Lament.

I am waiting on 20 pounds of undyed yarn right now. Half of it is coming from a wholesaler who was supposed to have shipped last Friday, but somehow misunderstood my e-mail that said I didn't want to wait for the backordered yarn that just arrived today. The other half is from a co-op, and part of my order won't arrive till next week so it will be another week before I get it.

Normally it's no big deal. My usual problem is trying to get through all the yarn that I've got in the house. But right now, thanks to my increased financial discipline for business-related spending this year, all I've got is bulky BFL and I'm needing some aran/worsted weight yarn to dye up for early April knitting projects. Bah, I knew this budgeting thing was a bad idea.

A little list of what I've got in mind for projects:

For my guest stocking at Lily Pad Landing, I'm planning to dye my Daydream and Spring Skies colorways. Got Daydream dyed up today on my last skein of Gaia organic merino, but I'm a little uncertain about how it turned out and will have to see what it looks like dry. I also want to do a skirt with my flowering plum embellishment:



but I haven't figured out what I want my base colorway to be. I'd also like to do a boyish knitted item, or maybe a felted purse ... not sure yet.

Then my own congo, Venus Vanguard is doing a Farmers' Market theme around the same time. I need to dye up Eat Your Veggies for a collaboration with Erika of Ramie Baby Designs. I have a Honeycrisp apple colorway in mind, for which I should probably do some experimental dyeing on cheap yarn this weekend. And I want to come up with another colorway, too. Maybe a sweet pea one?

After several months, I'm still thinking about approaching a local yarn store about carrying my yarns. Because they tend to take a significant percentage, I would probably need to raise my prices across the board, which I'm reluctant to do. I feel like I'm at a pretty good price point for my main target audience. But the thought of not spending hours taking photographs and struggling with color correction is awfully appealing.

the Huckleberry colorway

For over a year now, I've been thinking about a huckleberry colorway. I thought it would have purple and green for sure, and possibly some silvery grey like the twigs of a huckleberry bush. But I never got around to dyeing it because there was something missing from the image in my head.

A couple of weeks ago, I was developing a colorway for my spring training swap partner on Ravelry. It was supposed to be deep reds and blues, with some purples where the colors overlapped. But through the magic of kettle dyeing, the experimental skein turned into something quite different and wholly charming. When the skein had dried, I took it into natural daylight and the rich purples and wine reds leaped out at me. It looked just like a bowlful of freshly washed huckleberries. And I knew I'd gotten my namesake colorway.

cousins under the skin--er, overdye

Seems like lately I've been dyeing a lot of warm yellows, so rather than mixing it everytime, I got some golden yellow dye. I was messing around with it one night, trying to get a colorway that was something like this, only with a little turquoise:



Instead, I got this:



And a subsequent try was a little sloppy--I didn't make the color repeats long enough, and everything bled as the dye was setting, so I resorted to my old friend the navy overdye:



Strange to think that these two colorways are actually related. Sort of like the way human beings share 90+ percent of their genes with apes, yet turned out rather differently. That's what's so interesting and frustrating about dyeing: how what you plan is so often not what happens.

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.

Decadence

This colorway was inspired by the movie Chocolat. It was the first movie with Johnny Depp where I really understood why so many people thought he was hot. Since his other movies that I'd seen were What's Eating Gilbert Grape?, Edward Scissorhands, and Ed Wood, maybe that's not so surprising. The movie as a whole was so-so, but the chocolate wonders and watching Depp and Juliette Binoche in action were fantastic.

Anyway, I've tentatively named the colorway Decadence. Dried much lighter-colored than I expected. It's dyed on my new bulky Blue-Faced Leicester wool, which I am really liking--smoothly plied, with a lovely sheen.

back in the dyepot again

After not really feeling like dyeing for, oh, about two months, today I dyed 3 lbs of yarn. Two new colorways, one custom colorway (the soon to be world-famous Eat Your Veggies), and my Spice colorway on the last of my organic Clun Forest yarn. Plus I touched up some yarn that I originally dyed in October, but that I've been too busy/lazy/unmotivated to fix until now.

Photos this weekend! I'm especially excited about my new chocolate-themed colorway, for February's movie stocking at Venus Vanguard. It's inspired by the movie Chocolat (not to mention the pound or two of Endangered Species chocolate that showed up on my doorstep this week), but someone well-known in HC-land already has a colorway named that, so I'll need to come up with something else.

tedium

My neck and shoulder still hurt, so not much is happening on the knitting front. I did decide what to do with the aran cabled shrug--I'm going to knit the shrug just in stockinette. The yarn is interesting enough on its own to carry a plain sweater, I think, and it will also help with the probable yarn shortage. Now I just have to heal, finish the boy's gansey, and then finally get to a sweater for myself.

And THEN I can figure out what to do with my black aran BFL. It's one of a kind yarn--my very favorite BFL that I've ever had. Soft and plush, and a true aran weight. Not the same as the old school, cottony BFL, though it bears more resemblance to that than the silky thin stuff we've been getting in the past year. I got half a kilo of naturally colored black through a co-op about 1.5 years ago, and spotted another half-kilo from the same co-op on the Wooly Wonder swap board a few weeks ago, so now I've got enough for a sweater for me. Oh, and I also managed to get my hands on two kilos of undyed from that co-op, too. Woot!

Today I am dedicating my childfree half-day to figuring out my 2007 income and expenses. After last year's tax-time, I vowed to do a better job of tracking the money stuff in 2007. Ha. Ha. Ha. I've only gotten through July in my PayPal account and my neck is killing me and I want to put my eyes out. Plus I still have paper receipts to go through. Waaaaahh.