In an effort to get the ball rolling, and new supplies laid in, all current inventory is 30% off, so have fun.

~ Velvet Slippers Sock Yarn

~ Not a Daisy Roving

~ Spring Roving

It’s been a busy week on the dyeing front around here – as evidenced by the growing pile of yarns and fibers to be photographed, the rapidly filling drying racks, and the ever-changing splotches of color on my hands. It’s not every profession that allows you to get away with blue and yellow streaks on your fingers. (Yes, I love my job, why do you ask?)

The biggest project has been a twenty-skein order from a local yarn store. Remember, the one that carries my merino/silk laceweights? We’re swapping out some current colorways and renewing some old favorites.

I’m a little concerned though. My supplier might be hiking the price on the laceweight yarn base, and that would mean hunting for a new yarn blend. I have a potential source in mind as backup, but we’ll wait and see.

And, in and around those twenty skeins, I’ve been doing a lot of fiber dyeing. I’ve got at least five batches of rovings ready to be photographed, and listed in the near future. I’m rather tickled about that. It’s been awhile since I brought in some new fibers.

But, I got to spend a good four or five hours dyeing yesterday. Unfortunately, that means most everything is too wet to photograph, but I snagged a few pictures.

Believe me, four hours is a looooong time to be in the kitchen. Thankfully I had my lovely flowers to keep me company, and some friends dropped by for a visit. Anne is one of those wonderful people who can visit while you’re in the middle of working and make you feel like you’re on vacation, even though you’re running around the kitchen like the proverbial headless chicken. It was very enjoyable.

And, to make things even more fun, she and I worked on some super secret stuff for her latest project “Knitting With Jane.” If you like Jane Austen and are on Ravelry, you’ll find the juicy details here.

All this work dyeing is making me realize how much I miss spinning roving. I will admit to having jumped whole-hog on the “batt” bandwagon, but I’m beginning to feel pangs of homesickness. Especially when my arms are tired from long-draw spinning. Then the pangs are a little more tangible. =P

Granted, batts definitely have their place (besides being amazingly gorgeous), and I still like working with them, but I think it’s time to dig through my personal fiber stash and come up with something lovely. I can only hope that somehow, someway, I won’t have any roving and I’ll have to (gasp!) order some. Fat chance, but one can dream.

I loved every minute of it.

In fact, that’s all the confirmation I need to know that I’m doing what I really want to be doing. Selling fiber and yarn definitely holds enough excitement for me to last as long as God wants me here.

One of those sales was a refilling sale for the local yarn store. They needed more of the wholesale laceweights in certain colors, so I was able to stock them up on those. Here’s a picture of a few of the early colorways we put together. They have since been refined a little bit, and Dawn Treader isn’t pictured, but it’ll give you a general idea.

For the refill, they needed (among other things) six skeins of Dawn Treader. That’s the biggest yarn run in one colorway I have ever done, as of yet. I’ve got a custom Etsy order lined up for eight skeins of Blackberry lace, so that’ll take the record in terms of number of skeins.

I also dyed up my last two braids of Corriedale roving, so be watching for those in the store. One is the fiber version of my new colorway “Ink” (you can see the sock version here), and the other is probably going to be called “Japanese Bridge.” It’s reminiscent of Monet’s famous painting.

I’m discovering that I need to get way more fiber braids in my store ASAP. All the Bluefaced Leicester in Dawn Treader are gone, as are all the other braids I listed at the beginning of the month. I’ve got a bit more of undyed coming in (Wensleydale fiber!) but it’ll be a while before I can place another large fiber order. Hopefully we can hold out long enough.

Between all this order shipping I’ve been working away on a fun spinning project. It’s a llama, silk, and merino (I think) hand spun yarn, and I beaded a portion of it.
This was my first time beading a yarn.

However, to get to the point, one of his shorter writings features tips on writing letters and contains this little gem: “My second Rule is, don’t fill more than a page and a half with apologies for not having written sooner!” And I have taken this to heart. I think it safe to assume that you’re fed up with my apologies for not having blogged sooner, so I will dispense with them forthwith.

I’ve been keeping pretty busy lately with various fiber projects. One of which was a large undertaking.
Eight ounces of superwash BFL fiber to be handspun and dyed for a Maiden Yarn customer. Oh my goodness – I practically had to fight off my knitting sister to keep the spun yarn. Bluefaced Leicester is rapidly elbowing its soft and lustrous way to the top of the fiber heap, so to speak. It’s simply wonderful stuff.

