My Strange Addiction...

Oh my beloved Hobby Lobby, you are my drug of choice.  I adore you and all of the wonderful goodness that lives within your four walls.  You are almost as great of a time sucker as Pinterest!  The only thing that saves me from setting up a tent and living in your store is the fact that the closest one is 45 miles away(ah yes--the joys of living in a small town in Wyoming!)

I own a lot of yarn and there is really no reason for me to go out and buy more.  But, yarn is addictive--like crack cocaine.  And Hobby Lobby has such a truly wonderful yarn section.  I thought that I was safe from the allure of buying more super soft yarn because Hobby Lobby is 45 miles away.  I thought that Wal Mart was the only place in Laramie to buy reasonably priced yarn and, until they redo their yarn section, I have bought all of the good stuff they have to offer.  Well, I was wrong.  One day, I was visiting  Bart's Flea Market, minding my own business and not even thinking about yarn at all.  Then, I walked around a corner and discovered the discounted yarn shop.  It was so wonderful that I thought I was hallucinating.  I had to touch the yarn to make sure it was real.  I ended up staying there for 25 minutes, feeling different yarns and thinking of how wonderful it would be to make something out of them.  I might have stayed there forever if my mother had not come along and found me, and brought me out of my yarn stupor so that we could go home.

You see, I have this yarn touching problem.  I love, love, love soft yarn and I yearn to touch it so that I can enjoy its amazing texture.  I know this sounds creepy, but I promise you that I do not break into stores just to caress the yarns in the yarn aisle!  You really don't need to sign me up for that My Strange Addiction show on TLC.

What I do, instead of breaking into yarn shops, is to hoard yarn.  I have a walk in closet in my room, and the top shelves are filled with bags and plastic totes overflowing with yarns of many colors.  I make lots of hats and ear warmers, but I never make a dent in my yarn collection because I keep buying more yarn!

How will I be saved from this awful addiction?  How many hats will I have to make without buying new yarn before I run out?  What if there is a world-wide yarn shortage and I run out because I have made myself stop buying yarn?  What if my brain explodes because I think way too much about things that don't even matter?

Hippie Project?

As many of you already know, I crochet and knit in my spare time and to relieve stress.  While exploring the Internet the other day and looking at upcycling ideas on Pinterest, I found "tee-shirt" yarn.  A lovely Hawaiian lady gave explicit instructions on how to create this yarn and it looked pretty easy to me.  I decided to give it a try.

Well, it wasn't quite as easy as she made it look.  After several tries of cutting up tee-shirts and getting a bunch of little strips instead of one long string of yarn, I decided to examine her tutorial once more.  I found out what I was doing wrong(cutting straight across instead of in a diagonal) and proceeded to make several balls of tee-shirt yarn. 

Now the question was, where to get tee-shirts to cut up? I knew that Randy and the kids would not appreciate me stealing their tee-shirts to make my yarn, and I had already gone through my tee-shirts to make the first few balls.  Luckily for me, I love to go shopping at our consignment store here in town, and they often have free stuff outside of the store(can you say "crap that no one would even buy for a low, low price but Andrea will snatch up because it's free?")  One day as I drove by, there was a giant garbage bag of tee-shirts out in the free stuff!  I brought them home, washed them up, and proceeded to make yarn to my heart's content. 

So far, I have been crocheting baskets out of this yarn.  It will work well for bags too I think, because it is nice and heavy.  My family has been teasing me something terrible about my new yarn.  I have been reminded that ladies in the 1800's made rugs out of old clothes, and that recycling tee-shirts is probably something that makes me a hippie.  The hippie comment got me thinking.  There are tons of hippies in Laramie, why not sell them my tee-shirt baskets and bags?  So, this is my future plan.  I have only completed one basket so far and am working on a second.  When I get it done, I will put a picture of it on here for you to see.

By the way, after an hour of work with the shop-vac, I got all of the baking soda out of the carpet!  Victory is mine!