delusions

I had this grand design of using August to list a bunch of yarn and fiber online. Instead, I finished two orders that were originally scheduled to be completed before Sock Summit, before leaving on a long-planned two-week vacation (camping in the Canadian Okanagan, the Kootenay region, and Fort Spokane in eastern Washington). It was a great trip; I still have to look at my photos and see if I have enough to do a blog post.

And I think I needed to take it easy for a while, too. I had wanted to build on SS momentum, but I'd been operating all summer on an intense schedule with erratic child care, and I needed some time to reconnect with my kiddo. The day when it's completely uncool to hang out with mom is fast approaching, and I need to enjoy these days when his favorite companions are still his parents.

Anyway, I'm sorry if you've been waiting for me to resume online selling. I'm wary about posting online about vacation plans because I feel like it's an open invitation to thieves (am I the only one who's this paranoid?), but I also want to stay in touch with customers. I hope I'm striking a balance by privately informing customers that I'm actively working with about my holiday plans.

But now I'm back to work. Fall wholesale orders have come in, and I'm also prepping for Oregon Flock & Fiber. Many photos have been taken and I'm working my way through them in some new-to-me software that I'm trying out, Adobe Lightroom. Once I get the hang of it, I'm hoping that it will make photo processing both easier and faster. I'm not a natural photographer so I need all the software help I can get. It seems sub-optimal to list yarn on a holiday weekend, so look for listings after Labor Day on my HC store. (Fees at this store are considerably lower than Etsy, so I list my sweater-quantity yarns over there.)

Happy Labor Day to everyone!

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.

Sock Summit on the horizon

I leave for Sock Summit two weeks from today. I'm pretty sure that scientists didn't have SS in mind when they came up with the term "event horizon," but it fits. I have crossed the point of no return, and am now being sucked inexorably into the black hole of prep.

At the same time, I've been trying to not repeat the summer of 2009, where I spent every waking and half-waking moment dyeing for SS, and I felt like I missed out on a lot of the summer. My child is only getting older and at some point soon, he's going to have zero interest in spending time with old mom and dad. So when I scheduled him for camps and so forth this summer, I skipped this week and last in order to take him to daily swim lessons instead. We've hiked almost every day, seen friends, and spent lots of time reading in the sun. Dyeing at night is harder, both because of motivation and because I see the colors a lot better in natural light, but I'm glad I did it. And I don't feel guilty for also feeling glad that he's in camp for the next two weeks.

Tour de Fleece is also on, and my good intentions of spinning both on my spindle and my bicycle every day are out the window. But spindling is something that I can do at midnight, whereas cycling is somewhat less convenient at that hour, so at least I've been making a little progress on that front. I'm working with some undyed CVM and I'm feeling pretty pleased with how I'm improving, even though my joins are slubby monstrosities. It will come with time and practice, I know.

2011 Black Sheep Gathering

Thank you all for a wonderful show! (More photos on my Flickr.) It was a terrific weekend and I loved meeting so many fiber lovers. And particular thanks to those of you who showed me projects and yarns that you'd made from goodies that you'd previously bought from me. I really love seeing what my babies grow up to be. Like this gorgeous shawl from coordinating handspun (BFL/silk in the Red Rocks colorway, Navajo plied to preserve the color runs) and Willow sock yarn:

I know some of you were buying yarn for other stripe studies; looking forward to seeing some of those in the next few months.

It's on to Sock Summit dyeing for me now. I'll be focusing on sock yarns, natch. I'd thought about adding in an 8-ply sock yarn, restocking Cascara MCN sock, and bringing in a new merino/cashmere/silk lace. But being realistic about how much time I have between now and SS, I think I won't be ordering those till after SS. Look for those at OFFF in September, and online shortly afterwards.

Seeing the steady stream of shoppers, and knowing that I have SS coming up, my next door neighbor at the show, Joy of Shepherds Lane (and you all should check out her lovely Gotland fiber and yarn; some Gotland handspun sneaked its way into my car), suggested that I hire some help. I am a little (okay, a lot) afraid of getting entangled in paperwork with L&I and other state agencies during crunch time, but clearly I could get much more done if I had a hand.

analyze this dream

I'm at OFFF--the Oregon Flock & Fiber Festival. It's held at a school, and I have a good booth location; not at the main entrance, but just inside one of the side entrances. My friends are helping me move my stuff in, and I leave them to set up the booth while I go shopping for spindles. Hey, the shoppers can wait while I get this taken care of.

I talk with the vendor and she helps me decide on a Turkish spindle. She points me to a section of the display, and I spend a long time looking at them, trying to pick my favorite design, before I realize that I'm looking at top whorl spindles when I wanted a bottom whorl. I look at the clock and discover that it's noon. The show's been open for two hours so maybe I ought to go check on my booth.

I find where my booth was last year. Some other vendor is there instead. I find one of my friends who was supposed to be helping me. She says, "Oh, they moved you somewhere else. I don't know where all your stuff is."

I walk all over the school looking for my booth. Finally, I find it in the football stadium. Some, but nowhere close to all, of my yarn and fiber is scattered in the first few rows of bleachers. Some people have tossed their coats onto my booth, so I'm flinging them around as I frantically search for my items.

"Hey!" says a man sitting next to my booth. "That's my coat you're throwing on the ground!"

"Well, maybe you shouldn't have put it on top of my yarn!" I retort.

His wife glares at me. "How do you expect anyone to buy your yarn if you're so rude to them?"

I wake up with my heart pounding. I think, maybe I've been thinking a little too much about yarn lately.

Puget Sound LYS Tour

The LYS Tour starts today, and this morning I dropped off a small order at Apple Yarns to supplement their current stock of my yarns. This is all on Willow BFL/nylon sock yarn.

I'm also happy to announce that after the summer show season, I'll be adding another LYS on the tour, NW Handspun, to my retailers. They've got a lovely selection of yarns as well as spinning fibers and tools. My six-year-old is begging for me to bring home a wheel from them ("then I could earn money for you by spinning your fiber, mama!") but I think that might be the final straw to break my husband's back. He has been quite saintly about the boxes of yarns scattered throughout the house, but a wheel would be too much to tolerate, and too big for me to hide.