recent orders

After SS, I took a few days off, and then wrapped up a couple of orders that I wasn't able to finish before the show. This morning I dropped off a small sock yarn order for Apple Yarns. I was a little startled to see that the 60-plus skeins that I delivered in March and May have dwindled down to six. Thanks, knitters and crocheters! I'm not sure how long this new stock will last. They're mostly apple colorways, which has really put me in the mood for autumn.



Earlier this week, I shipped off a group order. This one had some older colorways, which were interesting to revisit.



Several new projects, big and small, are in the works. It should be an interesting fall!

Sock Summit 2011

In a word: AWESOME. Sold scads of yarn, saw old friends, made some new ones, ate great food, drank great beer, and was surrounded by color and fiber and lovely people.

A few photos of the booth I was sharing with my friend Diane of BugSnugger. I had been playing with my white balance in my photography class earlier and forgot to reset it, and there's only so much photo editing can do, unfortunately. Well, a picture mumbles a thousand words.

My side of the booth:



Diane's side:



I did a demo on how to knit with silk hankies. I'd been wondering if I could really talk for 45 minutes about it, especially once I looked at my notes that I wrote up a month ago, and discovered that I'd only jotted down four bullet points. But it went pretty well, I think--I had samples for everyone and people seemed to have fun playing with them.

There were three things I really wanted from SS, and I got them all: a Queen Bee Creations Truckette (the design is called Wisp), a Jenkins spindle (I got a Swan in a beautifully grained, walnut-brown mora wood), and a row-counting stitch marker, which I haven't found in my luggage yet. I also picked up some more Lo-Lo bars, which were first recommended to me by a 13-year-old boy at Black Sheep Gathering. If a prepubescent boy gushes about a moisturizer, you know it's got to be good.



And no trip to Portland is complete without visiting Powell's. While dyeing this summer, I've been rereading the Aubrey-Maturin series, this time as MP3s read by my audiobook boyfriend Simon Vance. So I picked up a copy of Cochrane: The Life and Exploits of a Fighting Captain, the real-life inspiration for Aubrey.

And because it just seemed so appropriate for Sock Summit weekend, I had to get a copy of Yarn. A man must locate a highly illegal and psychedelic yarn and make a coat out of it in one day. Having been surrounded by yarn junkies for four days straight at that point, there was really nothing I could do except buy it.



I took three classes at SS. The first, Photographing Your Fiber, would have been really useful about five years ago, when I was blundering my way through self-taught product photography. Still, I picked up several great tips, and the instructor, Franklin Habit, seemed to be a really interesting and pleasant person in addition to being funny (which I already suspected from his blog).

The second class was a one-hour wonder on natural dyeing with Kristine Vejar, the extremely talented dyer behind A Verb for Keeping Warm. It was a little peek into an endlessly fascinating world, but I'm a little afraid to go down that path for fear that I'll never come back out. And I have so much more appreciation for the challenges of production dyeing with natural dyestuffs.

The third class was a lecture by Judith MacKenzie on how to choose a fleece for sock yarn. It was the second time that I'd heard her speak, and she is just such an amazing source of knowledge. I admit that the content on the title topic was a little self-evident: choose a wool that will hold up to abrasion, and that has a lot of crimp. But she just knows so much, and I'm glad I had my netbook along for notetaking.