respect the cycle

 I've been thinking a lot lately about the cyclic nature of my process. I can get frozen trying to start my day because there are so many tasks between fleece and finished object to choose from. Clarifying the steps, right down to dorky diagramming has helped. Having a timeline does, too. Yesterday I watched Tara Swiger's creativelive class and the math at the beginning helped even more. After plugging in some numbers I discovered how doable it would be to achieve my production/financial goals on a quarterly basis. As long as I respect the cycle.

Blue spindles! I had a notion to dunk some spindles in my now ever present indigo vat and it turned them gorgeous. I'm going to put them up in the shop as part of the kits. They should be on display at the farmer's market next month, too.

The garden produced a lot of garlic and shallots this year, despite the wildlife slowly developing a taste for the sweeter shallots. It's the first year I've tried such a large crop of them. Aside from a few I left in the ground just to see what they'd do, I've been curing all of them on top of the fridge and putting them into everything. The garlic are all hardneck, so I'm nervous I won't use them up before they go bad. I suppose I could make dried stuff, but I love it best fresh.

high summer, deep shade

My focus has been on the dye pots lately. There is so much to gather, so many things are peaking, flowering, on the verge of fading. My goal is to have a studio full of plant dyed fiber that I'll mix up into yarn during the fall and winter.

It's not just dyestuffs, though. We found a dandelion patch on a walk to the cemetery a few weeks ago. The red stemmed kind that I swear taste better than the usual green stemmed sort. It's also a good mushroom patch. There were scads of puffballs, even a few alien looking orchids. They look like orange-red asparagus before they bloom.

I don't have a shop update this week. Toby's scarf took up all my productivity. I do have a few new things to introduce. A new twist on the spinning kits, maybe some new yarn. On a less than fibery note, I've also been Desire Mapping. I'm not usually one to go in for woo, but the woman behind the method passes my bullshit test and the message speaks to me so I'm giving it a go. My core desired feelings are: illuminated, shakti, prolific and quixotic.

market preview

I have a ginormous Etsy update this week. Lots of hats and cowls and some yarn, too. I fell off the schedule wagon the past few weeks and had some catching up to do. All of these things will be at the Longmont farmer's market this Saturday from 8am to 1pm.

I've created about four colorways of natural dyed reclaimed, unsweatered yarn to take to market as well. These will be exclusive to that venue for a while until I figure out if it's worth it to add them to the line permanently. I'll also have a few short / seconds skeins in indigo if anybody wants to try them. If they turn out to be a winner I might go in for buying actual base yarn to dye up.

 I think I'm getting the hang of blue. I've read that tropical indigo is easier to work with than woad or japanese indigo and I don't know if that is true or if I was just less anxious about it this time around. It did seem to turn the fibers a more dramatic shade on the first dip, though. And it smells less rotty.

My sister sent along her Lendrum wheel and some other fun stuff with my parents when they came up to see the kids' play. I've been using it to spin up a few more batches for the farmer's market this weekend (eek). The bobbins are so much smaller, but it's also sturdier and faster than my wobbly Louet.

Anais already claimed one of these pots of salve. Scrawled her name on the lid with a sharpie and ran off with it. I wanted to add something small and not made of fluff to my line. A nice, melty all salve seemed like a good fit. The base is olive and sunflower oil solar infused with calendula, rosehips, comfrey and cardamom. Then I added st. john's wort oil, honey, vetiver, orange oil and just enough raw beeswax to firm it up. With this formula it's good for everything from dry skin and lips to small scrapes and bruises.

fauna

The only thing I have to show for myself this week is a new Sukoshi. In my defense, it is spring break and there is a new addition to the menagerie. This batch is called Thessalonica. I have a habit of reading sci-fi and fantasy before bed and I couldn't get the catchy title out of my brain.

As for the growing number of fauna around here...this is Jasmine. While the kids were at their grandma's down in Denver, Gerry and I decided to go "window shopping" at the animal shelter. We got one of our cats there a few years ago and ever since moving into the house we've been flirting with the idea of finally getting a dog. So much for window shopping. She's either a Catahoula or a Plott Hound mix. Either way the consensus around here is she's a keeper.

