose. My office project, aka the garter project I inherited from my grandmother, is coming down the home stretch because I keep it by my desk to work on while I'm in meetings - I've added the fourth and final skein:

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Also this week, I took off for the sleeves on my cardigan, and it's starting to look like a sweater now!

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That's it for this week, though I will finally have an FO to share with you this Friday. See you then!



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