folktale

Customer Appreciation: Patchwork Mittens!

noreply@blogger.com (folktale fibers) — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 18:13:00 +0000

It's been ages since my first (and last) post showing a few items knit with my patchwork yarns. This post is long overdue! I have quite a few finished objects made by customers to share, and I decided to start with a mitten-themed post because mittens seem to be by far the most popular thing to knit with my patchwork yarns. I think it all started with knitting school dropout's mittens:

Which you can find here and here on ravelry. Ever since I first saw the pictures of these, people have been requesting custom yarns from me specifically to knit mittens, and many more patchwork mitten pictures have popped up. Here are some of my favorites:

folktale mitts, made by doodles in string

super duper handspun mittens, made by knitting and dogs

copy cat mittens, made by mahimahi4

panama jack handspun mittens, made by sewdotty

and lastly, esmerine fingerless gauntlets, also by sewdotty. I really love the detail pictures of these on the ravelry project page - this particular skein had puffy blips of fuzzy white angora or mohair.

If you've made something with my patchwork yarn (or any of my yarns) and have pictures, I'd love to see them! I can't describe the feeling I get when I see things made with my yarn - sort of a mix of delight and awe and a happy thrill. I have enough pictures for a few more customer appreciation posts, so there will be more to come. Thank you to everyone for allowing me to use your photos!

P.S. If you want some patchwork yarn of your own, now would be a good time to request whatever colorway you'd like, since I'm dyeing my way through the rest of my merino x wool! I have a nice pile of patchwork yarns ready to list in the next few days, plus I'm working on finishing some 'limited edition' one-of-a-kind patchwork colorways that incorporate lots of luxe fibers like local angora bunny fluff, local kid mohair, local naturally colored wools hand-processed by me, whole sections of firestar sparkle, recycled banana silk threads, and more.

See you this saturday!

noreply@blogger.com (folktale fibers) — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 16:32:00 +0000

Here's my last little preview of my wares for Crafty Bastards! The show is this saturday, October 3rd, 10am-5pm, at the Marie Reed Learning Center at 18th & Wyoming in the Adams Morgan neighborhood of Washington, DC. I'll be in booth #2 along with Molly Miller by Appointment.

Sheepy Sachets - these are hand sewn and stuffed with organic herbs blended by me, either lavender & rosemary or peppermint & eucalyptus.

A small army of Yarnbow skeins...I'll have quite a few of these, all from the same dyelot. They each have 32 different hand-dyed colors and self-stripe with no repeats.

Tailspun organic local border leicester locks from a sheep named Barley:

One of my favorites! This is called Kite Flying, and it's a blend of local cormo wool and merino x rescue wool, with puffy coils of white angora bunny fluff and tons of little kite-tail bowties of recycled sari silk fabric.

A sampling of some of the corespun local kid mohair yarns I'll have available:

And, a selection of wooly patchwork yarns (I also have some in organic cotton). These are almost all spun from local small farm roving:

Crafty Bastards is my favorite craft show of the year. I'm planning on stocking up on Biggs & Featherbelle soap (if I can find time to run to their booth). I'd also really love a hat from Rocks and Salt, and to take a peek at Maryink, but I doubt I'll be able to leave the booth long enough to actually shop. Crafty Bastards is so great...what other craft show has both a breakdance battle and a bike valet service?

Wirecore!

noreply@blogger.com (folktale fibers) — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 17:41:00 +0000

This week's Crafty Bastards yarn preview is of a wire core yarn - I spun up some super soft local merino & local kid mohair fluff around thin-gauge jewelry wire. This yarn is amazing! It's super poseable and more like a sculpture you can play with than a skein of yarn. I especially like this type of yarn because it can be used by people who don't knit or crochet!

Only 10 days to go until the show!!