I got to do some swapping this week, too. One of the other moms at school makes awesome outdoors-inspired jewelry. I picked out these two pieces, she wanted a woven cowl I had just finished. Remember when Etsy was a place for trading, too? When I first set up my shop I'd swap yarn for tote bags and schmancy lip gloss. I do trades at craft shows, too, but it's not something everybody incorporates into their business model. In case its not obvious by now, I emphatically do. I love it.

the yay..uh oh

I felt pretty smug at the beginning of the week when I took this shot. My out box is nearly full, ready to deliver to shops and be listed on Etsy. Then I found out I had made it into the Longmont Farmer's Market this season. They do an art market add-on every fourth Saturday. I'm so excited to be a part of it. Doing a regular market has been one of my goals. But...suddenly my box felt kind of small. Really small, actually. I've been busy making ever since. Carding, spinning and weaving. I do love a deadline and the first market is at the end of April. 

Weaving may be my new favorite thing to do. It's soothingly meditative and goes by relatively quickly compared to knitting. The best part though, is that I feel like I've found an ideal way to show off the colors and textures in my handspun. It's kind of like creating a canvas and a painting at the same time. One of my goals is to have a pile of these for the first market.

 I don't want to get out of the habit of stocking my online shop, so I'm still going to list things on Etsy as I make them. One question that gets asked a lot is whether a given item on my table can be found elsewhere and generally I always mean to list things when I get home but rarely get around to it in a timely fashion. No more of that. This week I have batts, yarn and a woven scarf.

weaving

I've had a floor/table loom for years. It belonged to Gerry's grandma and weaving has always seemed like such a good idea. The next logical step in my fiber craft education. But, between the hinky jargon and the misunderstood notion that it takes two people to warp one of these things, its mostly just sat around. Until last weekend. After watching a bunch of video tutorials and one adorable grandpa making rag rugs I finally set up the loom. I'm just doing plain weave and I put the floor treadle...things away because setting up the table loom side seemed easier to rig up. But I love it! I'm definitely going to be adding bigger woven items to the shop soon. Right now I'm doing what will probably become a mobius scarf out of some reserve Eat Agar that I've been holding on to for years now.
When I was still spinning OOAK skeins I would save ten or so yards from each for my own self. I could never find a project that seemed right for the 500 yards I ended up with. Weaving it all into one long, saori-esk scarf is what I was waiting for. It looks pretty amazing.

In order to feel like I was geeting more than just personal projects
done I simultaneously washed some wool and mixed up a few more Sukoshi batches. The jacob and merino wool turned out super soft. The suffolk got a wee bit felted as I was impatient toward the end and tossed in the dryer. It was set to cool, but the agitation did it in. It's salvageable but I'm probably going to save it for a dye day to redeem it a little. Spot's jacob went in with a bunch of woad dyed silk and alpaca along with teal and undyed hemp, auburn huayaca alpaca, a handful of yak and blue sparkle. Emma's merino became the base for alkanet dyed alpaca, seafoam bamboo and aspen dyed silk. There's some purple sparkle and yellow and plum flax in there, too. I'll be spinning up one or both batches this week.

 In unfibery news, I scored a broken birdfeeder at Home Depot for a penny (hooray for cashiers who take pity). Someone had dropped it, but all it needed was some glue and tape. I hung it out on the front porch, where the wind doesn't get too crazy and the chickadees found it a few days later.
I got this year's seed order done, too. It includes trees! Lots of trees! Trees for fruit and trees for chickens and trees for wind breaks and wildlife. It also includes a soil blocker, a toy I've been wanting to play with for a while now. And there are garlic sprouts in the cold frame, some of them are four inches tall and reaching up through their leafy blanket.

intentions

     The month of January was for me time. Selfish knitting, a beer class with my mister, kombucha making, and generally hanging out around the house without the guilt of a to do list hanging over my head. It went by fast but toward the end I was missing the routine of work.
     Even though my stay-cation had a few days left last week, I started binge listening to indie biz podcasts like AIM and Tara Swiger's Explore Your Enthusiasm. It was so inspiring I ended up breaking out paper and pens to plan out my goals for the upcoming year. There's something about writing it all down that makes it real, attainable. Starting with the big stuff and breaking those down into 'actionable steps' transforms the conceptual into to doable. For me, anyway.

