Sweet Merciful Crap!!!

Starting on 8:30 pm Sunday, I got to work cataloguing my yarn stash.
11-1/2 hours later, at 7:00 am on Monday, I was done. I think I took a total of about 1/2 hours in breaks, so the cataloguing job took 11 hours total. I located every single skein of yarn in my apartment, entered the stats in an Excel spreadsheet and added up the total yardage. Then I almost had a heart attack, because:
I HAVE 91,045 YARDS OF YARN IN MY APARTMENT.
This made me laugh at first, and then I thought about how most skeins/balls of yarn contain between 100-200 yards.
11,000+ yards are going out the door today (some in a swap, some to Value Village) but I'll still have 79,700 yards of yarn in the house, plus yarn coming to me in a swap.
Granted, my total contains some yarn that has already been knitted up in UFOs, but not that much. I am going to deduct each project's yarn only after I have finished the project.
I also did not count a few specific items: two almost-finished blankets (only need a single crochet edging in both cases), a small shawl that is currently blocking, a pillow cover that needs minimal finishing and the yarn for a project I am fixing for someone else. Since the latter is not my yarn or my project, I felt justified in not counting that. As for the blankets and pillow cover, I knit them so long ago I can't remember how many yards of yarn they contain. However, that just means that they don't factor into the count at all-- they aren't in today's total, but they also don't come off the total once the finishing is done.
Details of the Great Stashbust of 2007 (which may run through 2009, I'm guessing) will be posted shortly. VERY shortly, because I think I am faced with an emergency situation here....

Advance squee from Etsy

I just bought my very first handspun yarn. It is from JenniferJoyCreative on etsy, and it is a three-skein set called "DrEamCiclE". Hopefully, since I am linking to her seller's page on here, she won't mind if I post the pictures of the yarn I bought from her, so you can see how gorgeous it is. Her handspun creations are for sale at the site linked below: http://www.etsy.com/shop.php?user_id=104476
If she happens to Google herself and see this, I also must mention the way I found her etsy store: I am a contributor to the No-Sheep KAL (although, obviously, I do knit with wool) and one of the other bloggers on the KAL posted a link to the Fake Sheep blog about vegan knitting, and when I visited that, there was a post about Jennifer's fiery red bamboo handspun. So, I went and visted her store, and this is the yarn I ultimately fell in love with.
I don't have a specific project in mind, but this yarn is so beautiful that I couldn't pass it up. Besides, I have recently hit the point in my relationship with knitting that I need to start pushing the envelope, and that includes forcing myself to stop depending too much on patterns. I modify almost every pattern I use, but I am still pretty nervous about straying too far from the basic blueprints.
Frankly, I have been wanting to start designing for about a year now, but I have been too timid to start the process. However, I'm tired of waiting for myself to get past the fear, and I have decided that I am going to start pushing past it anyway. This will be a great opportunity to design something where I am initially inspired by the yarn and only the yarn-- no patterns.