"holy f-ing stash!"

Greetings from Watertown, dear readers (all two of you who are not in the room with me as I type). This morning, Bean called me at work, asking if I wanted to go over to her place (roughly a mile from my place of employment) and knit after I got out. I said okay, even tho' I had not placed any knitting into my bag that morning on my usual mad dash for the door (I actually thought "Oh, I'm just going to work and back - I shouldn't bother bringing any knitting, because I won't have a chance to work on it at all" - stupid, stupid, stupid!).

Once I got to Casa du Bean, I was told "We're going to Watertown! To knit!" (Watertown, for those of you not versed in Central New York geography, is about 45 minutes north of our fair city.)

Our knitbud Erin recently moved to Watertown, and she and Bean wanted to get together. Only thing is, there's nothing between here and there. So, Bean decreed we were going to Watertown, since Erin has always had to drive from afar (first from Tully, fifteen minutes to the south of Syracuse, and now the frozen wilds of W-town) to knit with us. This time, we would bring the knitting to her.

It'd been a while since I did any crazy spur-of-the-moment road-tripping, so I acquiesced. But before we could head north, I needed to make a quick stop at Michael's to get some yarn to knit! And my choice for spur-of-the-moment new knitting project was... (drumroll, please) the Linux illusion scarf! I'm not even that big into Linux... I've actually never used Linux except like, once on the DH's computer when he had that partition on his hard drive that booted to Linux... like, four years ago. But I love the damn penguin! And I want to figure out this illusion knitting thing. I almost get it... if I take a pattern apart and do it once, I'll have a handle on the whole technique, and that'll be yet another weapon I can add to my arsenal of eeeevil (like the fru-eet of the dev-ill).

I know I said I don't do the whole New Year's Resolution thing, but I have decided I'm going to try not to buy any more yarn this year until I've done a whole lot of stash-busting (and you will see why I've made this decision in just a minute). Buying more yarn just so I can knit tonight kind of goes against that effort, but at least the yarn I chose (Caron's Simply Soft, in black and grey) is *cheap*, so I don't feel too bad.

So. Why do I need so desperately to stash-bust that I've declared a moratorium on yarn-purchasing right on the eve of Elegant Needles' biannual massive yarn sale? Here's why. I present to you... my shameful, shameful stash:


(bin #1)


(bin #2)


(bin #3)


(bin #4 - scraps and sock yarns)


(bin #5 - pricey yarn! Well, some of it, anyway)


(overflow - I don't even have a bin for this yet)

I took these pics during a recent yarn-stash-database update. So now you know. Now you know where all the Gedifra Fashion Trend yarn in the greater Syracuse metro area went, once it was discontinued and put on clearance. Now you know why my DH is thisclose to kicking me out of the house. Why his demeanor fills with apprehension every time I come home from shopping and say "Guess what I bought!" I haven't gotten to the point of hiding yarn... yet. I'm trying really hard not to let it get that far.

In my defense, I didn't pay full price for the vast majority of that yarn. If I didn't get it on sale, I bought it ball by ball with 40%-off coupons. No, I'm not kidding. I have a deep internal well of patience.

But. I really need to cut down. So. If you look closely at that last pic, you'll see 15 balls of light gray Fantasy Yarns Alpaka (from A.C. Moore) there in the front. I gave those to Bean for X-mess. Most of the rest of all that, I already have patterns in mind for it. I probably won't live long enough to knit my way through that shameful, shameful stash. I have a lot of knitting to do. So, uhm, I better go get started (and besides, I've usurped Erin's computer for long enough!). (The title of this post, btw, is what Bean said when I started uploading these pictures to post.)

Here's to a knit-ful 2006.