Start the Insanity!!

I suppose the word "start" isn't particularly applicable when speaking of myself. A better word would be "increase" or, in this case, the proper term might be "Heighten insanity to an alarming level.....CODE RED". I shall break it down in list form:

1) I am STILL SICK!!! WTF!! I have now been sick for a week and 4 days.

2) I have absolutely destroyed both my office and bedroom, frantically searching for this....

DumDumDum...

3) I have begun studying for the GRE's, which I have to take in a little over a month.

4) I am still having minor issues over my sister's families recent acquisitions, shall we say.

5) There is a large meeting to be held at my home on Thursday morning. I have been trying to clean the house for about 3 days and have achieved nothing. I told my mother two days ago that I can go no further in m endeavours until she cleans up her mess, and she agreed. Guess who still has not cleaned up her mess??

For these reasons, among others, I have been sleeping less and less. I have not been making the best decisions in my sleep deprived haze as can be seen in this photograph.

Hello 6am McDonald's run.

I would like to say that I really don't have such massive cankles. Those would be my Opal Jaywalkers and my fancy Italian moon-walking shoes. I am aware that they don't particularly compliment each other. We decided to switch things up this morning and have breakfast before we went to sleep. You know.....we like to break out of the mold every now an again.

In knitting news, i finally attempted to photograph my finished Lady Eleanor, but pretty much failed miserably.

Pattern: Lady Eleanor from Scarf Style

Yarn: Noro Silk Garden #251, 11 skeins

Needles: US 9

Mods: I made it WAY longer than the pattern called for.

I also received this kick-ass yarn from Yarn Ahoy.

She does some of the most vibrant work I've seen. There's also quite an impressive yardage on these suckers. I believe the colorways are Nouveau Blue, Sour Berries and Chocolate, and Ablaze.

Always the optimist, I will take the havoc wreaked in my office as an opportunity to organize my old stash. Most of my newer stuff and sock yarn is in new shelving units, but the bulk of my stash is shoved (and I mean shoved, squished, pounded) into my plastic units in the office closet. Well...it was until I went on my mad rampage of destruction. Now it's just all twisted and tangled across the room. I'm off to clean!

Disclosure

Maryland Sheep and Wool was very exciting for me this year, to say the least. I didn't get to go last year because I was foolishly attempting to save some dough for a trip to France that was supposed to be happening a short time after the festival. That trip got cancelled not too long after I had missed out on all the yarny goodness. Anyhow, back to this year. I had a plan. All I wanted to do was get there, get some STR in colorways unavailable online, and get out. I had a party to attend later that day and I'm really not in need of any yarn. I made this plan one, maybe two weeks prior to the festival. As the weekend approached, I came across more and more accounts of STR selling out in mere minutes and herds of knitters storming the booth as soon as the it opened. I devised a plan to get to S&W really early and just wait. I heard more and more tales of empty yarn bins. I began to panic. At some point a few nights away from the festival I actually had a nightmare about lack of yarn. Scary. So Sheep and Wool day came and I got up super dark and early (in the 5am hour) and made it up to the festival by around 7. I can honestly say that I may have been the first non-worker sitting around that day knitting on a bench. By 7:45 others had joined me waiting outside barn 3, aka the STR barn. By 8:15 I actually had to go stand in line in front of The Fold because others were flocking in and I'd be damned if I was going to get up that friggin' early to be beaten out by a bunch of late-comers. When they finally undid the little rope that was between us and the yarn, it was anarchy. Luckily, since I was right up in front, I was essentially thrown face first into a giant wall of STR mediumweight by the 50 or so people pouring in behind me. It was heavenly......though I bit panic stricken.
So here's what I ended up with.

Brooks Farm Duet......lovely

Little Curly Mohair Handpainted by The Flock Bransonas

Blue Heron Rayon Metallic in very pretty greens & purples

Gypsy Girl yarn in Angela (pink) and Goblin (green/purple)

Oh yeah.......and that STR I was talking about?? I got just a weeeee little bit of it. It looks a little something like this......

Wooo!!! I hit the motherlode. What can I say?

I wish I could tell you all the colorways, but I had to quickly stash the goods and didn't have enough time to write it all down. I'll give it a whirl from memory.....uh, holy goodness, I think I know it all....at least the majority of it. What can I say, I know my STR. Here it goes, from top left to bottom right. Algae, Crazy Lace Agate, Carbon Dating, Hard Rock, Neptunite, Red Rock Canyon, Highway 30, Lemongrass, Alina, Country Clare, Pebble Beach, Azure something or another, Romancing the Stone, Heart-something, and Amethyst.

I wasn't satisfied (somehow) with the first 13 skeins I got in the early morning so I ho the booth again a little later and picked up some more!! Hello, Psycho! My crafty coworker later pointed out to me that I picked up a duplicate colorway during my initial buying frenzy.

Country Clare

While it is probably one of my favorite new colors, I just wasn't down with the duplicate. I had to go back and exchange it for something else on Sunday. I got there a little too late and there were slim picking to choose from. I ended up getting this......

....which is a merino/tencel blend from BMFA in the Tiger's Eye colorway (damn, I good with the color names!). It's quite nice and I'm not too sure what I'm going to do with it yet. I also picked up a good number of patterns, all of the sock persuasion. I have a feeling that they might just come in handy during the next few months. I have no idea why.

Okay, that's it. I finish school in just a few days now. I'm so through mentally that I hope I can wait for the next few days to pass before I run off screaming in the middle of the night. I think I can do it. Oh, and I have at least one FO to show....maybe even a second by the time I get around to posting again. Excitement!