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.

almost not winter

Since last weekend I've mostly been starting seeds, tending the kombucha (its lavender blueberry this time), spinning and knitting. Around the house kinds of stuff. We recently got a foot or so of snow and I've been reluctant to wade out to the studio to do more weaving. My test project is off the loom so I need to rewarp it and start a new project, probably something wide with the chunky reclaimed cashmere yarn I dyed with woad this fall. I can see it as a soft cowl, maybe with leather closures.


 My first big order of seeds came in the mail. I'm trying to focus on perennials this year. Or at least things that will either reseed or overwinter. And more flowers. There were patches of toadflax around the backyard this summer so I'm going to try some heirloom linaria. It's basically the same plant, but in lots of colors. I've also got pansies and hollyhock and cosmos. The kids picked seeds out, too. They started a plot of their own down in the northwest corner of the yard. Anais wants to try white strawberries, litchi tomatoes and dragonfruit. That last one will probably be more of a houseplant, but it should like hanging out in the kitchen well enough.

All that puttering resulted in something to show for myself. I finished up three pairs of fingerless gloves and reserved four batts from a personal batch I made over the holidays. It has tons of yak and silk and when I soaked the first round of yarn it smelled like aspen leaves. All that means really, is that I finally have a proper shop update this week with knits and fiber batts.

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.

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.

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.

 

 

What's in a name?

There are many reasons we humans come up with for naming things. Familial lineage, descriptive ease or legal requirements are a few that come to mind. I seem to aim for obscure references, which probably means that half of my psyche is perpetually stuck in art school. In fact, that's exactly where I ran into the minimal sentence that is my Doing Business As name.

For a few glorious, frustrating months I attended Bennington College in Vermont. I was thousands of miles from everything I was used to and my whole world flipped upside down. Pretty much literally. Back in Colorado I was able to put minimal effort into getting good grades, but I was about as disconnected from my peers as a kid could get. Plopped into this new environment, surrounded by trustifarians and art nerds, I became overwhelmed at the mention of assignments and a compulsive party-goer. I had more new friends than my entire grade school career produced and yet I couldn't bring myself to write more than a paragraph. I loved Bennington, but I hated who it was turning me into. I ended up leaving after only one term. I packed a lot of memories with me though-and flyers.

Being the arty Mecca that it is a lot of the events around campus were advertised with handmade, hand printed posters. Bands coming through, dance recitals, movie nights were commonly announced in layers of screen print or blueprint with a dash of snark. And that's where Andy Warhol comes in, and Eat Agar. Just before the end of the term a Warhol festival was going down, complete with theme parties and a full-length showing of Empire. That's when I picked up this gem:

It apealed to me in the way an obscure reference often puts a sparkle in the eye of a budding hipster- agar agar being vegan gelatin and regular gelatin being one of the main components of unprocessed camera film. In high school I had come to the conclusion that if I wanted life to be like a movie that it was up to me to write and direct. I decided to make 'eat agar' my creedo, an art mantra.

When the time came to give my fiber hobby turned microbusiness a name I hesitated because it doesn't have much to do with yarn or fiber in general. But it does have everything to do with my worldview, still; post-hipster that I am. Deep down I am still the girl who believes you have to make your own magic. Besides, when have I ever been one for caving to the obvious?

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

Some more wirecore

Here's one more wirecore. I made a super fancy batt too large, so I used the extra for this skein. I'm thinking I'll use it to make some bracelets for the Renegade show. It has silk and bamboo, mohair and angora and paco-vicuna cocoons. The main, not wirecored skein has big, puffy cocoons, but these ones are more like those beads you make out of magazines at summer camp. Only instead of being made out of old issues of Golfer Weekly, these are made of the softest fiber this side of South America. Mmmm...

The name of this skein, Oxygen, goes with one of the biggest series of done so far. I have about 14 skeins lined up, all named after elements from the periodic table. I got the cues for color, texture and such from this guy. Oxygen is really, really blue if it's really, really chilly, but most of the elements, in their pure form are one form or another of silvery in color, so I had to cheat a little here and there.

Bubie yarny

Anais, my daughter, just finished spinning her first yarn today. I found some bright, adorable art batts on etsy when I was looking for feathers a few weeks ago. Not only were the feathers from farm-raised fowl, but the batts had been carded up by the shop owner's own daughter. How could I resist? We tried the drop spindle first, but that was sort of meh. Using the wheel seemed to make more sense for her. I had to do most of the treadling, but other than that she did all the yarn making. No sooner had I set the twist than I was assigned a pattern, which naturally involved flowers.

Sukoshi is all spun up

I finished skeining up all of my first "big" batch of yarn today, 683 yards in total. Divided up that into seven skeins and tomorrow I'll try to post it on Etsy.
In other news I got a bunch of books from amazon that I ordered instead of textbooks, like Cooking in the Moment and Novella Carpenter's new compendium on urban farming. Exciting stuff!

for starters

     I'm not very good at getting out and interacting with people, but I would like to take a crack at the whole "making a living doing something I love" thing. I started spinning almost a year ago and totally fell in love with art yarns like Lampe's Lumps and Pluckyfluff. I love the combination of textures and colors, how it's an abstract construction with practical applications. I've always loved making art; ceramics, photography, painting; but learning to spin yarn has been about more than just art for art's sake for me because it also overlaps with my interest in history and getting to the root of things. Spinning and making fabric is one of the oldest crafts, up there with cave painting and pottery making. In a dorky sense, I get a little excited knowing that I would have such a useful skill in a post-apocalyptic future. 

     I have an etsy shop but those things certainly don't advertise themselves and this blog, along with my other sites on Ravlery and Flickr, are part of my self-promotion.