Here are my big goals for 2015:

~ take better care of my vendors. 

~ focus on what sells

~ experiment with a few others.

~ find a regular market to sell at

~ teach 

~ create a look book

~ publish something

personal goals:

~ 50 pairs of socks

~ yoga & archery

      I also wrote out my production timeline, the steps I take to get from raw fiber to finished object. Even though it lives in my head, it's a chattering beast. I have a habit of trying to do all the tihngs all at once which usually results in getting very little actually finished. I'm hoping that having it in hardcopy form will help me avoid vapor lock and stay on track. Structure = good.

    

aspen & nettle

     The dye vats were calling to me after I finally finished a pair of custom gloves I've been sloooowly working on for the past few weeks.  I can't wait to show them to the person who asked for them. They're a longer version of the striped gloves I usually make for craft shows, but the requested yarn is also bulkier. This made them much warmer and makes me think more of hiking/biking than typing but they turned out beautifully all the same.

  
     The vats of aspen and nettle I have going are not beautiful. I let them ferment as they cold-process, leaving the dyestuffs in for as long as my nose can stand it. They've reached peak smelliness with that scuzzy mold on top. The nettle is the primary offender. The word putrid comes to mind before I even lift the lid. While that sucks for air quality in my kitchen, it also means that the pigments and the fiber are getting along famously. I finally cracked and cycled the first round of fiber out of the nettle and aspen this morning.

     I worked outside on the porch to minimize any lingering zombie stench, not to mention the mess. These chickadees were hanging out with me the whole time. Well, they were mostly hanging out in the aspen trees and the bird feeder. But, when I stopped for a bit to watch them one did get curious enough to investigate my shoes.



     Specific fibers interact with natural dyes in differing ways for lots of reasons. One thing I've noticed is that silk will take up color with vibrancy while wool is more subdued. This batch was a good illustration of that general rule. The silk and alpaca came out of the aspen bath dyed a bright acidy yellow and the hampshire wool came out of the nettle a pale sort of greenish yellow. There was still one more step. I started bottles of copper and iron tea last fall for afterbaths and mordanting.  This was my first opportunity to play with them. On the aspen-dyed silk and with the copper, at least, the effect was pretty magical. It went from that acid yellow to deep green. The nettle...eh. It was a deeper, kaiser green last year but then I also pretty much forgot about it for a month or two, leaving it in the closet. And I used scottish blackface wool, which takes up dye almost as greedily as silk does. Maybe I'll try that for round two.

From left to right, the aspen-dyed alpaca and silk with alum moradant, then iron afterbath and copper afterbath. The next photo is the nettle-dyed hampshire wool with the same progression: alum, iron afterbath, copper afterbath.

A litany of this week's accomplishments

Finished spinning up the Spaulding Pink batch for my sweater.

Started and almost completed a child sized sweater for the shop.

Knit up one out of a family pack of four hats for the White Buffalo Farm fundraiser.

And mailed out two custom orders I picked up at craft markets last month.

Sold my last skein of Summer People: May to a wonderful traveling couple I met while working at the shop in Georgetown this weekend.

Updated Anais' unschooling Tumblr.

Roasted coffee in my popcorn popper. Got my oven back and made some pizza, too. Tomorrow begins a week of dyeing and some last foraging before winter and generally gearing up for restocking for the holidays.

The battification of a batch

The paucity of words continues, but here's a batch of Sukoshi being processed in the drum carder. It's a remake. The third generation of 'Girl Sailor'. The first batch was demo spun during the Georgetown Christmas Market, the second went into the Denver Art Museum order. This third one is coming along to the fall Firefly market and then to Paonia if I have any left.

