Everything in its place

First: Melly sent me this sweet thing:



Thank-you! :D Its rules stipulate that I should pass it on to four people whose blogs I love, but, um, I am about a month behind the curve and I cherish basically all the blogs I follow through Ravelry, so. Keep writing them, please!

Second: Look! I got a shelving unit:



And it's full of yarn! I'm actually pretty excited about the opportunity to organise everything: now laceweight, fingering weight, DK, and worsted-or-heavier have their own little boxes. There's also four (four!) sections of spinning stuff, organised roughly into "sheep-coloured" and "not", and a space for cones of silk and a space for knitting-in-progress and a space for odds and ends of leftovers and and and



a BOOKCASE. I can't tell you how excited I am about this; all of these books have been in teetering piles on the floor for months. I've been gleefully arranging and rearranging them all day. Alphabetically by author! No, by original language! No, by era! No, by subject! (This is a tiny Foucault joke that was hilarious in my head.) That's roughly where things have ended up so far, but it will probably change as I track down more books.

I've also been knitting! Just not talking about knitting, so I have a bit of a project backlog to work through. Here is part 1:



Stephanie van der Linden's Esther socks, from the Socken Kreativ Liste yahoo group. I made the large size (over 70 sts) to fit over my monster heels, and worked cable crossings on the second sock in the opposite direction from the first, so that each is the mirror image of the other.

The yarn is Classic Elite Alpaca Sox, and it's so soft. I can hardly believe it, I keep putting the socks on my hands to feel them, I knitted and unknitted two halves of socks before I settled on a pattern that would do it justice. It would make the most fantastic sweater, I want to make a sweater out of it and I don't like to knit sweaters. That's about the highest praise I can come up with for a yarn.

The only (only!) thing I'm worried about is how it will wear—it's got some nylon in it, but it's still mostly alpaca, and maybe it will get felty and fuzzy faster than I'd like? I'll report back.