Welcome to my mess

I've been telling you for ages about my mess upstairs.  For lack of better things to post about, today I've decided to share it with you.  Here we go.

First...up the stair case (this is north). 
Note the bi-fold door part way up.  It was added after we discovered that Bob has a penchant for eating all things fibery.  See the hand spun yarns hanging along the wall at the top of the stairs?  There used to be lots more.  The entire bottom row had to leave because Bob (pre-door), had happily chewed his way across the bottoms of each skein and left me with hanks of two yard lengths of yarn.

Next...when you get to the top of the stairs and turn around, here's what you see. 
It's the south wall, which holds some of my colored hand spun yarns and my stash of Malabrigo that's still in reeled skeins.  See the wool drying in the foreground?  That's resting on the chicken wire top we had to build over the staircase, so you know who couldn't find a way around the door.  Yes, it's true...despite his 20 lb. girth, he can still fly through the air with the greatest of ease.  As it turns out, this is a great place to dry wool, especially in the winter when I can't do it outdoors.

From this same spot, looking to the left (or north east),
these cubbies and humungous bags hold my commercial yarns, along with my handspun yarns that have been wound into balls.  My theory:  if you keep the floor covered in bags, you don't have to guilt about vacuuming.  Also if you don't see what you have, you forget to use it or be inspired by it.  Once I put all my stuff in those big green plastic containers, and once it was out of sight, well...I went and bought more because I forgot what I had.  Sound familiar?

The southeast view: 
these are dyed fibers I use for carding batts and other spinning fun.  There's lots more in big bags all over the floor, not easy to get in the photo with the lens I was using.  Much of this stuff came from my friends HollyEQQ and Sandy Ryan.  I love their stuff and Sandy's farm is animal friendly.  Check it out.

Here's my Rio Grande wheel
and the current wool I'm spinning.  These are roving scraps I purchased during the Circle the Wagons for Holly auction on Sandy Ryan's website.  There's still some great stuff left...go take a peek.  I love my Rio Grande the best of all my wheels...my stash upstairs (in the spirit of sharing) of wheels includes a Louet (S10 I think it is), a couple of antique wheels, and a Jensen D30 production wheel.  I love them all for different reasons.  You don't have just one tool in your tool box, right?

My carder is one of the best investments I've ever made...it is from Louet. 
I have a Patrick Green Fanci-Carder I bought when they were first on the market (it is the first one they made...bought it from Paula after she demonstrated it at SOAR that year).  It lays fallow somewhere, because after taking Lexi's Pluckyfluff workshop, the Louet is my new passion because you can shove all means of stuff through it and make the most fun batts.  Oh...see the row of wire drawers in the background behind the carding table?  They hold my collection of soon to be extinct (I hope) novelty yarns.  I am debating cutting them all up and using them in fiber blends or saving them in the garage until my kids find them in my estate sale and wonder what the heck was going on when I bought them (temporary lapse of sanity?  well...some of them are nice, but then some of them are...well...I'll stop here).

The south wall yarn from a different perspective. 
Painting and easel represent some fun I had a few years ago, when I mistakenly thought I had time to study oil painting instead of running my shop.  I keep this up to remind me to get back to it before I die.  I loved this brief period of fun and have almost as many paints and canvases as I do yarns and fleeces.  Color me compulsive.

And now, I'm off to go upstairs and spin for the rest of the day.  Thanks for coming along on my tour!