Ordinary thrills

I've been back from WI for a little over a week now, but we're in the midst of moving and I haven't been spending very much time online. My little 'vacation' was great, I got to hang out with my family and my bestest friend and my first ever spinning wheel. I also got a bit of knitting done! I finished a smallish shawl knit from my own handspun yarn:



It's the swallowtail shawl pattern, and the yarn is lovely super soft natural grey pygora goat fluff (type C, which is similar to cashmere). I think I'm going to block the edges again to make them pointier, but I'm so very happy with how it turned out, especially since I altered the pattern a bit because I didn't want a full size shawl.

I'm glad I got some time off before the move - we're moving to a townhouse with L's sister and niece, and the entire place needs to be painted and the carpet replaced before we can even start moving things in. We're almost done painting. We bought no-VOC paint, so there aren't any fumes, which is awesome. I picked this pretty aqua/teal blue color for our room, and I'm so in love with it! I have a skein of my Rona patchwork colorway that matches it pretty well, so I'm saving it to knit something for our room - maybe a pillow cover? I'm also planning on attempting to sew a quilt to match, so I'm going to be bringing the yarn with me for color inspiration when I go fabric shopping.



I'm going to update the shop today with about 4 new yarns. I'm hoping to keep doing smallish regular shop updates until we're done moving. Right now I'm spending lots of time dyeing and prepping fiber so I'll have plenty of stuff to spin while I figure out my new dyeing setup (I'll have a separate room for dyeing, no more dyeing in the kitchen!). There will be lots of patchwork yarns in the next month, including new colorways, new fibers (several different farm wools), and organic cotton patchwork skeins!

Old Cabin & New Yarns

We've been looking for places in this area to buy that have at least a few acres, and this past weekend we drove out to see the most interesting one. It's an old cabin that was built sometime around 1850! The realtor was great, he actually seemed to know a lot about it and explained how they dated the cabin & some of the interesting bits about it. The beams and the floor boards on the upper level are all hand-hewn, and the beams are american chestnut.



This is the only non-blurry photo I have of the inside, although we took a lot of pictures. This is the second floor. It was originally shorter, which is why the beams only come partway up. The bottom floor is set up for a wood stove, with a beautiful rock chimney. The chimney runs up through the entire cabin, but it's made of brick on the upper levels.

I think this place is amazing, and it's priced so that you're really only buying the land, but it would take SO much work to be able to live in it that I don't see it happening right now. Although that hasn't stopped me from daydreaming about it. It comes with about 2 acres, an old barn, and a wellhouse with a well & pump.

Also. I will be updating my etsy shop with at least 4 new yarns today, with another update tomorrow. Here's a preview of the yarns going up today:



I will be leaving for two weeks (May 14th - 29th) this Thursday, and I haven't yet decided whether to close my shop or just bring my yarns with me. But I'm looking forward to getting some knitting done on the 24hr+ train ride!

It's that time of year again...

Maryland Sheep & Wool! And this year I'm extra excited, because my yarn will be there too. Cloverhill Yarn Shop, my favorite booth from last year, will have a nice selection of my handspun for sale. You can see preview pictures & more information on the other indie dyers/spinners they'll have on their blog here. There will be leafy yarns, novelty yarns, vegan yarns, patchwork yarns (including some brand new colorways), and a pound and a half of Yarnbow self-striping yarns, all from the same dyelot. Oh, and I also spun up an amazing, magical skein of extreme tailspun yarn. It's spun from organic local border leicester locks from a sheep named Barley:



I *love* this style of yarn so much. This is the very first tailspun skein that I've ever put up for sale, because I always want to keep them! It was super time-consuming to spin, and only 8 yds long, but it's still enough for a long skinny scarf or a super-fluffy scarflette. Or you can always just double the skein around your neck, if you're lazy like me.

I'm so excited for this weekend! This entire month has been super tough for me - I even ended up closing my etsy shop for most of it, because I just couldn't stay on top of things - but now I've got it together again and I'm really looking forward to all the woolly goodness this weekend.

Also, I'm putting together a teensy shop update today:

Natural dye results!

