Knitting on Impulse

Still Not Properly Sick... Sort Of

I dunno what it means either.  I keep feeling like utter crap and thinking "here we go", and then a couple of hours later feeling mostly OK again.  So either I have a superior immune system, (as my son would say: "Go white blood cells!  Oof! Pow! Clang!", with appropriate sword fighting motions) or this is just an interminable lead-up to the Big Sickness.  Whatever.  On the plus side, the lack of physical energy, combined with the need to stay home and look after my wee clan of misery has produced a ton of knitting, which I was missing more than I realized.  (Oh, and for the record, despite the disruptions, I have managed to get all the orders packed up and off to the post office in good time.  Just so's you know.) 

Leafy Hat is almost ready, and I have a question.  In an ideal world, I would have had both ideas at the same time, anticipated that I would publish the designs and done them up as a set.  In reality, I whipped up a quick teacher gift, it came out rather well, did up a pattern which turned out to be well received, and weeks and weeks and many many kits later a clever reader suggested the hat idea. It really is not practical to attempt to dye single skeins for hats to match ones previously sold for mitts, plus the yardage in a single-size skein is uncomfortably close to the exact amount required for the hat (whereas there is a comfortable excess for the mitts.)  So... my plan is to offer the hat pattern as a stand-alone PDF, and double-size skeins (which will be a lower price than two singles) that can be used to knit a hat/mitt combo. I'm not going to try to package the doubles as a kit with printed patterns, because the pricing permutations for folk who do/don't have a mitt pattern already will get crazy.  Like I said, there are disadvantages to impulsive, stream-of-consciousness design development. 

Any thoughts or preferences?  I'm also wondering if anyone actually has any particular attachment to the whole yarn-with-printed-pattern-in-a-box idea, or would you all just as soon have a PDF you can print out and scribble on as needed and buy the purpose-dyed yarn separately for less money? The Kit idea is aesthetically pleasing, with the packaging and all, but on the other hand it's a lot more... packaging.  Which is not necessarily a good thing for the planet. 

Progress:

A Wee Bit Wistful Today

There's been about a million centimetres of snow over the last 48 hours, nearly doubling the previously skimpy base, the view out the livingroom window looks like this:

 

and neither Rob nor I are in any shape to take advantage of it.

Rob is definitely winning the sick and feeble sweepstakes; thus far I've just got headache, fatigue, and a free-floating sense of weirdness. I'm rotating between pattern writing, knitting, packaging, knitting, reskeining, knitting.... pausing to break up squabbles between kids who are now energetic enough to have cabin fever but still coughing in an impressive fashion sure to garner irate calls from the school.

Here's the progress on St. Brigid:

Falling Into the Abyss

Going downhill fast tonight... could feel the tell-tale headache starting this morning.  I SO do not need this right now - my To Do list is positively frightening.  I did drag my sorry behind to the kitchen to create 9 new skeins of fraternal sock yarn before things got too bad.  And Rob, who is declining pretty much in tandem with me (which I hate, because now we will have to fight for who feels worse and which one has to get up with the kids) reskeined the backlog of merino-silk early in the day.  So with any luck, there will be yarn on Sunday.  I've got a great one-skein design in the works with merino-silk and now I'm just praying I'll be able to knit as proficiently through my own illness as I have through the kids' because I have gotten a TON of knitting done in the last few days.  Oblique is finished, and I whipped up the Ballet-T by Teva Durham in an afternoon so as not to be behind on the Sweater-A-Month thingy that I joined in spirit but not in actuality for fear of triggering my competitive/obsessive tendencies.  I've begun St. Brigid, both sleeves at once.  I started with sleeves as a sort of second level back-up swatch, and thus far, I think it will be perfect, though some firm lengthwise blocking will be in order (perfectly achievable and does a good job of tidying up the motifs.)  I've decided that it would be exactly the right garment in which to celebrate the Spring Equinox, calculated that I need to complete approx. 4 inches of sleeve or 2 inches of body daily in order to finish by the 24th, created a table in Word to track my progress and completed my quota for each of the last two days. 