The first, second, third and final rounds through the drum carder. Resulting in a tame, fluffy batt of (mostly) cooperative fibers.

The finished product can sometimes surprise me. Fibers and colors conspire to let one shine through while others take a backseat. It doesn't always turn out how I expect it to. The funny thing is, these guys usually let me know what their name is during the carding stage. They change their mind from time to time, but always during the mixing and smoothing out of the batting and (almost) never during the spinning. Its like this is the part when they really gel, becoming an artifact onto themselves and the rest-the spinning, the setting of the twist, the knitting or weaving or crafting- is pure being on the yarn's part. As much as yarn can purely be, I suppose.

The little things

I was going to post a tutorial on how to make this, but who am I kidding? I'm not the tutorial making type and it felt more than a little disingenuous, considering I only changed up one element from this awesome, definitely tutorial type blog. I'm planning on making a bunch of these for gussying up my table at craft shows. Maybe I'll even put a few in the Etsy shop if I get really ambitious. Or maybe I'll make a kit. Oh! How awesome would that be? It only took me about twenty minutes to put together and it used up a fair amount of those scrap yarn balls I can never seem to resign to the yarn jar on the kids' art shelf. I love how some of the more dynamic yarns look like tiny cephalopods.

 

 

Bad wolf

Here's a quick glimpse of what I'm up to these days. Mostly spinning, with some scant knitting and kit-making thrown in for spice. I'm also perfecting the art of reproducing Sukoshi batches from the past. Its all for an order due at the end of the month so if you hear crickets in my general direction, that's why-for. The yarn in the photo is a repeat of a regular colorway that hasn't made it to the Etsy shop, yet. Although you could find a skein or three at Parlor Car, the shop in Georgetown. I sort of named this run after a pair of fingerless gloves, though the fact that the base wool came from a sheep named Rose may have nudged me, too. See the bright blips of pinkness? The oceany blues? I couldn't help naming this Sukoshi Bad Wolf Bay.

 

Monumental architecture

I've decided to release this skein for purchase. Its a huge, beautiful singles skein but I wasn't sure what I was going to do with it until now. I thought about splitting it into skeins of 50 yards and calling it a Sukoshi batch or just keeping it all to myself, but I think it will just be one of those outrageously priced OOAK pieces that show up from time to time. It's (almost) wool free with a touch of camel and yak down for texture. Aside from that its 244 yards of tussah silk and plant-fibered bliss with one crazy mint green silk noil slub for good measure. I keep wishing I wove because I really think that would do it the justice it deserves. Look for it in the etsy shop or at the markets I'll be attending in the next two weekends; the Georegtown Christmas Market and the Firefly Handmade Holiday Market in Boulder

Yarn, Etsyfied

I finally got all the pre-Renegade, Table of Elements and Summer People yarns up in the shop. Aside from a few new cuffs and that huge demo Summer People skein that's all I have in "stock". Consider this a preview of what'll be at my table during the Leadville Horseshoe. I'm gonna go watch my t'ej bubble...

Shop update

New things and things besides yarn for you non-yarnies out there in the shop now. Hinky wristlets and wirecore cuffs and that pixi hat from before to be precise. Things are trickling in because I'd much rather knit socks, make beer, consider doing a million other things and then go the park right now. Summer is distracting me, but I have lots more yarn to Etsy-fy in the near future.

dang my kids are cute

I thought I'd share this quick/fast while I wait for my camera batteries to charge. After much sturm und drang this morning, as I was doing a yarny photo shoot and my kids were doing their least best to stay out of the way of the volcano that is mom on a mission, I came up to the challenge of properly pictorially representing this pixi hat I knit up a while ago. I'm glad I decided to dial it down and let the kids help me, because these shots are killer cute. I love how Toby's a kinetic bouncing ball and Anais is holding back and being as grown up as she can muster. The last shot is my favorite yarn shot so far, its of the skein I spun up at Renegade, all 250 super silky yards of it. If I can resist knitting it up all for myself I think I'll reskein it into 50 yards each and call it a sukoshi batch. There was some wirecore at the end, too, but I'm knitting that up into cuffs now. I love that giant green noil slub. It wouldn't cooperate draft-wise so I just spun it in there whole.