CB Preview #2

noreply@blogger.com (folktale fibers) — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 18:46:00 +0000

Thanks to everyone who voted for my yarn! It was a runner-up and made it into the Member's Choice Gift Guide on etsy. If you're still in a vote-y mood, you can also vote for folktale in the Craftiest Bastard contest:

Here is this week's preview of one of the yarns I spun up for the Crafty Bastards show - it's made up of local kid mohair locks, recycled bamboo, recycled sari silk threads, handmade recycled fabric leaves, and three flowers gifted to me by Amber of Raimbowtree. This yarn is corespun for extra texture and softness, which means that the fiber is spun horizontally onto a core thread.

Vote for folktale! & a preview

noreply@blogger.com (folktale fibers) — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 01:09:00 +0000

One of my handspun yarns, "Meadowsweet", is in the etsy "Which handspun yarn makes you feel crafty?" poll. You can vote for your favorite yarn here. If you vote for my yarn, please let me know either by leaving a comment here or sending me an email or convo! I like Meadowsweet - if I could pick any one vegan yarn in my inventory right now to knit, I think this is the one I'd pick. It's the first skein I spun from organic cotton batting - which is super fluffy, lightly textured, and perfect for thread-plying - with soft loose hemp fiber, shiny recycled bamboo, and recycled banana fiber threads. Banana fiber is wonderful, it's like a shiny vegan version of recycled sari silk threads but more versatile because I dye it myself. I love recycled sari silk, but it comes jumbled up in random color grab bags and inevitably about half of each bag I buy is a garish neon orange that I can never seem to bring myself to work into my yarns, even in moderation. Someday I will spin a giant neon-orange sari silk boa yarn with all the horrible orange threads I have collected over the years.

My poor neglected blog. I haven't been online too much lately, because I am hard at work getting ready for the Crafty Bastards craft show next month! I will be there selling my yarn and sharing a booth with Molly, who makes the most gorgeous and luxurious knitted accessories with handspun art yarns. I'm planning on updating my blog at least once a week until the show with a sneak preview of some of the yarns I'm working on for the show.

Here is one of my favorite yarns so far, Garden Gate. I've spun this one before (if you were at MDSW you may have seen it in the Cloverhill booth), but it's never managed to make it into my etsy shop. This yarn was inspired by the imagery of the brick wall covered in climbing ivy in The Secret Garden. I've loved that book ever since I can remember, and I just recently re-read it this spring.

I make the leaves for the yarn from a sheet of my own handfelted wool felt. The felt is undyed white, and I dye the leaves to match each individual skein after I cut them out.

Once the leaves are cut and dyed, I embroider them by hand or by machine (these are done by machine, as you can see).

The finished ivy leaves:

Nothing makes me so happy as a stack of felty leaves! For this yarn, I strung the leaves onto handdyed (by me!) olive green recycled laceweight wool yarn and plied them into the yarn (which is chemical-free merino x wool + lovely dark green recycled sari silk threads). These pictures were taken before the twist was set.

New Home, New Yarns

noreply@blogger.com (folktale fibers) — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 20:15:00 +0000

We're finally done moving...at least the actual moving part, I have a feeling it'll be a while before we're done organizing. I'm still working on setting up my fiber & dye room. Unfortunately I somehow ended up getting a bad case of bronchitis/pneumonia in the last few days of moving, which were of course the most intense. The last time I was this sick (ages ago) I ended up in the hospital, but luckily I managed to pull through and get better with just the help of my own herbal remedies.

Speaking of herbs, a little bright spot in the midst of the moving craziness:

My calendula finally flowered! I was beginning to think they never would. I grew these from seed and am rather fond of them. I put all my potted herbs out in the backyard of our new place, but apparently rabbits really like calendula, because when I checked on them a day later, one of the bunnies that frequent the yard had gnawed the plants off at the base of the stem! I was worried, but as shown in the last photo of the mosaic, the plants are already springing back.

I also celebrated our new backyard with a new plant, found at a local farmers market:

Bee Balm! Also known as Oswego Tea & Bergamot. It used to grow wild where we lived down in north carolina, and the bright red blooms always made me so happy. It's both medicinal and edible - it has a nice flavor and I used to chop it up and add it into my homemade cheese.