I meant to take pictures of St. B. underway but the days are still short and the light got away before I got to it.  FO posts for the others will have to wait for the happy day that I am both rested and healthy. 

New Stuff

This week's update is focused on rainbow socks and Leafy Mitt kits.  I'm having great fun with the rainbow gradients:

I also finished cataloguing and uploading the BFL backlog (3 pages worth!) Now that there is a decent selection, it seemed an auspicious time to create a proper entry for the Andromeda kits.  You've seen Miriam's Andromeda, haven't you? 

 (photo used with permission) 

I love this design.

Yeesh - this seems a little bare bones and unpoetic for a yarn post, but I'm afraid my brain is in neutral at the moment.  The boy is slowly mending, but the girl has come down hard with the same flu, so we are back to getting up and down all night in reponse to whimpered complaints of misery.  On the plus side, there has been much couch cuddling, as a result of which, Oblique just needs buttons and blocking!  I'm trying to decide whether I have the necessary cognitive functioning to begin St. Brigid. 

Mute and sluggish

is how I'm feeling today.  Up half the night with a seriously feverish little guy, and spent most of the day cuddling him on the couch (and knitting, of course.  Oblique has benefited mightily.)  I have a thousand things I ought to have done instead, but when he feels truly awful, his most beloved comfort and medicine is my physical touch, and I am acutely aware that this is a precious and fleeting thing for a boy child. I did tiptoe away for a moment when he fell asleep:

Meanwhile, I got a wee bit of work done via my new voice-activated skein winder:

 

Is it just me, or does it look like he has a halo?  Perhaps it's one of those ghostly imprints that can only be captured with a slow shutter speed (cue the Twilight Zone music...)

Assuming flu spares the adults of the household for another couple of days, I hope to have the entire backlog of BFL skeined, catalogued and up on the site for Sunday, along with the new rainbow socks and leafy mitt yarn. As for next week's productivity - that is entirely up to the flourishing flu fates.  I would kick myself for never finding a window of opportunity to vaccinate us, but I hear this year's batch wasn't especially effective, so I've decided to go with the theory that ours was one of the missed strains.

A Brief Tour

It's not often that I get brave enough to show pictures of our not-exactly-at-all-Martha-Stewart abode/playroom/dye, jewellery, & photography studio/fibre storage facility, but the sun was casting a glow over the living room this afternoon, and the boy's newly shorn head was awfully adorable in said sunlight, so here you go:

I saw a magazine cover on someone else's blog the other day, promising a review of the "remarkable and inspiring" (or words to that effect) workspaces that top artists invariably create for themselves. The one on the cover was all airy and uncluttered and freshly painted and childless and I thought that I guess I am at the opposite end of that spectrum, which possibly says something about me as an artist?  I don't know.  I do know that when knitters from our very affluent community want to "drop by" to see some yarn, I feel more than a little awkward and intimidated, particularly if it is right after a dye day and I haven't had time to properly bleach out the inevitable spashes on the cabinets and floor.  The drop cloths are never quite enough. (Never mind my resolutely unmanicured fingers - at least I can sit on those.)

Clockwise, from the bottom left: 5 Rubbermaid totes (and one you can't see on the back of the couch) full of yarn, some reskeined, some not, most waiting to be added to the site.  (Told you there was a lot.)  They are on the couch because someone wanted to sit on a dining room chair.  (There's more behind me, usurping the other chairs).  Once sorted, the totes will return to their giant tower configuration between the computer cabinet and dining room table.  Behind them at the end of the couch is a pile of WIPS, swatches and miscellaneous projects.  Like this:

The side table holds the OTT light (ie. makeshift photo studio), a few books, and a wooden carry-all with most of my needles and sundries.  The seriously bent IKEA laundry rack holds yarn that is drying / waiting to be reskeined.  The distal 2/3 of the coffee table / trunk is given over to a Playmobil castle (bought in a moment of Yuletide weakness last December - it did NOT look that big online) and inummerable knights, horses and accoutrements.  It is the boy's primary obsession.  A pair of fairy wings seems to be holding down the near 1/3 (those would belong to the girl) and at this end of the trunk is the children's table to which all messy / creative activities are religiously confined.  At present the boy is printing his name 100 times in order to create his chosen collection in honour of "100's day" (the 100th day of school).  The girl picked jellybeans.

