new retailer, Yarnover, new listings

In the upper Midwest? Huckleberry Knits has a new retailer: Darn Knit Anyway in Stillwater, MN. They'll be at Yarnover (tomorrow!) and Shepherd's Harvest with my Willow BFL/nylon sock yarn, Cascara MCN fingering, and lots of spinning fiber. And silk hankies!

A few of the silk blends and BFL braids that DKA will have:

I also put up some new Etsy listings today: Polwarth/silk yarn, silk/merino, luscious yak/merino fiber ...

Have a great weekend!

thank you, self!

I love it when I put on a jacket I haven't worn in a while, and find money that I'd forgotten about. Sometimes, as a little treat to my future self, I deliberately leave a five or ten in a coat pocket at the end of the season.

A couple of years ago, when I knew I'd be quitting my job sooner rather than later, I bought myself a pair of my favorite Keens, and stored them away for the days when I'd no longer have a steady paycheck and might not feel comfortable about buying nice shoes anymore. I just broke them out a couple of weeks ago, and I love my old self for being so kind and thoughtful.

The latest example: I finally got my current wholesale order to the point where I felt okay about switching gears to working on taxes today. I steeled myself for the tedious task of sorting my PayPal expenses into the various categories--only to find that I'd already done it in January, before I'd even received this current crush of wholesale orders. You have no idea how grateful I was to my January self for having done that.

Now I need to think of something nice to do for myself during my next time crunch. Even though it was just planning ahead, it feels like a friend took time out of her day to think of a wonderful present for me.

closing the shop for the weekend

I'm vending at the Whidbey Weavers' annual spin-in this weekend (Oak Harbor High School, open to the public from 11 - 1 on Saturday, $15 otherwise for both days, including spinning lectures and clinics). All the fiber at my Etsy is coming with me, and I was going to deactivate only those listings to avoid duplicate sales, but now I'm thinking my head might explode between now and the spin-in, so it might be simplest to just put the entire shop in vacation mode.

Anyway, if you've had your eye on something, now would be a good time to get it, because it may not be there after this weekend.

Look for some fiber listings the second week of April. I'll try to be consistent about listing fiber over the next couple of months, but Black Sheep Gathering is getting ever closer, so listings will probably tail off as we get towards June. Someday I'll have enough stock to both list AND hoard for shows, but today is not that day.

Instead, today is my last day of dyeing before the show, and you can tell. The dyeing plan never survives contact with show week, and there are all sorts of random things in various stages of dyeing scattered about the studio. The clinical observer part of my brain has noticed that the last few days before a show can produce some really interesting colorways. Cleaning up my dye table becomes a low priority, so splatters of color end up juxtaposed that would never have occurred to me otherwise. Leftover dye solutions get mixed together, the wrong dye bottles get grabbed, and oftentimes beautiful, non-reproducible things happen. They get released into the wild at shows, and sometimes that's the last I see of them.

The Four Commandments of Dyeing Fiber (Roving)

I have recently been trying to spin some fiber from another dyer, who has a reputation for good fiber prep. And I have to say that I'm a little shocked that people would consider this to be good. Yes, anyone can have a bad day and turn out something that's not up to their usual standard. But I had two braids, and to let two of these slip through the QA process seems like it's a standard rather than an exception.

One braid is a total loss--the felted bits of Wensleydale are knot-like, and despite the gorgeous colors, I've given up on spinning it. Disappointing, because I was looking forward to spinning my first longwool. But hey, maybe it was me, as a newer spinner working with a more challenging fiber.

Because the first braid was a waste of money, I was determined to spin the other braid, which was 100% BFL, a fiber I have dyed hundreds of times and am very familiar with. Imagine my disappointment when this, too, turned out to be difficult to spin. It's technically spinnable after you rip it apart sideways, and I've spun nearly 2 oz of it so far. But it doesn't draft easily at all, and leaves my thumb and forefingers aching for the next day, with tenderness radiating up to my shoulder and neck. I've decided that despite the lovely colors, it's not worth it to me to spin the rest of the braid. I have enough joint problems as it is.

Yes, people are always saying, "Don't spin bad fiber--sheep grow more wool all the time." But the fact of the matter is that buying fiber COSTS MONEY, and when you work hard for it, it's painful to just throw it away.

This experience has gotten me thinking about what I consider to be fiber dyeing rules. Others may dye it differently with great results, but here's what works for me.

1. Thou shalt not touch the fiber when it is hot. When you're intentionally felting/fulling fiber, you put it in the hottest water you can stand, with detergent, and agitate it. When you're dyeing fiber, hot water is unavoidable--it's an essential part of the process (unless you're talking about plant fibers and fiber reactive dyes--totally different process that I don't use). And detergent is present as well, since it helps to open up the fiber and remove the last bits of processing residue. Only the last leg of the felting triumvirate is missing--agitation. KEEP YER HANDS OFF OF IT. I try to avoid even bumping the pot.

How do I define "hot"? Anything higher than room temperature. If it's even a little bit warm, I keep my paws off the pot. Room temperature does vary with the season, and I dye fiber with as much success during the summer as the winter in my unheated garage--so I often try to justify to myself that if it just gets down to about 70, it's okay to rinse. But I talk myself out of it. Cutting corners to save some time often means that I just end up having to redo the whole thing again. It's not a timesaver at all.

2. Thou shalt not rinse too many times. Sad to say, I have (in my opinion) ruined BFL/silk with too many rinses. Last year, I did have a customer who bought one of my seconds at Black Sheep Gathering come and find me at Sock Summit, so that she could tell me that there was nothing wrong with my "second quality" braids. I'm not sure if I'm too picky or if customers are accustomed to doing some yanking and pulling during drafting. But ...

