I'm Your Huckleberry Yarn Club

Yarn club is starting up again this month! Eight slots will open up at noon ET this Friday.

http://hyenacart.com/prod_details.php?id=89259&vid=465

This club is designed to be super flexible. You get two colorway options and a variety of base yarns to choose from. Get just one skein or as many as you want. This is an every other month club, so you won’t be bombarded with yarn constantly. I’m considering doing another club on alternate months, for those of you who *do* want to be bombarded monthly.

During this round of subscriptions, yarn will ship in August, October, and December. I can promise an apple-themed colorway for one of them, probably October. :)

Please let me know if you have any questions. Thanks!

benefit for a friend: custom dye slot auction

A fellow dyer, Kim of Green Strings/Sugarbubbie, has been going through some tough times. The latest blow came when her four-year-old son was diagnosed with Stage 3 cancer. He is currently receiving treatment three hours from home. Her husband receives his final unemployment check this month. They are in a very difficult situation, as you might imagine.

Her business partner has organized a charity auction to help Kim and her family. I'm donating a custom dyeing slot with my Silk & Silver base yarn. Bidding starts at $20 and includes shipping anywhere in the world.

The link to my auction:
http://hyenacart.com/prod_details.php?id=20707&vid=2213

More info about Kim and the reasons for the auctions:
http://hyenacart.com/prod_details.php?id=43513&vid=2213

General link to the auction items:
http://hyenacart.com/sugarbubbie

There are some really wonderful things being offered at this auction. Please come take a look. Thank you!

2010 Midwest Fiber and Folk

I'm back now from MWFF, and full of energy and excitement. I had a fun show! I shared a booth with my friend Diane of Bugsnugger, dyer of all things fresh and pretty. She was awesome and brought all the fixtures, though during setup, as we kept pulling skeins out of our bags and arranging them on shelves, we came to the unsettling realization that we had too much yarn for our fixtures. So we went and bought new ones. Twice.

This is what 750-odd skeins and braids look like (all photos are courtesy of Diane; I only remembered to take one photo all weekend):



Our friends Lori of Alfabette Zoope and Jen of Starving Artist Bazaar were also at the fair. This is what four vendors look like on the last day of a show:



Left to right: me, Jen, Lori, Diane

My side of the booth:


Diane's side:


A skein of her Pulling at Strings colorway on Posh MCN might have come home with me. *whistles*

Our shared rack of worsted, plus my friend's Bitterroot shawl that I knitted, and my Annis shawlette:



I really love meeting people and seeing the beautiful handmade items that they wear. It was a surprise bonus to meet customers of mine from Sock Summit. One even brought a lace shawl--the lovely Prairie Rose pattern--that she'd made from my yarn that she'd purchased at Sock Summit, especially to show me. How cool!

And I met some people from my tribe. You know who you are. Especially the ones who I showed my Centurion colorway to, and who instantly got the Battlestar Galactica reference. So very awesome.

There's also one more noteworthy development that came out of this weekend, but more about that later.

On my list this week is to stock some of the yarn I brought home with me (the rest is in transit from Illinois), start dyeing the latest wholesale order for my LYS here in town, and to continue setting up my Etsy shop. My initial game plan is to stock lace, fingering, and sport yarns, as well as spinning fiber at Etsy, while leaving longies yarn over at HC, where my current storefront is. I would be sad to leave HC completely, but I know that my creative direction is going somewhere else for the most part, so I'm going to give Etsy a go and see where it leads.

Thank you to all the people who visited our booth! A great weekend with great people, surrounded by beautiful fiber--it's hard to ask for more than that.

leaving on a jet plane

My yarn arrived safely in Illinois today, I'm happy to say. I had visions of my yarn strewn for miles behind an oblivious FedEx truck somewhere in the Great Plains.

I fly out tomorrow with my five-year-old, armed with my new netbook, my even newer DVD drive, and four episodes of Bill Nye the Science Guy. My child is obsessed with him. He's adopted Bill's nervous laugh, draws pictures of him in preschool, and thinks in the metric system. Seriously. He has no grasp of feet or ounces, but describe something in meters or kilograms and he has a much better frame of reference.

Oh, and I'll be checking a duffel bag full of yarn and fiber. A few examples:

Crystal, on merino/tencel fiber. This sold at BSG before I even had a chance to photograph my booth, but I think I was able to capture the colorway again.



Huckleberry, on Willow BFL/nylon. Please excuse the fuzzies on the yarn.