The naturally dyed yarns turned out better than I'd hoped! I'm especially relieved about the indigo, since it was my first time making an indigo vat, but it was actually not as hard as I thought it would be. The whole process of dyeing these yarns was pretty involved, here's a brief walkthrough of the steps to give you an idea:

1. Make mordant solution. This either involves simmering plant material for 1-2 hours before straining it out, or bringing a pot of water to a boil & adding alum.
2. Mordant the yarn. The yarn is immersed in the mordant solution & simmered for another 1-2 hours over very very low heat. I like to leave it sit in the mordant solution overnight, just to be sure.
3. Making the dyebath. For each color used (and I sometimes used 2-3 on a single skein), I make a strong dyebath by simmering the plant material for 1-2 hours over very low heat. The exception to this is indigo - making an indigo vat using the yeast method takes 48 hours.
4. Dyeing the yarns. For the single color yarns, this means immersing them in the dyebath and simmering them, again, over very low heat for 1-2 hours or until you get the depth of color you want. For multiple colors, I carefully poured the different dye extracts over the yarn before heating it. Some of the yarns are overdyed (the greens & purples mostly), so after dyeing them for the first time I repeated the process again, minus the mordanting.



So each skein probably took me several days at least. I'm very happy with how this first batch turned out! I just started listing them over at my etsy shop today, and I'll continue listing them in small batches all this week.



What else have I been up to? Well, there was the Yarn Party this past weekend, which was awesome! The weekend before that, I had a spin-off with Steph, Molly, and Carissa, and I made a trip out to Digging Dog Farm to play with the sheep and buy lots of organic local wool. They're humane-certified, too - I'm so happy to have found them! We visited in the midst of lambing, so there were tons of darling, fuzzy little lambs toddling around. And of course, I somehow managed to forget my camera for every single one of those events. *shrug* Oh, well. I might be going out to Digging Dog Farm again soon, so I'll try to remember to take pictures next time!

The 'adventure' begins

Today, the crazy super-crafting officially starts. It's less than two weeks now until the Homespun Yarn Party:



Yesterday was probably my last day off until then...we bought equipment to bottle our homebrewed beer and went to a local thrift shop that has an excellent pottery & book selection. We bought a bunch of books & records, plus a pretty brown earthenware crock:



And when we were checking out, a lady who was standing nearby asked what we were going to use the crock for. I was kind of nervous, because the last time we bought a crock at this same thrift store, the lady at the checkout was like, "Do you KNOW what this IS?!" and gave us a short lecture about how it was this rare brand of vintage crock and we shouldn't profane it by actually using it to store utensils in or anything crazy like that. L and I are very practical people, and I don't ever buy things for 'decor', I buy things that I'm actually going to use, and we use crocks to make fermented foods like sauerkraut and kimchi. So after a brief terrified pause, I told her I was going to use it to make sauerkraut, and to my relief she was delighted and started telling me how her mother used to make sauerkraut in giant crocks when she was growing up, and they used to have to climb into the crock and mash the cabbage with their feet! She was german, and we ended up talking to her for like 20 minutes about how when she moved to the US she was appalled at the food selection, especially the bread and the beer, so she had to learn to make her own. She was super animated and fun, and I wish I had gotten her contact info or invited her to come make sauerkraut with us!

Today, I'm starting work on dyeing my first batch of naturally dyed handspun yarn for the show. Here is the pile of mordanted skeins I'll be dyeing:



The bottom skeins are yellowy from the mordant I used on them - I'm experimenting with using plant-based mordants rather than the toxic metals usually used. Even though I won't be listing these skeins for sale on etsy unless there are any left over from the show, I'll be taking 'after' pictures of the dyed yarns to show you all. Wish me luck - natural dyeing is always an adventure (at least for me!).

Spinnin'

It's taken me a while, but I feel like I'm finally back in the swing of things. All my December custom orders are being packed up & shipped out, and today I pulled my wheel out into the living room and worked on spinning up a big basket of fiber while listening to oldies on the radio:



My plans right now are to work on a new batch of custom orders, while still trying to list yarns in the etsy shop regularly as well as saving them up for a show in mid-March. I may have found a new local source for wool, so if that works out I'm going to test out offering batts for sale as well!

I'm also working on a line of naturally-dyed yarns, dyed and mordanted with plants...I'm hoping to debut them at the show in March, and then list them on etsy after that. I'm excited about the warmer weather and the new year ahead!

Home again home again

I didn't mean to almost completely shut down my etsy shop for a month, but I ended up having a real vacation because of computer troubles while I was away visiting family. But I did still spin up lots of singles, so starting sometime this weekend I'm going to be re-opening my etsy shop and listing a big pile of yarn. Here's a preview - this is a haphazard yarnpile currently waiting to be individually photographed:



The rest of the yarns are still in various stages of drying. I have enough yarns to list consistently every day for at least a week, plus a big initial update. Yay! I'll be glad to finally have a non-empty shop again. And I'll be contacting people about their custom orders - most are either finished or nearly finished, but I have a lot of custom orders so it'll take me a while to organize & photograph them.

Even though I have a ton of stuff to do, it's good to be back!