I've been slowly arranging my fibery things and getting some spinning done, and I re-opened my etsy shop today! Here's a peek at some of the new yarns:

Also waiting to be photographed are several colorways of organic cotton & wool patchwork yarns, some yarnbow self-striping skeins, and some yummy novelty yarns spun from super soft (cormo & merino x) local & rescue farm wools. AND I'm getting ready to list some spinning fibers in the near future, including some organic local wool locks and some super soft loose hemp dyed in rainbow colors.

Ordinary thrills

noreply@blogger.com (folktale fibers) — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 18:27:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (folktale fibers) — Mon, 11 May 2009 18:21:00 +0000

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...

noreply@blogger.com (folktale fibers) — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 19:05:00 +0000

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!

noreply@blogger.com (folktale fibers) — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 19:18:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (folktale fibers) — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 18:23:00 +0000

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'

noreply@blogger.com (folktale fibers) — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 19:15:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (folktale fibers) — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 18:18:00 +0000

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!

Holiday Schedule

noreply@blogger.com (folktale fibers) — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 19:54:00 +0000

First off, I wanted to announce my next craft show:

It's going to be a small, fun show, the last one I'm planning on doing for a few months! I won't be listing very much in my etsy shop until the show is over. Right after the show, I'm going to be leaving to visit family in WI for about a month. I'll be taking my yarns & a bunch of fiber with me, so I'll still have my shop open. Since I only have a Ashford Traditional with smallish bobbins up there, I'm planning on spinning up TONS of singles for patchwork yarns, and then when I get back to my Lendrum I'll ply them all. So sometime in early to mid-january, I plan on unleashing a barrage of patchwork yarns (both wooly and vegan) into my etsy shop. And I'm making an effort to come up with new colorways! I've been getting lots and lots of custom patchwork requests, but I don't have the time to spin them all before my show, so right now what I'm telling people is that if you have a specific patchwork colorway in mind, you can let me know and if I end up working it into my spinning schedule, I'll convo or email you to give you first dibs on the yarn before I list it. That's the best I can do for now - my custom patchwork yarn listing won't be going back up in the shop until mid-January at the earliest.

I'm really looking forward to seeing friends & family & spinning somewhere other than my tiny apartment, but I have a mountain of work to do before that happens, so I'm off to multitask like crazy in the hopes of getting lots done today!

Best cake ever!

noreply@blogger.com (folktale fibers) — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 20:34:00 +0000

It's been a while, eh, folks? This past weekend was Lucius' birthday, so I baked him a nice homemade cake. A few days beforehand, I asked him what kind of cake he wanted:

L: A pumpkin cake.
Me: What's that?
L: I dunno.

Haha, so I googled it, and of course such a thing does exist! And I just roasted, mashed, and froze a bunch of locally grown pumpkin a few weekends ago, so this was a good excuse to cook with some of it. I cobbled together a recipe and it actually turned out to be the best cake I've ever had, so I thought I'd share it with you all. Now, I avoid refined sugar like the plague, so this might not be what most people think of when they think of 'cake', but I found it to be plenty sweet. And also the measurements are approximate because I'm not very strict about measuring and I tend to just wing it ;)

PUMPKIN CAKE

NOTE: this made TWO 9" round cakes.

3 organic eggs
1 stick organic butter
2 c pumpkin puree
dash of vanilla extract
2 1/2 c whole wheat flour
1/4 c molasses
chunk of evaporated cane juice, dissolved in a small amount of water (you can substitute honey or sugar to taste)
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp each cloves, nutmeg, cinnamon, and allspice
1/4 tsp sea salt

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Mix butter, eggs, pumpkin, vanilla, molasses, and cane juice or sugar. In a separate bowl, sift flour, baking soda, spices, and salt, then mix into wet ingredients. Pour into 9" round cake pans and bake for one hour or until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean.

ICING:
-organic cream cheese (you'll probably need at least 1 package per cake, so get 2 if you're making the full recipe) or homemade yogurt cheese
-honey

Blend cream cheese with honey to taste, chill and then ice cake. I like to use yogurt cheese - to make it, take a quart of organic yogurt and place in a muslin-lined strainer inside another pot and let drain for about 8 hours or until the yogurt is about the consistency of cream cheese. You can save the whey that drains off and use it for cooking (Nourishing Traditions, the cookbook I use the most, calls for whey a lot for soaking beans and lacto-fermenting vegetables).

