I’ve been notably absent again. It’s all Ravelry’s fault. If I’m not trolling the boards, or joining a zillion groups, I’m entering stash. I’ve dug through all the living room stash (sock yarn). I’ve made it through the stash that had taken over much of the second bedroom in my apartment. And tonight, I’m tackling the stash that lives in the second bedroom closet. “Tackling” has resulted in, well, a pile. A big pile. That photo just encompasses what has been entered so far. The closet stash is at least as big.

Once all the data is amassed, I’m going to seriously have to figure out a better storage plan. Fortunately, I’ll have half of a sizable closet to work with once I pull it all out.

There are some yarns that won’t make the “stash” too. There’s already a 20 gallon rubbermaid box that is filling with half skeins and leftovers. There’s a grocery bag full of partials from dishcloth cotton. And there’s a scrap basket of sock yarn leftovers. Enough of all of those that I will be starting some longer term scrap projects soon. I am certain that lots of ballband dishclothes, log cabin everything, and doll clothes galore are all in my future.  For now though, I’ll be spending the weekend digging out. If I don’t surface for a while, come yell at me to blog, I’ll be on Ravelry.

I have been working on stuff, and I have some cool stuff to share, I just haven’t gotten it all assembled in blog post format. Shame on me.

First I have to thank Terri for my Knitter’s Tea Swap package! She totally rocks! She sent knitting fiction (yay books!!), an ass-ton of tea, seriously like 4 boxes or something crazy like that, plus 4 skeins of yarn in great colorways (how did you know I wanted to try the panda wool?) and some good dark chocolate.

Prior to that package arriving, my birthday order at the Loopy Ewe gained me membership into the Loopy Groopies. I got the great extra gifts that go along with having spent way too much money with Sherri. A really cool project bag, some chocolate kisses, some wool wash, and a black and grey skein of Opal. Plus the 3 colorways of Claudia’s and one of Lorna’s that I bought for the actual purchase.

However, I’ve been slowly inventorying the stash and getting it into Ravelry and I’ve come to the realization that I really really need to put the spending on hiatus for a bit. It’s taken me forever just to get the sock yarn stash photographed and entered into the system. I’ve got 63 pairs worth stashed on the site, and I still have 5 or 6 more to photograph and add. I haven’t even tackled the scary room where everything else lives. Or the mess of needles and crochet hooks. Reality is freeing in some ways and scary as hell in others. It’ll be nice to finally know what all I have once I’m done though, and organizing it all electronically might be the push I need to get some sort of organization system in place physically as well.

My biggest birthday gift to myself was a new PC, and I’m starting to slowly get that set up as well and making the move up to Vista.

I also haven’t been completely neglecting the coaster hobby either. I spent Friday at Cedar Point for Coastermania. There is one great crazy story from that that defies definition. I have a friend Kris who is one of those fearless people who will do absolutely anything and not be embarrassed. I also have some other friends who have no issues throwing money at something if it’ll be entertaining. The combo, deadly. We were standing in a shop and someone made a joke about those little girly shorts with the words on the butt. Kris made the offhand remark of “if you buy them, I’ll wear them. ” No less than 10 minutes later, he is in a light blue pair of short shorts with the words “Get in line!” across the butt with his polo shirt tucked in.

Same conversation at a different locale of the park landed him a set of light-up blinky bunny ears. This was his ensemble for the remainder of the evening. I haven’t laughed so hard in ages. People watching was hilarious the rest of the night as we caught everything from people trying to do the sideways-glance-don’t-let-him-see-us-looking-at-him, to outright pointing and staring, asking for photographs, and everything in between. He totally played it up, high fiving random people on the midway, waving to the passing train, and chatting up people in line. My ribs still hurt from laughing so hard.

It’s a random day today, I’ve got too much going on and pulling me in a zillion directions.

Knitting has been scarce around these parts the last few weeks. I’ve been cleaning like crazy (successfully for once) and just have some quick bathroom scrubbing to wrap up tonight. Mike gets here tomorrow night, I’m working Wednesday and we’re on the road as of either Thursday night or Friday morning.  Almost two full weeks of much needed vacation in the works though. We’ll be roaming on the road for a week of that getting to Holiday World, Camden Park, Dollywood, Busch Gardens Europe, Six Flags Great Adventure and Clementon. Had to go with mostly big parks this year since the small parks aren’t open during the week yet.

It’s not all cleaning though. I’ve also been sacrificing some knitting time to discussing and organizing knitting stuff over on Ravelry. I totally lucked out and got on the invite list early enough to get in early last week. I love this site! It’s totally addictive in it’s current form and all the features they’re looking into adding will make it the be all and end all resource for project planning, community networking and just about everything else you can think of that relates to knitting.

On top of that, I’m loving the Pligg Alison set up for Sockapalloza after we broke blogger. I’ve more or less just put a lot of focus on reading about knitting and not as much into actually knitting.

Although, I did finish a pair of socks last week. 

These are the J-Knits lightweight sock on size 1s that I started when the Harlot was here. There was a ton of yarn left, enough that I could probably get a pair of footies out of them, and will definitely go toe-up with calf shaping when I get around to knitting the other colorway I have.

I’m making some progress on the second Aran Sandal Sock, and once those are done, the needles will be free for my Sockapalooza socks. Based on the comments on the last post, no one can decide on a varrigate, but the lavender color got rave reviews all around. Of the cabled patterns I had in mind, I think I’m going to give the Austrian Socks a shot. I haven’t seen any show up in blogs so they’ll be more unique than some of the other socks out there. Plus the construction intrigues me. (If you haven’t looked that closely at the pattern, they’re constructed top-down by making an i-cord, grafting it into a circle then picking up the stitches along the length of the i-cord.) If that is too much, I reserve the right to try a different pattern later if these don’t work out. But I have to give them a chance, they’re too pretty not to.

In the meantime, I need to get back to the scrubbing and packing, I’ll probably post some from the road where internet is available.