Today’s question for our blog readers is: when you feel manic what do you do? Do you call everyone in your address book just to chat? Do you clean? Do you go shopping? Do you cut your hair real short and dye it a wild color?

(And those of you without documented neurosis are more than welcome to answer as well, everyone has a manic moment at some point in their life.)

I can tell you that at one point or another I have done all the things I listed as examples. (This is how I ended up with a pixie cut dyed bright blue when I was 19 and have several credit cards that are so full they could spontaneously combust and I wouldn’t be surprised.)

Gail cleans and organizes. I have left her house at six p.m. one night and come back at ten a.m. the following morning to discover that the entire house has been reorganized. Books are moved, yarn is moved and color coded (and organized by brand and weight….) the coffee mugs have been moved, the coffee pot is on a different counter, things I thought I left on the desk have been filed. (I use the word ‘filed’ loosely here.) Gail is a master at organization. When Gail gets manic she does two things really really well; talk and organize.

My favorite thing that Gail has ever done in a manic OCD moment is color code her balls of Noro.

 

She literally has hundreds of tiny little balls of expertly separated colors. All those gorgeous flowing color ways that we love about Noro? Gone. Neatly compartmentalized into a whole color wheel of segregated little balls of only one color. This is awesome when you’re doing the wonderful little felted flowers and leaves that are on several of our purses.

When I met Gail her house was a lovely fluffy explosion of fiber. It was everywhere, in every corner, in every book shelf, on every surface. I walked into her dining room one day and there was even yarn stuffed into what looked like a beautiful antique wine cabinet.

Several weeks later I came to visit Gail and she had done this:

All the yarn was put neatly in one room, separated by brand, fiber content and color.

Her books where all lined up neatly in her china cabinet and organized by type of craft (knitting, cake decorating, decoupage, etc.)

Never again will I underestimate the power of a few manic hours and a severe case of OCD.

So, now that we’ve shared a little bit about what we do when we’re feeling particularly crazy, let us know what you do.

Also, more details on our contest are coming up very soon! I’ll give you one more little hint about it though to get your brains running the right direction:

Think of your least favorite person ever. How would you render their likeness in yarn? Would you be willing to do it for $500 worth of yarn? (I’d be willing to do it for free and call it therapy, but hey the yarn would be gravy!) What kinds of details would you need to add to make it clear that you were knitting that specific person?

Be sure to visit our forum and submit your vote in our poll and let us know what kind of yarn you’d like to see included in the prize yarns! If the yarn you’d like to see isn’t on that list, leave a comment over there about what kind of yarn you would like to see and we’ll take it into consideration.

“I joke around a lot about the manic times because they’re funny. We manics do outrageous things and it is part of our colorful nature.”

-Patty Duke

This entry was posted on Monday, February 25th, 2008 at 12:52 pm and is filed under General News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.