Why knitting is good for those with OCD

I’m at home sick today. (stupid cold, stupid sinuses) The only bright spot is that it’s given me time to re-oganise my stash.  I was in the middle of taking the photos of the yarn, that are linked to the spreadsheet showing what I have, how much of it there is, and where it’s kept when I realised why I love my stash so much.

It’s the perfect play-thing for my OCD.

I can catalogue it in spreadsheets, I can reorganise it based on

• prospective project (all the jumper yarn over there, all the hat yarn here)
• colour (spectrum order, obviously,)
• weight, (cobweb through to Aran) and
• quantity.

And the whole time I’m doing that, I can think about what I’m going to make with it all, and therefore which organisation schema makes the most sense.

Of course, because I’m more of a visual person, no matter which schema makes sense, I always end up with it organised by colour. It just looks better that way.

But that explains why all my recent flickr photos are of yarn.

God I hate Microsoft…

I’m working on a client website.

They’ve agreed to give me direct access to their CMS <Good>

Their CMS is Microsoft Content Management Server <Bad>

Microsoft stopped supporting CMS years ago <Worse>

They no longer provide any documentation on how the damn thing works <Worser>

Oh yeah, and although it “works over the internet so you only need a web browser to use it” it relies entirely on ActiveX controls that only function in Internet Explorer. Which means I (a Mac) have to run a virtual machine to run IE just to deal with this ancient crap product.

I freakin hate Microsoft.

Dealing with the stash

I have recently acquired the first of Yarn Harlot’s books.

I thought it would make me laugh – I was right

I didn’t think it would teach me useful tricks – I was wrong….

See the problem that faces every knitter who lives with a non-knitter is how to deal with the stash. Stash is the yarn you keep at home. Non-knitters assume that the point of stash is to turn it into knitted garments, so they get very, very confused by the fact that knitters continue to acquire stash far faster than it can reasonably be knit.

That’s because they’re wrong. The point of stash is not to be turned into garments – the point of stash is just to be; just to sit their being soft, and warm and prettily coloured, gently inspiring the knitter into dreams of things that *could* be made out of the stash, but won’t, because then the stash could no longer create those dreams…

I love my stash

Anyway, as a relatively new knitter my stash is still comparatively small, but I am already encountering the raised eyebrow when I bring home yet another skien of sock-yarn. So eventually I will have to start to conceal it in places other than the designated yarn-storage bucket.

And this is where the Yarn Harlot was so useful – thanks to her book I now have a long list if hidey-holes where yarn can be stored.

No, I’m not going to share them. My husband reads this blog and I don’t want him to find out…

Perhaps a trip to my LYS this lunch might be on the cards – they’ve got some lovely silk/wool sock yarn I’ve been eyeing off and now I’ve got places I can hide it…