Mmm. This cake came out perfect, moist and springy, and the cream cheese honey icing was the perfect compliment to the pumpkin.

On the fiber front: I'm spinning my way slowly but surely through custom orders, and will be listing yarns very soon! Most likely there will be a shop update early next week. I'm going to spin spin spin all this month because I'm taking a much-needed month vacation to visit family in December.

Handspun scarves = love

noreply@blogger.com (folktale fibers) — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 17:32:00 +0000

So, I haven't done any 'customer appreciation' type posts in a long while, but I was inspired to do one by the lovely handspun scarves made from my yarns by Molly and Amber, two of my favorite crafters. Here are the yarns and what these two lovely ladies made from them - you can click on any of the scarf pictures to be taken to its etsy listing.

These yarns:

Became this scarf, crocheted by Amber:

(The leafies!! How I love them...)

This yarn:

Became this scarf, knit by Molly:

These yarns:

Became part of this scarf, crocheted by Amber:

This yarn:

Became this scarf, knit by Molly:

(I love the colors & textures in this one! It's got organic cotton, bamboo, tencel, carbonized bamboo/"black diamond", and sparkle)

This yarn:

Became part of this scarf, crocheted by Amber:

This yarn:

Became this scarf, knit by Molly:

I love the drapey elegance of Molly's scarves, and the thick snugglyness + awesome yarn-combining in Amber's scarves. I especially like the handspun tussah silk in the last scarf of hers (spun by snowberrylime. There's also some knittydirtygirl yarn in that one.

These two have me craving some handspun scarves! I have a feeling there'll be some scarf-making in my near future. Make sure to check out both of their etsy shops for tons more amazing handspun & handknit goodies (Molly) and gorgeous felted headbands (Amber).

A quick photo credit - the pictures of Molly's scarves were done by Dorean Photography.

Crafty Bastards fall '08

noreply@blogger.com (folktale fibers) — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 21:57:00 +0000

I did it! Whew, it feels so good to have all that stress and crazy craftin' over with. I managed to spin more yarn than I brought last time, and I think I improved my booth. I sold more too ;) I brought home about 4 skeins, 4 batts, and a few knits. I didn't get as many pictures as I hoped, since I was so busy at the fair...I really wanted to take picture of my corespun kid mohair yarns, but I didn't manage to get any and they all sold. I hung up a sort of "yarn curtain" of corespun skeins along one side of my booth, which I thought showed the yarns off nicely - plus it attracted more people, since they stopped to pet the enticingly fuzzy yarns. Here are the few pictures I managed to snap of my wares:

I also had pick-your-own felty baubles again, and I have a lot left over, which makes me happy! So I'll probably be spinning up some bauble-y yarns in the near future.

Some of the yarns that didn't sell surprised me, cause I thought they were good ones! I just finished listing them in my etsy shop, so you can see more pics there. It feels good to have more than one thing listed on etsy again!

I also came home with a few other goodies - handdyed falkland wool sock yarn from Woolarina for teaching Lucius how to knit socks, and about 6 bars of soap. I picked out the sock yarn, Lucius is the one who went crazy with the soap. It's all really nice stuff, from Oliba and Biggs & Featherbelle. The only thing I'm sad about is that I missed checking out the awesome wooly hats at Rocks & Salt. I really wanted to get myself a hat from them, but the one time I managed to get away from my booth for a moment, their booth was completely full and I didn't have time to wait.

I'm back to spinning for etsy now, so I should be updating regularly again! Hurray! Did you miss me? I missed you.

EDIT: I can't believe I almost forgot! There was a huge B-boy battle at Crafty Bastards, right by my booth. Lucius sat and watched it for 2 hours! The guy in the rainbow shirt in the link above was his favorite.

Crafty Bastards preview

noreply@blogger.com (folktale fibers) — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 17:25:00 +0000

Ack! CB is two days away! I'm almost at my "WHATEVER" stage of craft show preparations, where I throw my hands up in the air, polish off what I have finished, and stop my panicked crafting. Almost.

