deliberately

I've been turning a bit inward lately. Spending less time in the studio and more thinking about projects I've shelved, playing Catan with the kids and listening to lots of music. I'm still producing, just at a reduced pace. I think it has a lot to do with the renaming and wanting to take the opportunity to be more deliberate rather than doing all the shoulds. What does this hybrid artform of mine look like when I take away all the expectations? What do I make when I just...make?

   
What's got leaf peepers thinking twice about driving up to the mountains this year has got me curious. There was a tree fungus that thrived from the unusual amount of water we got in the spring. The baby trees look like they were set on fire but the most established ones just have lots of funky leaves. Some with spots and some with burnt looking edges. Aspen makes one of my favorite yellows and greens. I'm wondering what kind of shift I might see in this years dye pot.

  

 I've been craving a new tattoo. Two actually. That Danielle LaPorte is a fantastic influence. She's putting out a range of gorgeous, shiney sacred geometry temp tattoos. The Metatron's Cube is calling to me. It contains all five platonic solids, reminding me a bit of that disc on Voyager that's supposed to be a crash course in what humans are. Only from the past instead of flying through the universe. The second tattoo is one I've been wanting for a few years now. It combines a Mollisonism and an image from Nausicaa of The Valley of the Wind. A stylized Ohmu with the phrase "everything gardens" underneath.

 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.

skillsharing

 This is the time of year I find myself knitting and knitting and knitting for craft shows. My goal is to have ten pairs of fingerless gloves on my table, among other things like hats and spinning kits and yarn. I just finished these gloves last night. They're extra long and all handspun. I'm tempted to keep them for myself, I like them so much. But then I'd have to make one more pair to meet my self-imposed quota. Meh.

 I decided to try and overwiner our tuscan blue rosemary. I'm not sure if it could have hacked the minus whatever-it-gets-to-here nights. It's flowering now and that generally makes me wonder if I'm making it happy or stressing out so bad that its making itself pretty in a desperate attempt at reproducing before it dies on me. I might try cutting it back a bit and making starts from the cuttings. I got the idea from this Juniper Moon Farms blog post.

 I've been making time to play with natural dyes lately, too. I'm brushing up because I'm teaching a yarn dyeing workshop with the Living Arts School on December 7th. The focus is on locally available dyestuffs, plants you could find growing wild plus a few you could easily incorporate in your own garden here in Colorado. I'll have a mix of prepared and whole plants and go over the various ways to tweak a dye bath to get more than one color/shade from each plant.

By way of example, here are some examples of a few of the dyes we'll be playing with. The browns are from black walnut hulls gathered in Wash Park in Denver. From left to right its been dyed onto tussah silk, hemp and alpaca. The pink(hemp) and orange(silk) are from the same bath of safflower petals. You can get a yellow from the same dye pot, too. The nice thing about safflower is that you can do the whole process cold.

This is from an indigo vat I've stashed in a corner by the stove. The fiber is silk that has been sitting in situ as the vat ferments and the gray-blue color has touches of red where the madder root took hold of the fiber, too. It's back in the vat and hopefully it'll get blue-er. I like the storm cloud quality of this stage too, though. The blue we will explore in the class will be more traditional, from woad and should produce a truer blue than this one.



 The jar is full of alkanet root that's been soaking in some Everclear that I found in the cupboard when we moved in. Alkanet isn't water soluble but alcohol will draw it out and create a deep purple/red color. This one doesn't exactly fit into the "local" rubric, but I'll probably bring some to the class anyway in case someone wants to try it. It gets used in natural cosmetics commercially and grows wild in Europe. It's a lot harder to find seeds for it here but I've seen them on Etsy now and again. This batch is currently evaporating out as I add snow to it so I can dye fiber in it without turning it into alkanet flambe.

sales and sensibility

Proof that I am still alive and spinning. My daughter and I will be selling bath salts, lip salve and yarny stuff in Boulder in a few weeks. We are also going to be donating part of what we make to the Xerces Society, a group that raises awareness for invertebrate conservation. We found them after Anais put on a change jar fund raiser "For the Bees" at our then local library and needed to find a place to donate the proceeds to. I haven't decided yet about the amount, maybe 5% of sales?  I don't know if that's high or low or what but given what I usually make at these things it should end up being a respectable amount and that's what I am aiming for.

Changes are coming for my yarn, too. In the interest of streamlining and the development of reproducibility in my work (in some ways my evolution as an artisan has been all about me fighting this aspect of best business practice) I am toying with the idea of shifting to straight up colorways instead of limited run micro-batches with individual names. One unexpected side-effect of our moving from the apartment to a house in the woods has been that my precious routine has been shattered. Little things have become big stumbling blocks despite the fact that I now have a whole studio to myself. Making my process as automatic as I can is what builds the momentum that gets the job done.

Blah, blah, blah. What this really means is that I'm having a sale on the micro-batch Sukoshi. I'm reducing them from $20 to $15 per skein at this upcoming show. I'm also going to have a pattern to give away with each purchase. Probably for those stripey fingerless gloves that I can never keep on the table at these things.

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.

Craft shows

I'm starting to line up a few market dates, just fall ones so far. I plan on doing at least one out of state show this winter, but I haven't decided where, yet. Maybe Detroit? Maybe somewhere in the Pacific Northwest? It depends on who wants me and how far we can afford to travel. I'm focusing on knitting things up since those get sold the quickest so I won't be updating the yarn sections of Etsy shop much between now and then. I'll be debuting my indigo dyed yarns and I hope to have a few more sorts of jewelry, too.

