yarn, yarn, yarn

After tweaking and photo editing trial-and-error to get a look that I like, my Etsy is now stocked and open for business!

http://huckleberryknits.etsy.com

I've also listed pre-orders for Inked and Centurion at my HC store. The way these work is that you choose your base yarn(s) and I dye those colorways to order. The pre-orders will close at 11:59 p.m. Pacific Time on Sept 14.

http://hyenacart.com/huckleberryknits

I was planning to offer more colorways as pre-orders, but a wholesale order came in this week, so I had to reschedule some things.

Also, I finally got up a page with information about my more frequently used base yarns. Jeez, that only took me about two years to finish writing. But I guess my taste in base yarns has also changed quite a bit since then, so it all worked out.

Happy weekend!

what I've been up to

I've mostly been knitting lately. Shawls, a new mitt pattern, and restarting my Salina sweater. I've also been working on setting up my Etsy shop. I surprised myself a bit by the banner that I designed; it wasn't what I had in mind when I started, but I got to playing around with gradient fills and this is what I ended up with:



(You'll need to click on the image to see the whole thing; my blog format truncates wide images.)

Nothing in the store yet, but I expect to start listing early next week. I'll also be doing pre-orders for a few colorways like Inked, but I think I'll continue to do those on my HC store.

I also am taking some time to work on a formal business plan and other admin things like a balance sheet. Figuring this stuff out feels like another major milestone, like I'm graduating to real business-owner status. It's kind of exciting.

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.