I've got self-striping yarns, patchwork yarns, vegan yarns, and novelty yarns. And even a few knits! I spun up a bunch of deliciously luxurious corespun yarns (pictures cannot even begin to convey their fuzzy-soft allure), including three from the batts in one of my previous posts:

Remember those purple kid mohair locks? Ohhh, so soft and gorgeous. I want to keep all these yarns and cuddle with them like teddy bears. They're super super bulky, about 70-90 yds per 4 or 5 oz, so these will knit up into awesome instant gratification scarves! And each skein should be enough for a scarf - you can probably use like size 30 needles, cuz not only are they really really bulky but they should develop a nice fuzzy halo with wear.

A bunch of the corespun yarns were spun from local mohair, fresh off the goat. I made a trip out to a small local goat farm two weekends ago and picked up 5lbs of soft goatie curls that were fresh off the goats. I washed, dyed, fluffed, carded, and spun them, and I'm hoping they sell well so I can make another trip out to see the goats!

I've been chucking all my finished yarns into a big plastic bin as they dry. Here's what I've got as of this morning:

Although I still have a bunch more that are either drying or waiting to be set. Whew. I have been crafting my butt off the past few weeks! Including making my own handmade wool felt and cutting it up into soft organic leafies to be spun into yarns:

I'm excited that I finally tried making flat sheets of felt, because it didn't take as much time or effort as I thought - so now I can make lots of fun felty embellishments for my yarns! I have some really thick felt leaves that are too heavy to be spun into yarns, so I may have some felt leaf pendants for sale at the show.

I'm excited for this sunday! Makes sure to come say hi if you're in the area - it might be rainy, so bring an umbrella. I'll be in booth #26.

Vegan Yarn Club - the making of

noreply@blogger.com (folktale fibers) — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 17:15:00 +0000

I thought my vegan yarn club peeps might like to see a bit of the "behind-the-scenes" of me making their yarns, so last month I took pictures of the yarns in-progress. I think it's safe to post them now, since everyone received their yarns. I chose a theme of bright, multicolored gypsy-inspired yarns for August's yarn club, and this was the first month that everyone's yarns all came from the same dyelot (before this, I dyed up custom colorways for each person). I started out by sitting down and making up a list of 14 different colors that I wanted to include, and then I dyed up a storm...this is about 2.5 lbs of organic cotton, plus another 8oz or so of loose bamboo:

(you can click on any of the pictures in this post to see a larger, more detailed version on flickr)

I separated the fiber out into piles for each individual yarn. I spun two different types of yarns, according to each person's preference - organic cotton patchwork 2-ply and organic cotton/bamboo chunky thick-and-thin thread-plied novelty yarn. So for the patchwork yarns, I had to prep the organic cotton roving into a more easily spinnable form, and for the thread-plied yarns I carded up batts of organic cotton and bamboo. Organic cotton takes forever to prep or card, so this was the most tedious part of making the yarns.

Once all the prepping was done with, I starting spinning! And spinning, and spinning... Each skein was a hefty 5-6oz, so for the patchwork yarns that meant spinning 400 yds of singles (and then plying them together for a total of 600 yds of spinning, but only 200 yds of finished yarn). The thread-plied yarns spun up faster, since I only had to spin one ply and they were pretty chunky. My regular bobbins were packed full of fiber. This was the second most tiring part - and I got pretty sick of spinning the same colors over and over.

Luckily, I have a short memory, and so by the time it came to ply the yarns I was back to liking the way the colors were turning out. I'm especially proud of the dark teal color, which was a new invention for me! I mix all my own colors, so every once in a while I discover a "new" one. It's impossible to see the teal in the yarn pictures (I think the color is a bit off, since I took them late in the day), but if you look at the first picture of the organic cotton fiber you can see it tangled in with the pinks.