3. Thou shalt err on the side of being too picky. Every time that I'm on the fence about whether something is first quality or not, I throw it in the seconds bin. I think, "If this is the only thing of mine that this customer sees, would I want this to be her or his only impression of my work?" When I put it that way, the answer of what to do is always clear, even if it costs me some money.

4. Thou shalt not dye fiber for wholesale. I do have exceptions to this commandment, as I have retailers who take my product to shows that I can't vend at myself. But generally, when I'm filling a wholesale order, I'm dyeing colorways chosen by someone else, and attempting to match a stock photo. I'm focusing on accuracy, and if an interesting variation or idea pops up, I don't pursue it. By keeping fiber at a retail level, I'm preserving a certain creative freedom that makes me a better dyer.

Apple Yarns order

I'm in the middle of a series of wholesale orders right now, and here's the latest.



Click on the photo for a link to my Flickr, where you can see colorway names. This order's for Apple Yarns, here in Bellingham.

In this order, my favorite was Sleeping Bear with Turquoise. This is a very old colorway--I dyed it for Apple Yarns right before the holidays, and it was so popular that she asked for it again. But before that, I can't remember the last time I dyed it. I really like how it came out this time; I'll have to put it back into my regular lineup. Sorry about the flash; it was a little less glare-y in Lightroom.



And this was the runner-up, Mercado.

Next up on the dyeing list: NW Handspun's Madrona order, Pulling at Strings' February sock club, and a secret sock order. I have a busy few weeks ahead of me!

taxes: the no-whining edition

I filed my state taxes last night. There was no whining. There was minimal confusion and delay. And they're not even due until next Tuesday.

Could it be that I have finally turned a new accounting leaf? Well, not entirely; my good intentions of downloading and categorizing all my PayPal records on a monthly basis didn't really happen. But I did enter all my wholesale and fiber show sales as they occurred last year, and that was a huge time savings.

Certainly it helped that I was doing this as a full-time, wage-earning business. Nothing motivates you to properly track income like needing to earn your daily bread.

I'm thinking a little more about buying QuickBooks. I find myself wanting to do sales data analysis that would be pretty cumbersome and time-intensive with my current spreadsheet setup. I've asked around and a lot of people think that it's too much program for a business at my scale. I also asked an accountant friend, who loves it. And QB integrates with the Washington Dept of Revenue's sales tax filing requirements (DOR has a database plug-in for QB). That alone might make it worthwhile, if QB has the capacity to tap into the state's GIS database; sorting out my in-state transactions and manually looking up location codes takes me quite a while. If I still have to manually look up the rate by street address, it won't really help, though.

Washington is one of the states participating in streamlined sales tax efforts. This is a multi-state attempt to collect sales tax from out-of-state businesses; so far, two-thirds have signed on, with 24 states that have already switched over to destination-based sales tax. States are losing a huge amount of revenue because of the growth of online sales, which has led in part to the dire financial straits that most of them are currently facing. Because Washington doesn't have an income tax, it's feeling a particular crunch from the decline in sales tax revenues. I have a lot of sympathy for the state budget people; many services that aren't mandated by federal or state law have been cut to the bone. People are getting kicked out of the state health insurance program (which has really stringent requirements; when I first moved to the state and was making $10/hour working part-time, I didn't qualify for any subsidies. But my experience with individual health insurance and my sheer outrage over premiums is a whole other story).

Anyway. The United States is moving towards collecting sales tax for all online sales. I had a horrible no good very bad six-month ordeal with the Illinois Dept of Revenue last year, rectified only after I fired off an email to the agency director (lesson reinforced, girls and boys: always go straight to the top), who to his credit, responded to my message at 7:30 p.m. on a Friday night and got it worked out for me in one business day. But if that experience was anything like what I can expect to endure after streamlined sales tax goes into effect, I might be rethinking how I sell yarn.

finding true bromance

Valentine's Day is coming up, so naturally a young dyer's fancy turns to thoughts of ... bromance. At Universal Mama, our theme this month is famous couples, and instead of doing Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy, or Romeo and Juliet, I wanted to do something just a little off-kilter.

Over the past year, I've listened to all of Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin series (sometimes called the Master and Commander series), read by the marvelous Simon Vance. So when I started thinking about bromance, Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin were the first to come to mind.

Meet Aubrey--he is a blend of sea greens and blue, with accents of navy (he's a captain in the Royal Navy) and gold (he's nicknamed Goldilocks, or you can prefer to think of it as a stand-in for prize money if you prefer):




And this is my take on Maturin. He was a bit harder to pin down, but I finally decided on this combination of black, charcoal, dusty and earthy browns, and the pale turquoise of the blue-footed booby, his favorite bird:




I've also recently been rereading the Sherlock Holmes stories and books by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. I watched Sherlock: Season One, a fantastic miniseries produced by the BBC, and it sparked my interest in the stories again. I like the BBC's Watson so much more than the one in the stories, who is really rather dim and more of a narrative device than a believable character. BBC Watson doesn't just let Sherlock's condescension pass (or not always, anyway), and his thirst for action makes him the perfect companion. Love this series, can't wait for Season 2 to get to the US.

This is Holmes--a brooding semi-solid of dusky blue and charcoal:






Watson echoes the same blues and greys, but the addition of several shades of brown and silver makes him a little warmer and more approachable:




It surprised me that Watson and Maturin would be somewhat similar. Watson's more like Aubrey--never mind maneuvers, just go straight at 'em. I thought about substituting a different color for the blue-footed booby in Maturin--I might play around with that a bit more.