Things are turning green, even up here at 9000'. I've been poking around looking for potential wildcrafting spots. So far I've found pokeberry thickets and plenty of sages. I'd love to ferret out some elderberry and some weld or wild woad. Despite how much I love it when I get there, getting my butt out the door is something I've spent a lifetime unperfecting. Having a dog who lives for hikes has paired nicely with counteracting that.

Oh! the rain. It does not stop, and sometimes it turns to snow. The rain kept messing with the kids plans to camp in the tent, which has now come to live permanently on the back porch. When their first break in the weather came they lasted about an hour before they tapped out and came back inside. They'd spooked themselves reading scary stories.

Now that I'm warping a full-sized loom I have waste yarn, which generally makes me sad.  But, as it happens, they are the perfect length for weaving bracelets. I plan to have several woven cuffs at this Saturday's farmer's market. They'll be crafted from either a colorway called Viola or Emma the Pink, the batch I was demo spinning at the first market. If you miss the market I also have a few at The Corner Studios in Lyons.

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.

unsweatering

It was warm enough the other day to open the window and let Angie scheme about what she would do when she escaped to the outside again. When we first moved here last spring she managed to scramble up our bed and slipped out the broken screen. I had no idea until we ran into each other on the back porch. Ever since that day she's known she's being kept from all the fun and longs for a ferret ladder to an open window.

I'm toying with the notion of adding reclaimed, plant dyed yarn to the farmer's market booth. I keep an eye out for not-acrylic sweaters when we go thrift store shopping. It's a cheap, if labor-intensive way to add 1,000 yards to your stash. I've deconstructed a few this week and realized that they all seem to have a chirality to them, a handedness to the direction in which each garment was seamed together. Once I caught on to it I was able to break them down much faster and with less fear of wasting yarn by cutting the wrong bit.

 I love the range of colors you can get from rubia tinctorum, from pink to purple and even yellow. But, the next round of madder I buy is going to be chopped and not powder. It's such a pain in the dye bath. Either you let it free and it gets all over the fiber or you have to use a tea towel to strain it because anything with a looser weave will let it get all over everything anyway. If I had more patience it probably wouldn't even be an issue. This dye bath gave my a nice purple with pink highlights on a wool and cotton blend. The leftover bath is cold processing some lambswool skeins in a tucked away corner of the kitchen. So far they're a pale orangey pink.

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.