Once the yarns were plied, next came the boiling. Yes, boiling. It's my preferred method for setting the twist on my cotton yarns. I put a big pot of water on to boil, and when it's hot enough I plunk the skeins in, turn the heat down to a simmer, and leave it for a few minutes. I like watching the yarns plump up and relax into their new shape while they bathe. I didn't take pictures of this part since I usually do it late at night. After their hot bath, the skeins get hung up to dry, which can take quite a while for cotton, depending on the weather. If it's sunny, I stick the skeins in a window where they will be completely dry in 1-2 days, but if it's damp, cold, or rainy, they can take several days to dry all the way.

When the skeins are dry, I weigh them and write out the labels and make them look pretty before packing them up. Here are a few of the finished skeins from August:

Some of the lovely patchwork skeins.

One of the thread-plied yarns - this one was plied with a nylon novelty thread that was black with bits of red, yellow, and blue popping out. Most of the other thread-plied skeins were plied with metallic threads.

I'm working on September's yarns right now, in the midst of my craft show spinning - this is the last month of my vegan yarn club! It's been fun, but I'm also relieved that it's over. I will probably do another club in the future, but when I have more time & less craft shows!

Carding day

noreply@blogger.com (folktale fibers) — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 19:46:00 +0000

I'm so super busy with fiber right now. A new 22lb bale of organic wool just arrived, and so I've been dyeing that up into new patchwork & self-striping yarns. I just finished up all the vegan yarn club yarns and custom orders I've been backlogged on, and now I'm spinning away for the fall Crafty Bastards show. Today I prepared for a corespinning marathon - I carded up a bunch of super airy, lofty, mohair-y batts:

That I'm planning on spinning up into a bunch of lovely corespun yarns like this one:

I love mohair, but it usually spins up too rough if I just spin it into a single or 2-ply yarn, and it doesn't really agree with thread-plying (unless you want a crazy slippery loopy yarn). Corespinning is perfect - you get a super soft yarn with a gorgeous halo. I've been carding shiny bamboo, soysilk, tencel nepps, and sparkle into the batts for textural interest.

Most of the mohair I'm working with is kid mohair locks (heaven!!) that I bought from a small farm. I'm using up the last of them now, so I need to order more! This is some naturally colored pale grey kid mohair that I overdyed in shades of purple, a color I don't work with often. The natural grey looks really good overdyed! I carded it up along with some bamboo & sparkle. I just watched the movie "The Dark Crystal" the other night, so this yarn is sorta inspired by that.

I give the locks a good floofing before running them through the carder - this ensures that they'll open up enough to corespin well, but still preserves some of the texture & curl. I alternate layers of locks with bamboo and sparkle and nepps.

The batt starting to build up on the drum - yum!

Back to work now!

Natural dye adventures plus milkweed fluff

noreply@blogger.com (folktale fibers) — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 20:08:00 +0000

My natural dyeing experiment with the fleabane flowers that I collected on my hike was a success! They dyed a nice yellow color on wool & mohair:

And I ended up pulling out my entire mini-stash of naturally dyed fibers that I've saved up over the past few months:

And combined them into a few new yarns!

I still have enough fiber for one more skein. Now I have plans to (attempt) to dye/spin a whole section of natural plant-dyed yarns and fibers for the fall Crafty Bastards show. I'm really picky about my natural dyes, which is why I've never offered naturally dyed stuff for sale before - all my dyes are either harvested by me (and I always plan my harvests around the plant's fertility, so that I never interrupt the breeding cycle, plus I never take more than the local population of that plant can recover from) or purchased from sustainable, ethical sources. A lot of dye plants are endangered in certain areas, so I find it very important to make sure I'm not wrecking native ecosystems. I also never use toxic mordants. I prefer to use natural plant mordants that I can collect myself or natural dyes that don't need mordants, but I do occasionally use alum. There are three different types of alum, some more toxic than others, but I usually use the alum that is used in food - you can read more here. I always save and re-use the water from mordanting fibers in alum, so it never gets dumped down the drain.

