Blame it on the heat, being tired, or just plain not feeling knitty, but I was surprised to realize the other day that I had gone a whole week without doing any knitting at all. I did a tiny bit of spinning to ply up the next batch of MacGyver for Mike’s sweater, but that’s about all that happened on the fiber front. A whole week!

Instead, I read a bunch of books. They’re a little better at consuming all of my attention (so that I can’t think about all the things I need to do for work and get sucked in when I’m supposed to be enjoying myself), and every once in a while I really just need to sit down and read for a while. That can be a little tough on the book budget, though – between Friday and Saturday I managed to finish one book, start and finish a second, and start a third. It is true what they say about the entertainment cost of knitting being pretty low for the hour.

Fortunately for my blogworthiness, I appear to have snapped out of the reading binge and have begun showing signs of a returning interest in all things wool. (It probably helps that the thermometer has dropped 20 degrees since this time last week.)

I’m now well into the main body section on the Mike sweater, and so far the yarn seems to be holding out. I’m about 10.5 ounces in and have another 14 left to go, so I’m cautiously optimistic that I’ll make it without further substitution.

Since I’m keeping track of knitting time on this one, I know that I’m pottering along at a pretty reliable pace of an inch of knitting for every hour, which seems pretty painfully slow until you realize that there are 268 stitches per round and 8.5 rounds per inch.  That works out to 2278 stitches per hour, or 1.6 seconds per stitch. Not bad, really.  (Though nothing on Miriam Tegels, the world’s fastest knitter, who clocks in at about 0.7 seconds per stitch. Her hands are really flying!)

And so I calculate my way along, heading down the main body section of the sweater, and trying not to look at my empty spinning wheel.

I have been trying to resist the pull of the Tour de Fleece. I have quite a bit of catching up to do in the knitting department before I’m really ready to start the spinning for another sweater, but the call is becoming irresistible. I also needed to keep my bobbins free for the unplying and replying of MacGyver, but now that that’s done I don’t have any more excuses. So I think tonight may find me beginning the spinning of the first ply of Branden’s next sweater:

Some things are just too good to resist.