And, of course, it’s just coincidental that I happen to have more Bluefaced Leicester on my other spinning wheel.

This is the “Violet, You’re Turning Violet!” roving I mentioned earlier. A blend of BFL and silk, dyed by OrangeJello. I’m really enjoying spinning this, especially as I’m spinning it on the wheel that was formerly in disgrace. I hauled the wheel back downstairs from its exile in the bonus room and decided to give it another chance. Mainly because my other two wheels were full of custom BFL, and (amazingly enough) some more BFL that was a gift from my aunt. Do I sense a theme here?

This will most likely end up in the neighborhood of a two-ply fingering weight. I’m rather enjoying the ability to just kick back and spin and not worry about getting the weight exactly right, or making sure there aren’t any weird little bumps and slubs in the fiber. This is fiber for me, and yarn for me, so I will spin in such a way that it promotes my fiber experience. In other words, I’ll spin it the way I choose and pick up the chips later.

Not that I have a project in mind for the finished yarn, though. I’ll have to wait and see for sure what gauge it winds up at and go from there. Oh, and yardage. That’s a bit of a factor. I made the mistake of browsing Ravelry’s patterns again and discovered an interesting fact about myself. Apparently I labor under the delusion that bigger is better. Do I like the little shrugs or lacey half-sweaters? No, of course not! I go for the giant knitted coats with cables and snowflakes, or the shawls the side of bedspreads. Not exactly conducive to the four-ounce braid of roving. And I doubt I’ll have a chance to spin that much yarn anytime this year.

I’m so flabbergasted that we’re almost into December already! And this is a good sort of flabbergasted. This is a “oooh, Christmas is coming” sort of sensation. I’ve already snagged some fun little Christmas-y things for my two stores. Hurrah for half off sales at Hobby Lobby.

First up we have not one, but two braids of blue faced leceister/silk roving. Both from OrangeJello. “Bonfire” and “Violet, You’re Turning Violet!”

Then I got three sets of stitch markers from AnneKRiley. These are technically for a promotional thingy I’ll be doing for my Etsy store, but I get to admire them in the meantime.

Then we have the September Phat Fiber sample box. This is the box I got for contributing over fifty samples. (Actually, I got it because the “Phat Fiber” owners were very nice. I’d misinterpreted the instructions, but they let me have the box anyway.) All sorts of little samples (and some not so little ones!) to play with.

It was a challenge to figure out what to do with all of them. At first I thought I’d spin up the fibers, combine them with the yarn samples, and knit a hat out of them. Then I realized I’d have enough for socks. Then I thought about trying a needlepoint-type bag. However, I am now up to my ears in a new idea. Stay tuned for exciting developments. Or a frazzled blogger, which might be even more exciting.

Or, if you want to get really out there, it’s like saying, “You stand up, why would you ever want to sit down again?”

There’s so much to be said for dyeing your own stuff, but every so often you want a break. And, as it happened this time, I found this gorgeous braid for sale. It’s a merino/mohair mix (a blend I’ve never bought before) and the colors jumped right off the screen and grabbed me. (Yes, it was scary, but a good scary.)

Isn’t it pretty? I don’t know what I’m going to do with it. The thought of a hat or smooshy cowl crossed my mind, or perhaps a little shawlette. I could go for socks, as it’s a four ounce braid, but I don’t particularly feel like spinning sock yarn right now. Ha, well, true, I probably won’t get around to spinning this until later this year. Oh, I bought it at FiberFancy, if you’d care to take a peek at some of the other lovely stuff there.

And, along a different train of thought, I paid for not blogging recently. I skeined up this gorgeous single ply laceweight (the one I was spinning on my English wheel) and it turned out to be about thirty-five grams/440 yards. In short, a nice size. It washed up beautifully and bloomed into this amazingly soft fluffy single ply. I was so proud of it. Then I listed it on Etsy and it sold before I could tell you I had even finished it! So, here’s the picture of the now long-gone yarn.

On the home knitting front: Raveling is in the offing. Remember that purple sweater I made? The cowl neck? Well, it was far too big in the body, so about a week or so ago I raveled it clear back to the armpits and commenced re-knitting it in a smaller size. I’m now about six to eight inches from the bottom, and hoping it will somehow finish knitting itself so I can take it along to Colorado in the beginning of August. Things are looking pretty close, but I might just finish in time.