I also used some milkweed seed fluff in one of the above yarns, and I thought I'd give a quick mini-tutorial for anyone interested in collecting some. Milkweed grows pretty much everywhere on the east coast and the midwest - I'm not so sure about the rest of the country. Oh, and also someone commented on my last post and reminded me that some folks are allergic to milkweed...it oozes a sticky milky white liquid when cut or bruised (like dandelions), and it can be an irritant to some people. I've never had a problem, and I've actually eaten milkweed before (the young tops of the plant in early spring, the flowers, and the very immature seed pods are all edible, but I think the rest of the plant is not only inedible but toxic/poisonous). Here's a link with more info if you're curious.

Milkweed seed fluff is shiny and soft, but not strong at all. I experimented a lot with spinning it a few years ago, and it cannot be spun on it's own, even with multiple plies - the yarn will fall apart with a gentle tug. But it does make an interesting addition to other fibers, so if you have hand cards or a drum carder you can easily blend it into your yarns. Milkweed seed fluff has other uses besides spinning, too - it makes really good "down" jackets or pillows. Milkweed fluff is lighter, warmer, and more compact than goose down! There have been attempts to grow milkweed commercially as a down substitute, but so far it hasn't been successful since not all of the plants produced seed pods. There used to be a pattern for making your own winter jacket stuffed with milkweed down on eBay, but I haven't checked in a while.

So, on to the tutorial. I picked a few pods while hiking, because I wanted just enough fluff to blend into a skein of yarn. Some people wait until the pods are old and crack open on the plant to release the seeds, but I prefer to get them while they're still green because the fibers are damp and much less flyaway. The pods have a "seam" up the back, and if you press on either side of it, it opens easily.

Inside is a core surrounded by the seed fluff, with the seeds on the outside. These seeds are immature - they should be dark brown when mature. I usually save the seeds and scatter them outside near where I picked the pods, but these ones aren't ready. I hold the fibers down with one hand and gently scrape the seeds off with the other, leaving just the fibers still attatched to the core.

Once I've stripped all the seeds off, I carefully pull the seed fluff away from the inner core. I say carefully because the core is delicate, and if you pull too quickly or too hard you can pull off pieces of the core with the seed fluff. Once you're done, you should have a pile of seed fluff, a pile of seeds, the inner core, and the outer pod.

Repeat until you have enough fluff. The fluff is super flyaway when it dries. I like to store it in a closed paper bag so that air can circulate. If you have mature seeds, please consider scattering them in an area where milkweed grows so that there will be more plants next year!

Ouch.

noreply@blogger.com (folktale fibers) — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 18:50:00 +0000

Sooo, last week I felt like I was finally getting caught up on everything - spinning, shipping, etc. And then a bug bit me - in my EYE - and I've been mostly knocked out for the past few days. I've had random bad reactions to bug bites (especially mosquitos) ever since I was a kid, but it hasn't happened in a long time! Ugh. The side of my left eye was super swollen and painful when I woke up one morning, and the swelling then proceeded to spread all the way across my eyelid until my whole eye was swollen. As if that wasn't bad enough, I felt horrible too, all achy and feverish, so I've spent the past few days getting absolutely nothing done and slipping behind again.

Luckily I woke up feeling tons better this morning! My eye is still very slightly swollen, but it's not noticeable. I got a bunch of packing done today for a post office trip tomorrow, and I think by the end of tomorrow I'll be back on track. I'm giving myself until this weekend to pull it together business-wise.

Check back for a blog update in the next few days with my milkweed fluff & natural dye experiments!

Hunter/gatherer

noreply@blogger.com (folktale fibers) — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 17:00:00 +0000

Yesterday I missed out on one of the spinning meet-ups, but I had a wonderful day. I decided to take the whole day off to spend with Lucius. We planned on going for a walk in the woods, but then we suddenly decided to go a local pick-your-own farm, despite the fact that it looked like an intense storm was gathering overhead. It was a bit of an adventure finding the farm, but we eventually did, and spent several hours picking amazingly delicious blueberries and blackberries. We filled up two big buckets, one of each type of berry, and so I have plans to brew some wine in the next few days. One of the farm workers seemed kind of freaked out about the storm, because he kept running into the field yelling about how he just saw some lightning or how the rain was currently two miles away and closing. I love the rain, so we just kept on picking, but quite a few people left. The silly thing is, the rain never showed up! All day long, the thunder kept rolling and there were dark clouds and occasional lightning flashes, but no rain. And the sun actually came out a few times. But we amused ourselves for the rest of the day by randomly bursting out with dire warnings about the weather.

