I came to knit socks and chew gum...and I'm all outta gum

Over the summer, I traveled quite a bit. Mostly on business, but my hubby and I also went to see our best friends who live in Connecticut. My travels had one thing in common: in each place I found at least one yarn store. I was mostly sane, with a bit of nuttiness when I found ArtFibers in San Francisco (oh the silk!). While I normally can't justify buying anything that I can find at my LYS, sock yarn tends to be the exception to this. I had a decent sock yarn stash, and had bought a bit here and there over the summer at each place I found. In August I went to Florida to do some research, and was left to my own devices for a week. I found a yarn store in Gainesville, Yarnworks, where the ladies were really nice and they had tons of sock yarn. The longer I stayed and talked with them, the more balls of sock yarn I picked up. On the way back to my hotel one night, I stopped at a craft store that was literally next door to the hotel, and they had lion brand magic stripes sock yarn on clearance for $2.50. Seriously. I bought some for me, some for my girlfriend back home, and some to knit up as gifts. Half of my suitcase was sock yarn. When I got back, my LYS was having a sale on sock yarn for the month of August. Dear Zeus, what's a girl to do? All of this stash acquisition ended up being added to the existing stash, and now looks like this:

It's enough for 40 some odd pairs of socks. And I really want to add some Lorna's and Mountain Colors and Fleece Artist and STR and some plain colors to do fair isle (like for arrgyles), but how can I justify acquiring more, when I have all of this???

Thankfully, I love knitting socks, and I have already knit up four pairs out of this, and have a bunch more that will be going out as Christmas gifts. I love having a stash, but I am a bit overwhelmed and am looking forward to knitting this down. I am much faster at knitting socks than I used to be, but whoa. It's gonna take a while. I am hereby going to pledge that I will reduce this by 25% before I buy more. I think this is reasonable since I am totally going to count the four that I have already done. I think I can resist ( unless I come across Fleece Artist...that is soooo an exception). And just because I have a picture handy, these are the socks that I have knit for myself over the past year:


I have knit this many again for others as gifts. Notice the plain vanilla that I normally use. I do want to start experimenting with more patterns, but I always seem to have other complex projects going on, and plain vanilla is a comfort.

So that's a glimpse at my sock addition. Later we can talk about my warshcloth issues. And--as an added bonus, blogging about the sweaters that haunt me helped. I will have a big FO post coming soon. I guess I did exorcise some of those demons!