You know, for someone who’s between jobs, I’m finding myself with an awful lot of work to do and a great number of deadlines. I’m not sure how I feel about that…

I’m in a wedding this weekend, and that means I have to pick up my dress tomorrow, get my hair cut (also tomorrow), and find a great necklace to wear with my great dress (yet again, tomorrow, since the shop I want to go to is in Chapel Hill, and I’ll already be on that side of town for my hair appointment anyway). And that’s just the prep stuff for the wedding. Then there’s the wedding rehearsal and the rehearsal dinner on Saturday (no idea what I’m going to wear), the wedding and the reception on Sunday, and dinner with my parents and friends Thomas and Eva on Monday. And my parents are coming to the wedding, and since they’re planning on getting into town Friday evening sometime, that gives me til … Friday evening to get my apartment clean. (Yeah, yeah… I won’t even bother trying to pretend like it’s not totally messy at the present.)

It’s not just busy this week, though. This past weekend was the bachelorette party (a fun, innocent girls-only pajama party filled with coloring, Girl Scout cookies, and Disney movies (Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, and The Little Mermaid (I love parentheses within parentheses!)), and of course, lots of alcohol). That took a good bit of planning and errand-running.

Then there’s work stuff. Job listings to hunt down, resumes to send out, my portfolio webpage to finish (I’ve just been feeling so unmotivated on that last front lately).

And then there’s yarn dyeing. Since mom is going to be in town, and since mom wants to buy some of my hand-dyed sock yarn to sell at her store, I figured it’d be far easier for me to just hand her the package while she’s here instead of dealing with the inconveniences of packaging it up and taking it to the post office to mail it. Of course, that means I have to get on the ball and actually dye up a decent-sized batch of yarn before Friday evening, too.

Which brings me to … (drumroll please!) … my first picture for the post! Yarn! Lots and lots of yarn!

What you see here, people, is 15 glorious skeins of unblemished, untarnished, ready-to-become-beautifully-colored sock yarn. That’s 1500 grams of yarn, people. That’s 7,350 yards of yarn just itching to be painted. (The orange you see are the bits of cotton yarn I use to tie up the skeins so all the strands stay put while I’m dyeing.) Hoping to get to that this afternoon.

All this random stuff I’ve had on my plate lately, though, has kept me from getting much knitting done. I haven’t picked up my needles since last Friday, in fact. It’s okay… I’m a tad burnt out anyway, having knit a pair of socks a week for three straight weeks and all… But last week I did finish my cable-and-rib socks in the Claudia, and I finally got around to taking a picture of ‘em this morning.

And a close-up of the purdy cables:

They’re quite comfy, and seem to be wearing well, though I’ve only worn them once so far.

I’m facing a couple of dilemmas at the moment, though. One is the itty-bitty skeins I’ve got left over after winding the cones off into 100g skeins. The cones are supposed to be 1 pound each, but… they’re not. So sometimes I’ve got 1.2 oz. left over, sometimes as much as 2.8 oz. I could dye these up and just add them to my own personal stash, or I could split them up into smaller hanks (say, 0.5 oz.or so), dye them in solids complementary to the variegateds, and sell them along with the larger skeins to be used for cuffs/heels/toes (either packaged as a set or sold individually). I posed this dilemma to the Sock Knitters Community over on LiveJournal, but there doesn’t seem to be much of a consensus last I looked. Oh well. I’ll figure something out.

My other dilemma is what to do with the leftover empty cones that the yarn came on.

You see, I’m a total clutter-bug (which is quite different from a shutter-bug, though I’m that, too), and these are high-quality top-notch cones here, people! You can’t expect me to just toss them out with yesterday’s newspaper (nevermind that I don’t get the newspaper, though if I did, I likely wouldn’t toss it out, either). They inspire me and make me feel crafty. But what to do with them? A pencil holder? Cheezy Christmas tree decorations? A hat? Or what about this spiffy Cone Head Water Canon? Or a cone bra? All are possibilities. (Okay, so mabe not so much with the Madonna bra…)