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.

six weeks till Black Sheep

I leave for Black Sheep Gathering six weeks from today, and much to my surprise, I'm on track with my preparation. Amazing how a skein or braid of roving here and there can add up when you start early enough. My goal was to bring triple the amount of fiber that I had last year, and it looks like I'm on pace to have closer to quadruple. My BFL/silk blend (like the photo above) is definitely popular, so I'll have a lot of that.

What a change from how I felt around this time last year. During the runup to BSG, I was stressed about where my business was going, what I was investing for little emotional return, never getting enough sleep, and so on. If Black Sheep didn't go well, I was going to quit.

But it did go well. Better than I had dreamed of. I'd hoped to equal my Sock Summit take; I ended up selling almost 50% more. And even better were the comments that people made about my yarn, and my fiber. Those words, sometimes said directly to me, sometimes overheard as friends were talking to each other, have carried me through a lot of late nights.

And now I'm a full-time dyer, thanks to the magic rejuvenation of BSG. Thank you, Black Sheep friends, for reinspiring me. <3

honest, Fate, I'm not trying to tempt you

I'm afraid to say this, but I think I might be caught up. I mean, not totally, as in I have nothing on the dye schedule, because I still have a lot, but that sense of panic has eased up. Fiber club is shipped, yarn club is shipped, and three wholesale orders (including the one shown above, which is now up at Pulling at Strings, here and here) went out the door last month. I have a couple of small custom orders to work on tomorrow, and then I might safely say that I'm back to my normal level of frenzy. I'm starting to think ahead a little bit, including hiring a local friend/web designer to do a standalone site for me, so that's a good sign.

I need to build in a little more leeway into my schedule. I'm not sure exactly how. My husband did offer to go back to a 4-10 schedule so he could help me wind yarn and reskein one day a week. That would be a huge boost to my productivity; I hope it works out.

In my ongoing efforts to prevent the Perfect from being the enemy of the Good Enough, I'll be listing a few things tonight on both Etsy and my HC store. Still trying to find the balance among building show inventory, completing wholesale orders, and tending to my own retail sales. We'll get there.

I'm not going to whine ...

but I will say that taxes this year are hurting my head. Plus I'm pretty sure that I have to figure out estimated taxes for the 1st quarter of 2011 by tomorrow. I don't know if the tax return deadline of April 18 applies to estimated taxes, too, and the IRS web site is down right now (no surprise). [Edit: the estimated tax deadline is also 4/18.]

I do think that I will finally be able to set up a decent tracking system for expenses so that Schedule C will be a lot easier to do in future years. I've been browsing different software programs, but I think that if I can just get the right spreadsheets set up, consolidate my spending to downloadable electronic formats (i.e., my business checking and PayPal), and never use cash for business expenses, it will be so much easier. I'm also planning to spend some time reading sites like Money Crashers and Basic Accounting Help to figure out some of this stuff. I'm actually feeling a little excited about learning more about accounting, which is a first.

It really wasn't my intent to leave taxes till this late, I swear. We usually do them in March, after I've recovered from the first round of tax frenzy prompted by the state business tax deadline of January 31. But my husband had the flu for a week before I came down with it, so that was three weeks where the household was just trying to tread water with one functional adult.

On a related business-y note, we've launched the My Better Earth blog, which focuses on helping handcrafting businesses to grow. I'm one of the primary writers, so some of these business-related ramblings may evolve into full-fledged posts over there. We'll be posting about twice a week at first to build up some more content, and then settle down to a weekly schedule.

2011 Whidbey spin-in

2011 Whidbey spin-in, a photo by connormarie on Flickr.

I spent 10 days during the second half of March in bed with the flu, which was pretty much zero fun and I had to miss my Cookie A class because of it (sob). Then as soon as I got back on my feet, I was catching up with a few projects and prepping for the Whidbey Weavers Guild's spin-in this weekend. I tried to tell myself to just be happy with what I already had dyed, but of course I didn't listen. At any rate, I remembered both to bring my camera and to actually use it to take a photo, which is the first time I've been two out of two in quite a while. This photo was taken after almost the silk hankies had been snatched up (I think I was out of them within the first hour of the spin-in).

It was a fun weekend--great to meet more local spinners and knitters, including some people that I've known online for a while, as well as seeing some familiar faces! It was the 40th anniversary of the spin-in, and one of the original organizers confirmed that the name had been inspired by all the 1960s sit-ins (I'd wondered). Judith MacKenzie was the featured spinner this weekend, and it was an education to listen to her. (How nice that the vendors were able to listen in, too!) I don't own a wheel so her talk on wheel mechanics was completely new to me, and I learned a lot. I wish I'd taken notes. Judith imparted so much information in a disarmingly casual manner. One thing she said that I found particularly interesting was that the diameter of a spindle's shaft is directly correlated with the diameter of the yarn that you're able to spin. I had thought it had more to do with the spindle weight, and there's probably some connection there, but not as direct a correlation as the shaft. And that the bigger the wheel, the finer the yarn you could spin.

I'll be spending this week dyeing the March (I know) fiber club, the April yarn club selections, wrapping up a wholesale order, and entertaining my child on his spring break. I was thinking about dyeing some silk hankies tonight, but I think maybe I've earned a break.