Elizzabetty Knits: Chicagoland yarn crawl... circa 2006

This time last year I had a business trip to Chicago for an all-day meeting on a Monday. Since it was so conveniently scheduled next to a weekend, I decided to combine it with an all-weekend yarn crawl. But the schedule changed and I wound up staying out there so that I could be told about the restructuring. I never did post about the yarn crawl.

So here we are, a year later. The yarn crawl post has been sitting around in draft form for a year. It's time to share, so here goes Part 1 of my yarn crawl....

My goal--visit three, maybe four yarn shops west of Midway on my way to the hotel, and try to only buy yarn that I can't easily get back east. (I should say that the office is in the northern 'burbs, not the Chicago proper.) I plotted everything out with Mapquest, printed out all my directions, and after picking up my rental car and a PotBelly Sandwich (mmmmmm...), proceeded to my first stop...

Chix With Stix in Forest Park.

Sorry, but that's the only picture I took of the shop. (I got camera shy once I stepped inside, being a new blogger at the time.) Very nice shop, well organized, carrying all the basics plus a really nice selection of Malabrigo. (There was lots of Malabrigo in Chicagoland. You guys are sooooo lucky!) I stuck to my purchase plan and picked up this:

Three balls of Karabella Aurora 8 that were marked down, and a skein of hand dyed sock yarn from The Knitting Nimrod in these gorgeous spring colors.

I had no idea who the Knitting Nimrod was, so I did a little internet research that night. Turns out the woman had recently passed away about six months before that and that she had a yarn shop in Belleville, Ontario. So sad. I'll have to knit something special with this yarn.

My next stop was Knitche in Downers Grove. It was good size shop with a coffee bar, a separate area for classes (cool!) and a nice selection of yarns, but there was nothing that I couldn't find anywhere else. I didn't take any pictures there either, but if you look here you can see the shop for yourself.

My third and final stop for the day was Fringe in Aurora. Wow! What a shop! They arrange their yarns by color, not weight. A total feast for the eyes!

Again, tons of Malabrigo (I'm so jealous of you guys!), but I didn't buy any of it. Instead, I agonized over what I would buy. I wound up focusing on these skeins of Fleece Artist sock yarn...

...but eventually got my focus back and decided that I could probably find these in New York, so ultimately these weren't part of the stash enhancement plan. But this did...