buttons

I'm almost finished with my Vine Yoke cardigan (such a fun knit! Fast, uses less than 4 skeins, and really interesting construction. Plus I'm really liking my new worsted superwash BFL) and I'm on the hunt for buttons. I don't know if I'm just too picky, but I'm having a devil of a time finding round, dark brown, wooden buttons that are 1.5" wide. Sounds so simple, right? Apparently boring, classic buttons are not currently in style.

I saw some cool reclaimed wood buttons at Madrona, but decided not to buy them because I didn't have a project in mind and I have way too much clutter in my life as it is. Well, never again; from now on, I am an official button hoarder.

I've been to the yarn shops in town, I've been to Joann's, and I've been through dozens of pages on Etsy. Finally (and I should have tried this first, of course), I search Ravelry, which produced a couple of options:

* Woodturner's Etsy shop, for custom wooden buttons. But I need 9 of them, and of course I want them by the time the sweater is blocked and dry (the end of the week), so not my first choice. I want to wear this sweater pronto.

* Maiwa. I've been hearing cool things about their workshops for a couple of years now, and looking at the photo on their buttons page is bringing out all sorts of covetousness. It wouldn't be too crazy to drive an hour and brave the spring weekend traffic on Granville Island just to shop for buttons, which might or might not be what I want, would it?

In other news, I have been officially confirmed as a vendor for Black Sheep Gathering in Eugene, OR and Midwest Fiber and Folk in Grayslake, IL. I've calculated that I need to dye about eight skeins a night from now till BSG to boost my inventory. So what am I doing tonight? Shopping for buttons, of course.

just a few more to go

I have just 17 skeins to go, and I'll be finished with my current wholesale order. Well, dyeing it, anyway. Still need to do a little reskeining of the really tangled hanks, and all the labeling. My husband accidentally threw one of the skeins in with the laundry today, requiring a redye (argh! yes, it's superwash, but the results after heavy agitation aren't pretty) so I think I can get him to help me with the labeling. He owes me.

My yarns will be debuting with two retailers over the next few weeks, so in preparation I've started a Ravelry group for my yarns and fibers. I'm kicking it off with a knit-along and contest. Make a project with my yarn (or spin some of my fiber), complete it by December 31, post it in my group, and get entered into a random drawing for a store credit worth $20. Get cracking!

okay, one more post today

I just noticed this in the Ravelry store:



The "dis" part disappears when the mug is filled with hot coffee/tea. Genius! Since I only become fully functional (and agreeable) in the morning after a cup of coffee, I had to have it. And while I was at it, I also caved and bought the Ravelry hooded sweatshirt that I've been eyeing for three months. I am weak.

F5, F5, F5.

I have been hopefully refreshing my Ravelry cart all day, just in case the store opens. I don't know why, but I keep thinking that if only I could buy a Ravelry lapel pin, tote bag, and T-shirt, I could snap out of this funk that I've been in for two days.

Anyway! Enough moping about the lack of retail therapy. I've finally managed to get some good photos of my custom dyeing order. I took some photos yesterday, but I had the not-so-brilliant idea of using a brushed metal tray as the background ... so the yarn got nicely framed by blurry reflections of my face. Whoops. Makes me think of those "accidental" reflections of naked photographers in eBay product photos that were all the rage for a while.

All of these colorways are on bulky Blue-Faced Leicester. I really like this yarn--smooth, silky, and a fast knit.

Copper Patina:


Bloom (really like how this one came out):


Azure:


Decadence:

no knitting, just photo editing

After three hours, I finally managed to get everything uploaded for my guest stocking at Lily Pad Landing tomorrow. I have no idea why it took me so long to edit photos and come up with names.



I did get distracted by the pooling thread on Ravelry. I really hate ugly pooling, and a lot of the photos people posted would certainly have qualified in my book. Though I was fascinated by how one woman deliberately manipulated pooling to create a chevron effect:



I'll have to keep that concept in mind the next time I run into some uncooperative yarn.

the siren call of Ravelry

This afternoon, I was going to either pick my kiddo up early from preschool and take him swimming, or make shepherd's pie for dinner. But instead, I spent the last hour updating my projects on Ravelry and browsing my friends' newest projects. That place is such a time drain.

I keep forgetting to take photos of my kiddo's gansey, which I finished in January after my shoulder finally recovered enough for me to knit again. At first he complained that it was "too yarny," yanking and pulling at the funnel neck collar. But he seems to have gotten used to it, and will happily wear it. I still need to take photos of all the details, like the diamond gusset and the triangle neck gussets. Those Channel Island knitters certainly were clever about those little comfort-enhancing additions. I love feeling like I'm part of a centuries-old tradition by incorporating these features into a modern sweater.



I finished up a pair of cargo longies this week. They use my Moonlight colorway, and have a cute little cargo pocket on the left leg. I love the button that I was able to find--it was exactly what I was looking for.

October roundup

Ravelry's project feature is proving to be unexpectedly useful. Before, I had never tracked how much I could crank out in a month. I always figured myself at a pair of longies every five to seven days, so I thought I was only making four or five pairs each month. Thanks to Ravelry, I now know that in October, I knitted seven pairs of longies plus a pair of fingerless gloves that ate up three days because I kept experimenting with different patterns. I also got two other pairs of longies started in the last few days of October, both of which were giving me gauge problems. If I hadn't had to repeatedly unravel one pair because I was trying to solve both sizing and pooling issues (the yarn was considerably thinner than its label would have you believe), I might have been able to finish off another pair.

Anyway. It's nice to know that I'm producing much more than I thought I could, even when I run into unexpected snags.

joining the ravelry

Got my Ravelry invite last week (my ID is huckleberrymama) and it was fun till today. I've started listing my projects, looked at other people's projects with the same yarn to see what needle size they're using, and browsed for sweater patterns for my kiddo. A really nice resource, with cool features like automatic links to people's Flickr accounts and their blog posts about their projects, so you can really get a good sense of how a pattern will look in a variety of yarns and what sort of pitfalls you might run into while knitting it up. It organizes the enormous explosion in knitting blogs and photos in an incredibly useful way. Plus (NERD ALERT) I like looking at what my friends are working on, and what yarn they just bought.

But then today I fell in love. I discovered the ISO/destashing board. Now that's the way to a girl's heart. Not to mention her PayPal account.