After our berry-picking was done, we dropped the berries off at the apartment and headed for the woods. I think I need to sew myself a skirt with tons of large pockets, because I am such a gatherer. I brought home a bunch of little bundles and treasures from our walk, including:

-fleabane flowers for a natural dyeing experiment
-milkweed seedpods (pictured above) - I'm going to separate the seedfluff from the seeds and then card it into some yarns. The seedfluff is shiny like silk, but very delicate and not strong enough to be spun on its own.
-catnip, which I am drying and will probably make some cat toys with - but it's also a really good tea for fevers!
-autumn olives, which are beautiful reddish-orange berries with silver speckles.
-a black feather, to add to my small collection of found feathers.

The autumn olives were a surprise, because normally they don't ripen until the first frost! I love the way they taste, tart and sweet, but they're super invasive and non-native so I'm careful not to drop the seeds anywhere that they can grow. I'm glad we discovered them - I'll be back in the fall to gather lots more for fruit leather and maybe some wine. In the picture, the berries are in a simple muslin bag that I sewed to bring with me on hikes - because I've learned from experience to always bring gathering bags with me!

And now, back to work! I still have a bit of catching up to do and I want to have a shop update by Wednesday, which means I must go spin.

New yarn & interview

noreply@blogger.com (folktale fibers) — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 17:56:00 +0000

Tara of Blonde Chicken Boutique just posted an interview with me about my fiber business on her blog! So, click here if you want to know all my deep dark secrets.

I also finally, finally listed a new yarn on etsy today:

Hopefully the first of many, as I'm trying to get back to listing a yarn a day. This one, "Desert Blossom", is a yummy blend of organic cotton and batts of bamboo and hemp with cocoons. Perfect for late summer knitting! I have a new skein of my Canopy yarn with felt leaves drying in the sun right now, so that will probably be popping up in the shop sometime tomorrow.

Catching Up

noreply@blogger.com (folktale fibers) — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 15:29:00 +0000

The art yarn workshop this past weekend was fun. I didn't take any pictures, but you can see one here on Jacey's blog. I love many things about Jacey, but here are a few: all of her wooly fiber comes from animal sanctuaries and no-kill farms, all of her spinning is geared towards sturdy yarn that you can actually use but is still magical and artsy, and she supports her whole family with her spinning business. My hero! If you missed out on her workshops, she's going to have a spinning DVD showing all her amazing techniques for sale in a few weeks.

Here are the yarns I spun at the workshop (click to see a bigger, more detailed picture):

I was a smidge worried that I'd already know a lot of the stuff at the workshop, since I have been spinning art yarns for a few years, but even the stuff I did already know was new to me because Jacey had her own way of doing it. Here are all the techniques we went through: thick and thin (balanced and workable), twists/loops, knots/stacks, coils, racing stripe, autowrap, tornado, Foreign Objects 1 (strung), Foreign Objects 2 (trapped), supercoils, cocoons, halos, corespinning, tiny circles, Foreign objects 3 (integrated), Foreign objects 4 (wrapped). That's a lot to take in over two days! I'm most excited about the cocoons and halos. And the tiny circles and the trapped foreign objects were pretty awesome too.

After the workshop was over on saturday, Molly and I went to Spinster Yarns & Fibers, which was right down the road. It's a sweet little yarn shop that specializes in local and environmentally friendly yarns, so right away I was in love. I managed to restrain myself and only bought a few ounces each of local, organic, predator-friendly wool and hemp. They're working on setting up a carding station where you can use their drum carder and selection of fibers and pay by the ounce! How awesome is that?!

In shop news, I just finished up a big custom order for 6 skeins (that's a whole pound and a half, 977 yds) of patchwork yarn:

And once I wrap up my vegan yarn club yarns, I'll be back to listing new stuff in the shop! Finally!!