Behind me... the dining room table (aka reskeining & packaging station), the aforementioned kitchen / dye studio, a large stack of cardboard boxes full of base yarn I haven't found a better place for since the UPS guy shoved them off the dolly and into the front hall.  You have to squeeze past them if you come to visit, but the master bedroom's pretty much full now, so....

Anyone still respect me?

Renting a proper studio space is just possible enough to be tantalizing, but realistically at least a year or two (or three) away.  No matter, I think I'd find the film crews dreadfully intrusive.  I'll stick with imperfect!

Employee of the Month

(We were watching an episode of Corner Gas the other night where the single employee of the business felt underappreciated and was duly bought off with a similar poster on the wall.) 

I've recently come to the realization that standing about reskeining yarn for hours on end while emails, design work, sample knitting, etc. etc. pile up is perhaps not the best use of my time and talents.  Enter the willing slave valued employee.  To my surprise, Rob did not balk at the suggestion that he would be well suited to begin taking over some of the the mindless labour (the fact that the business puts food on the table probably helped).  So I'm teaching him the art of skein winding, including that fancy twisty thing you do at the end to make them look nice.  He's a quick learner, but I've got him practicing on the personal stash for a while until his technique is up to snuff (not that I'm a perfectionist boss or anything....)

 

Anyway, soon you'll have the singular satisfaction of knowing that your yarn has passed through the skilled hands and steely gaze of this handsome fellow.

Which brings me to another point - I've been holding out on you.  Just a bit.  Many months ago, I was reading the blogs of other dyers who were struggling to dye enough yarn to take to impending fibre festivals and I thought it would be very clever of me to hold back a couple of skeins of everything I dyed so as to have lots of stock for this coming summer, should I choose to do the fibre circuit.  Well, over the winter, the Rubbermaid totes piled up... and up... and up beside the computer cabinet, and my web stock got rather ransacked in the lead-up to Christmas and it occured to me recently that if I were to put all that backlog on the site, one of two things would happen.  Either it would get largely sold off by summer, in which case I wouldn't need to truck the family and display gear all over BC in an aging Forerunner, OR the better part of it would remain, in which case I would have plenty of stock for festivals.  Most of it needs reskeining though, which is where Rob comes in.  There's a lot of it.  Like, probably twice again as much as is presently on the site - mostly BFL, merino-silk, and summit sock, with a healthy dollop of laceweight.  Unless there's a flood of requests, I'm not going to send an update notice every time I add these - we'll just keep plugging away and put them up as they're ready. If you missed something first time around, you may want to keep an eye out, though.

Speaking of holding out, I completely forgot about this one yesterday:

     

Oh, and the hat? That was dyed/designed for his role as Chief of Finish at the recent Bobsleigh & Skeleton World Cup. If you were enough of a sliding aficionado to follow the races on TV, you would have seen it bobbing about in the finish area. (It will appear at the 2010 Olympics, too, in case you missed your chance.)