The two dates I have so far are for the Firefly Handmade Autumn Market on September 2st & 22nd in Boulder, CO and the Paonia Mountain Harvest Festival on September 26th through the 29th. Actually, the market part is just the 28th and 29th, but there are lots of cool things going on all weekend. Farm tours and live music and a kids' bike parade...I'm excited to dust off Bill and take the whole family up there. Paonia has been calling to me for a while now and I'm glad I was able to be a part of this event.

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.

 

Formulaic

 

I had a few firsts this last week. My first custom yarn order, which necessitated my first attempt at intentionally recreating a couple of colors. It's a task I had ever really considered before. The thing is, I have these color formulas I use for the low-impact synthetic dyes. I keep them written down on a few dye-stained pages in my master notebook. They're little bits of arithmetic for the colors I've come to use over and over. It's kind of like having my own personal pack of crayons, some with names I've given them myself. Names like rusty grape or broken black. But for all the times I've used them it never occurred to me to notice how close one batch has been to another. Variation is kind of built into the process. In fact I love being able to invite chaos in. The surprises generally outweigh the frustration and I know of no better way to learn something new than to just leap and take notes as I go along. Different fibers take up dyes at different rates and saturations and I have a habit of putting random combinations of fibers in the jars with each round of dyeing. So color me surprised when I got both colors I needed on the first try! I guess from now on I'll have to admit that, while I feel letting chaos into my process is essential, it's a controlled sort of chaos...with compulsory sparkles.

Manifest destiny

I'm not usually the type to set goals or come up with New Years resolutions or anything like that. But it wasn't very long ago that the thought of seriously considering myself a 'yarn artisan' seemed kind of far fetched, too. Back then I was daydreaming of hitting the road with my family and spinning wheel packed into some vintage RV, but kept my feet on the ground by telling myself it was more practical to get a teaching certification attached to my history degree. Pphfftt! After the prerequisite car crash I realized that there is no 'keeping one's feet on the ground'. The ground can disappear at any time. I have a sneaky suspicion that folks who come to take themselves that seriously make a habit of plan-making, as well. Therefore, in the interest of holding myself accountable and maybe bringing myself to attention of some passing wish-granting ( not so bitey) fairy, I'm going to up and tell you my plans and my goals for Eat Agar in this coming year. There are already exciting, exigent things brewing, but I also like the idea of having a record to come back to next year. especially one that I can't spill coffee on or lose in a move. These goals are still pretty basic, as I'm a plan it now & figure out the logistics later kind of person.

🐜 one major print ad

🐜 regular online sales stream

🐜 a dedicated dye garden & a fiber rabbit

🐜 an art shows worth of fiber art (beyond the usual yarn)

🐜 a small collection of pattern postcards (5-7)

🐜 1 regular summer market w/ a max. of 2 holiday markets

🐜 perfect custom order process online & at markets

That's it chickens. You know, besides all scouring, dyeing, spinning, photog, marketing, bookkeeping, etc...Any advice on how to accomplish any of the above or whacks on the noggin with a sparkly wand are welcome.

 

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

Foraging for color

I have a new hero, her name is India Flint. Between her and Rebecca Burgess I am feeling pretty excited about this dyeing fluff with plant stuffs business. When I went back home this summer to visit family I came back with all kinds of roots and flowers and leaves to try out. My grandparents helped me pick tickseed coreopsis along the roadside and after going through Harvesting Color with me my Grandpa John pointed out that he had several sorts of pants from the book right in his yard. In Georgetown I discovered wild hops and pokeberry, possibly leftover a time when folks still ate poke sallet and homebrewing was less a hobby than what you did if you wanted some beer in the house. So, between all those foraged bags of plant matter I've built up quite the stash of yellowy, purple-grey, earthy and acid green fiber. With winter coming on I'm wishing I got out there more, stashed and dried some rabbitbrush and sage at least. But that's what winter is for-planning and scheming for the things I'll do come spring.

I'll leave you with this mini-photo essay. It documents the process I meandered through from foraging to dyeing with aspen leaves, the last plant I gathered before the cold really set in here. In between the steps I was reading India Flint's amazing book, Eco Colour and getting lots of ideas to augment what I had already learned and put into practice with Rebecca Burgess' book. I highly recommend reading both if this is a subject that catches you, too.

 

I gathered most of the leaves from the old Georgetown Cemetery. It's part Royal Tenenbaums and part The Graveyard Book. I noticed that the place is also a bit of a botanic garden, so I'm sure to go back soon.

I left the leaves in my kitchen for a bit, too long I thought when I went check them again. So I added some fresher leaves from my yard and used an India Flint trick...I let them hang out in one of my pots for a few days. I giggled a bit when I stirred them one morning and they started talking to me with fermentation bubbles.

 

I know, I know. Pee in a bottle, right? But this is the color I got after a few days of cold, fermenting extraction. The next step was putting the pot and some fiber of various mordants over low heat and repeating that cycle a few times.

Which got me this handful of fluff, dyed a deep, earthy yellowy-green. I noticed that the color of the dye bath had deepened to an orange color and now I'm repeating the cold/hot cycle with some unmordanted fiber.

 

One thing that caught my attention in the cemetary was the abundance of lichens. Normally it's an ecological taboo to go scrapping this slow-moving, low-yielding symbiosis all helter-skelter. But cleaning it off of old gravestones is one of the exceptions.

 

 

 

 

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.