The stash that's not a "Stash"

Last night, after working from 5am to 8pm in a hundred-degree warehouse for three straight days, I found myself sitting up in bed and wishing my sleeping mojo was on.  See, I am one of those blessed individuals who can lie down, close my eyes, and be entering the Land of Honk and Shoe (thank you, neice Rachel) within two minutes.  Last night, I rolled over, watched the digital clock change numbers and then finally admitted defeat and turned the light back on.  Time to knit.

I first had to mentally go through my stash.  Hmm...there is the cardboard box next to the bed, the two balls of "good stuff" in the backpack, the Lion Brand Wool-Ease that I save for designing patterns on the dining room table (at least I was sure that midnight after three work-days is not really the time to design something, or so I thought), the tote of ball and skein remnants NEXT TO the dining room table, the cotton in the baby colors in the front seat of the car, the probably forty balls in the trunk of the car...

And then two things hit me:  one, I was not going to my car for yarn at midnight.  Two, my stash is not a stash.

The word stash, in my head anyway, draws the inference of maybe a bag of mismatched yarn totalling about eight or nine different balls and colorways.  My spread-out, yarn-in-every-corner-of-my-life stash has yarn from the honeymoon in Rome, the trip to Paris, sales at all three of my favorite yarn stores, one or two individual balls given to me by friends, and stuff I buy on sale so I can design queer little knitted stuff later.  My "stash" is not a stash.  It is more like a TJ Maxx for yarn.

When all was said and done and my Type A personality finished bitch-slapping the apparent hole in it...well, it might be its evil twin, Type B...I went for the Malabrigo Merino Worsted that was in my backpack.  One day, I was at Yarntopia in Katy, Texas.  The store has a promotional card with 25-dollar hole-punches on it.  After filling up your card with purchases in increments of $25, you can redeem the full card for 25% off your entire next purchase.  On this particular day, I was already buying a skein of Schaefer cotton that rings in around forty bucks per heavenly ball.  It made sense to me to bump it over fifty, so in addition to buying the Schaefer I figured it was a good idea to just buy two balls of heaven instead of one.  After I signed my Mastercard receipt, I loved up on the balls of yarn for a good ten minutes before I would put them into my backpack.

Last night, I was overwhelmed with inspiration from Italy.  Could have been the Soundtrack of the Snoring Husband, I don't know, but all I kept thinking about was the hats we saw at all of the little kiosks in the plazas there.  In addition to women never leaving their house after the Italian equivalent of Labor Day without a fashionable scarf or wrap, the winter hats sold there are all open on the top.  It turns out that they are plenty warm if you just pull them over your head like a normal hat, but they are also hair-savers for girls who want to keep their lush curls intact on the way to work.  I started making a tube hat sampler so I wouldn't go into a coma knitting stockinette stitch.  Looking back, though, the point of this endeavor was to make an effort to fall asleep. 

I finally did fall asleep, just after one.  And today, I am going to finish the stove stack hat after a few cups of coffee.