  

Enchanted Forest

I waffled a bit on whether to give this colourway such a seemingly trite name... but let me tell you the background.  Though much of this area was logged in the early part of the last century, there are also many patches of mature forest left untouched.  If the soil beneath is sparse, the trees may not be enormous in diameter (though there are some of those around, too), but they are extremely old and have formed a near-complete canopy cover that inhibits rapid-growing underbrush and creates a great domed hall with brilliant mossy floors to take your breath away.  If you are fortunate to be exploring on a gently rainy day, there may come a moment when the drizzle pauses, the mists roll in around you, all earthly sounds recede and a golden glow fills the air, seeming to emanate from the mossy rocks themselves.  The sense of Presence is so palpable that you can't help calling out to the trees, though ever so quietly for fear of breaking the spell.  Eventually a pair of mountain bikes crunch down the trail, calling to one another in rough oblivion to their surroundings, the dark rain resumes, the moment is past. But you know... you know that you will find it again.

Here's the yarns for the week - for the most part, these are very subtly shaded solids, as I had in mind the complex cables of St. Brigid for my own use (I'll show you a swatch of the worsted weight BFL I dyed for myself in a minute).

First up, a new yarn, completing my superwash merino family in worsted weight.  I love this yarn - it has a firm yet springy twist that gives it lots of body and bounce, as well as great pill resistance.  It would be a fabulous garment yarn - if there is interest, I may start offering it in sweater quantities as well.

Fingering weight BFL:

  

Some aran weight merino for the Leafy Mitts:

  

and Summit Socks, featuring a little more variation in light and shadow:

 
The rainbow socks have been snapped up, but there are still some lovely self-striping, as well as new Leafy Mitt yarns in self-striping colourways.

And here's a swatch for St. Brigid - the worsted weight BFL is incredible...but I kept it all for myself this week.  I'll share next time, promise!

Blathering On

Thanks for all the supportive messages - the speaking thing was fine. Actually, considerably better than fine, according to the feedback, which in no way mitigates the fact that I used up three days worth of energy that night and I don't have three days worth of leeway in my schedule to compensate for that. 

The thing is, I don't dislike people (in this case, many of them I like very much), nor did I even find them all that intimidating or worry terribly about being judged (which is why all the "envision them in their underwear" tricks don't help).  I think the crux of it is that I have a much less robust than average protective shell around my essential Self (for want of a better phrase) and when I speak from the heart to 90 women all at once, it's like my soul goes flying out my mouth and into the room like water into a sponge and it takes me days and days to feel safely collected again. 

Anyway.

On top of all that, I am torn this week between being achingly in love with the yarn I dyed for St. Brigid and heartbroken that more than half of that same colourway that I dyed for the rest of you is Not Good Enough.  I have tried every trick in the book several times over, rinsed and washed for (literally) hours and days on end until my hands are raw and bleeding, and still... if you swish them about in lukewarm water (as I know any good knitter will, to wash and/or block the FO) there is a faint but unmistakeable stain to the water.  There's a goodly number that are up to snuff and they are breathtakingly luminous, but the sheer size of the pile that didn't make the cut makes me want to curl up in a fetal position and weep. I know I set somewhat perfectionist standards for my yarn business, and it is tempting to question whether that is realistic, but.... I have to do what I have to do. (There may yet be hope for some, but my hands need a break.) I debated whether to say anything at all, but I thought I owed you an explanation for the glaring discrepancy between my besottedness with this colourway and the quantities available. Anyway, the perfect ones go up tomorrow (not to mention some splendid rainbow socks, as well as new Leafy Mitt kits), and I shall follow some of my own advice and resolve to see this adversity as a creative opportunity to learn and grow into hitherto unimagined paths of glory.  Or something. Perhaps I ought to stop talking until I'm properly collected again.

Here's something a little more down to earth:

Fresh scones: chewy and oaty inside, with a crisp, sugary crust. Baked after sleeping ridiculously late (08:30 is ridiculously late these days), washed down with mimosas, and accompanied by Scooby Doo on Zombie Island and the happy laughter of children.

Happy Valentine's Day!

Surfacing

Can't talk... busy fretting.

Why do I ever agree to speak in public?

Why does no one ever believe that just because I do a decent job, it doesn't mean I have anything but fear and loathing for it?

Wish me luck.

Proper blogging to follow later... the yarn dyed up perfectly.  So far.  I think.