I did have one non-disposable tray left, so I used it for one of the batches: this lovely repeat colorway. (You may recognize the color pattern from way back when. I dyed it first on some of the silver-gray Romney roving I bought at the Yellow Daisy Festival.) The fun thing about the repeats was that it braided up with colors to colors, as you can see. I’m really happy with the way that one turned out.

Then, while I was puzzling over how to go about dyeing the other rovings, as my only big-enough pan was full, I played with that thick and thin yarn I spun. Really deep, rich colors. (This particular one sold the very day I listed it! Praise God! That was quite the surprise.) And I discovered that the “fulling” method of setting the twist on a single ply works very nicely.

With a normal yarn you have two or more plies that combine to even out the twist and make the yarn stay straight. In a single ply, you have twist running rampant from one end to the other. The solution? Plunge it into a pot of hot water, then whack it against something for a little bit. This doesn’t “felt” the yarn (if you stop soon enough) but it does help it behave itself.
Now, granted, for this one I didn’t even have to whack it. The pre-soak, hot water, and dyeing process taught it good manners like nothing else would.

I eventually decided to just layer the remaining rovings into my medium sized pots (as the biggest was full of wool locks) and pour in dyes as I went. This created a really cool watercolor effect and produced these two rovings.

The one on the top is called Tempest, and the one below is Dragonfly Wings.

This was my first time using fibers from a new dealer, so the dyeing was a bit of a trial run. The merino (red/gold/green/blue pictured at the top) took up the dye really well and got a pretty good intensity of color, while the other two Corriedale Crosses went a little more middle ground.

I have more of each fiber, so I’m looking forward to giving them another test run. It could be that the Corriedale just didn’t get as intense of a dye solution as the merino. So many factors! It seems like so long ago that I was a beginner, just dumping dye in as I felt like it. The amount of knowledge anyone picks up while learning a new hobby is just amazing. And there’s always something new lurking around the corner!

At the time, I wanted to have all this yarn spun up by mid-October, and I still do— (I hear the rustle of calendars as you look at the date. I can dream, can’t I?) It didn’t seem so difficult at the time, but the trouble was that my usual loyal, supportive G. P. Adams & Co wheel was full of silk. And I did not have time to finish spinning that project before I began the indigo. Therefore it was time to try out the two antique spinning wheels that my father bought. Scary scary. Two unknown wheels and a deadline. I started with the one that treadled best.
This poor wheel had literally come to us in pieces and had been put back together by my grandpa. On its maiden voyage (ha ha) it behaved well for a while, then began throwing a fit. And throwing its drive band.

When that didn’t deter me, it decided to snap the single at any and every opportunity, and if it could snap the single about two inches after I had rejoined it, that was even better! Well, I couldn’t sit around and deal with it so I put it in the corner to think over its attitude and got out the other wheel.

This wheel is beautiful, and possibly English. I’ve always been somewhat partial to its looks — perhaps that’s why the other was being nasty — but this one has brass knuckles. It literally has a metal rim around the inside of the big fly wheel. It must be iron or something, and it’s quite thick, which means heavy, which means greater leg power in the treadling. (I’ve literally spun my leg into a big muscle ache before, so you can understand my trepidation.)

However, I have now spun almost two whole bobbins full and it is behaving beautifully. The only time the single snaps is if I do something ridiculous, like not putting in enough twist. It seems the pretty wheel has won the day! (But the other wheel is not forgotten. It’s rather like a horse that needs to learn how to behave itself. I have a feeling, once all the kinks are straightened out, that it will be a fine wheel.) (Did you hear that, wheel? So behave yourself.)

And you know what the most exciting part about this is? This is my first ever bobbin full. Yes, I’ve been spinning for over a year now (gasp), but this is my first full bobbin. The other wheel doesn’t have a fully functional bobbin, which means I can’t fill it to its full capacity. So here, I give you, my first totally full bobbin. And it’s indigo merino! How perfect is that?

Yes, things got a little crazy. (The house smelled rather strongly afterward.) But things went pretty well. I had to dig up a five-gallon bucket to be able to keep enough fiber presoaked, and then I strung up a makeshift clothesline inside to give me enough drip-drying space.

All the fiber went through at least once, and some of it twice. Here is what some of it looked like when I finally had to stop due to lack of energy.

I’m planning to do another, smaller indigo run here pretty soon and darken those up. (In the corner of the picture you can see a sneak preview of the Fall collection soon to be released on Etsy!)