To Market

Last Saturday was the Spring Horseshoe Market and I'm so glad to have been a part of it. So far, every time I've done a fair or a market I end up feeling really good about having devoted myself to this handspinning business. My husband came along this time to help set up the booth and run the inevitable errands that came up-like getting change and extra bags and, um, chairs. I didn't realize I had forgotten them until the tent was set up and I was trying to figure out how to fill up a 10x10 space with what little I had brought along. Hopefully I don't repeat that at Renegade. Then, when we were settling in and people started flowing by, he grabbed his RV repair book, sat down in the back of the booth and kicked off his shoes. That was embarassing enough, but then I heard him swearing (barely) under his breath in the direction of some random guy with an anti-Obama tshirt on. We laughed about it later, but in the moment all I could do was glare at him until he sheepishly apologized. I'm really glad he came along, though. Without him I would have been a starving, seatless, sphincter-clenching mess by the end of the day. Plus now I think he really gets why I've decided to devote so much time, energy and love into Eat Agar.

It got up into the 80's on Saturday, not exactly the kind of weather that inspires folks to buy scads of handspun, but I sold a few things; some skeins of yarn, a postcard, some bent knitting needle bangles I made out of my stash. What really bouyed me though, were all of the connections I made. A jewelry designer I had been convoing with on Etsy stopped by to check out my wirecore, Jaime from Fancy Tiger stopped by with some encouraging words and I scored some amazing reclaimed barn wood earrings from Canvas' booth and found the studio apron of my dreams at Sparrow Waits. I bonded with one person over an obscure anthropology book and lots of people stopped to watch me demo spinning. I love the way the wheel becomes a kid magnet. A lady with a wonderful German accent stopped to watch me spin at one point and let me in on the fact that, in German, when you say someone is "schhpinnink" it means that they're a little crazy. Heh, heh....

Rescue Wool

     What do I mean when I say I use "rescue wool" in my yarns? I could call it by other names, "animal-friendly" for one or maybe "no kill", but that sounds a little dramatic. I like the way the term "rescue wool" rolls off the tongue, plus it seems a little more descriptive and a little less vague.
     Specifically, I get the majority of my wool from a place called the Homestead Wool and Gift Farm. Sandy Ryan and her flock of Fruit Loop munching sheep live in Wisconsin and you can get anything from raw wool to batts to yarn from them. I first discovered the Farm after picking up a copy of Intertwined by Lexi Boeger and seeing a write-up on it in there. I prefer the raw fleece because I'm hardcore like that, but Sandy comes up with lots of pretty colorways and there are always several kinds wool plus fun stuff like camel or llama occasionally. The part I really love, though, is that many of the animals are ones that needed a new home and they get plenty of love and care at the Farm. They all have names and as Sandy paints a wonderful picture of their personalities and foibles on the website and on her blog. My daughter likes to ask me which sheep I'm spinning, meaning is it Fender? Or Aina, maybe? It makes me smile just thinking about it. They don't get sold again or eaten, nor are they allowed to become pregnant. The shearing is done carefully and respectfully and all the money they make goes into continuing this process.
     I love getting to vote with my work and wallet in this way and I would encourage anyone else who wonders about the origins of their fleece, batts or yarn to do the same.
     
    

Oxygen cuffs

So, for future reference, 30 yards of wirecore makes about five cuff-bracelet-bangle things. I really love how these came out, simple but durable and pretty. The Paco-vicuña cocoons are there, but subtle and you can either squish them narrow into a bangle or stretch them wide into a cuff. The best part, mostly for me, is that they don't take a week to make, so I'll be able to make a whole mess of them to add to my table for Renegade Austin and the spring Horseshoe market.