And Weeping Willow, dyed here on Blue Mist BFL/suri alpaca. Love the subtle variations in the green.



I have some more fiber to tag, and then off to bed. I have time to pack my clothes tomorrow. I hope.

sprinting to the finish line, again

Somebody PLEASE shoot me the next time I decide to sign up for two shows three weeks apart. I sold more than I expected at Black Sheep (a good problem to have!) and consequently have less to bring to Midwest Fiber and Folk than I wanted, especially in the roving/top department. I'm shipping the bulk of my yarn on Wednesday. I'll try to make up some of the difference this week, but I don't know. Girl's gotta sleep once in a while.

On the knitting front, I'm working on a test knit of a new shawl pattern (Aase's Shawl by Kristi Holaas), with a new trial yarn, a silk/merino laceweight. I have discovered that I can't count very well when I'm falling asleep between stitches. Have you seen the photos of webs spun by spiders on different drugs? My first attempt at the drop stitch body of the shawl looked like a spider doped up on caffeine:



I'm also working on knee-high lace socks (why? I'm not sure, except that I got this vision of myself wearing a pair of leaf green socks with a black skirt, and now I must have them).

And to round out my list of half-done projects, I have really stalled out on my cardigan. I brought it with me to Hawaii in May, and finished the back, one front, and one sleeve there. When I got home, I knitted the other front and sleeve. Tried to put them all together, and realized the ones I made at home were too big. Unraveled and took out the extra pattern repeats, and tried again. Still bigger than their Hawaii counterparts. I think it must have been the heat and humidity that changed the tension of my knitting. Obviously, the easiest solution is to fly back to Hawaii and reknit the sweater there. Yeah, if only.

2010 Black Sheep Gathering

After a week of late nights (3 a.m. was an early bedtime), it was a relief to get to Eugene. I was ridiculously excited by the prospect of being unable to dye anything, which would allow me to go to bed at a decent hour with no guilt.

Setup went smoothly, thanks to the help of Elizabeth, who demonstrated an amazing ability to construct wire cubes in no time flat. Here's what the booth ended up looking like:





The red sweater in the top right overexposed corner is my Vine Yoke cardigan. It got a lot of attention this weekend; I probably could've sold a hundred copies of the pattern if I'd had it. And deservedly so: it's such a clever, fun design to knit.

The show went swimmingly. I talked to so many interesting people, saw faces I knew from Sock Summit (hi Alexandra!), and generally had a great time. I have to thank Amy for taking pity on me and offering to watch my booth on Saturday so I could grab some lunch. She even stayed around after I got back, hoping to give me some time to actually eat my food (instead of just looking at it longingly out of the corner of my eye), but the stream of customers didn't let up. Which was a problem I was perfectly willing to have.

I also chatted with two women from Lantern Moon for a while. They came back a little later in the day and offered me a pair of LM knitting needles, just because they liked me and my yarn. It was such a kind and sweet offer--I was really touched. I chose a pair of rosewood circulars from their Destiny line, because I used to play oboe, and the finest oboes are made from rosewood. The circs are beautiful and sleek and wonderfully light; I'm really looking forward to using them!

I didn't have time to do much shopping while I was there, so I came home with only a new wooden shawl pin and a tin of hand balm. It's okay though; it's not like I'm going to run out of yarn anytime in the next 200 years.

Thank you, Black Sheep Gathering, for a wonderful weekend! I'll be back next year.

the 15-day countdown

Two weeks from tomorrow, I'm heading to Eugene for Black Sheep Gathering. Eeek. For some reason, I thought I had three weeks left, but I was wrong. I just got back from two weeks in Hawaii and now I am in serious, get-down-to-business mode. I've been dyeing up some BFL/silk top and it is the prettiest stuff ever. Soft and radiant--it makes any colorway look good.

Aside from dyeing, I've been working on pulling together my booth. I figured out that I'll be able to connect my laptop to my non-smart cell phone via Bluetooth so I can do real-time credit card processing. I'd been worried about getting CC approval without a wireless connection, and having to wait till night to process transactions, only to discover that some didn't go through. My $20 Nokia 2760 continues to surprise me with everything that it can do.

Still working on samples. For the life of me, I cannot decide what to do with my Silk & Silver yarn. I've tried two different shawl patterns now (Citron and Queen of the WAves), and neither one was what I wanted. I love this colorway but for some reason, I can't figure out what I want to make with it.