Spring Scarf Sale!

Spring has sprung down here in the South,

but if it's still nippy in your neck of the woods,

grab yourself a handmade knit or crocheted scarf while they're on clearance sale!

All scarves are marked down 40-50% to make room in my crafty space for new spring things.

My spring cleaning is your opportunity to keep yourself warm & snuggly!

Element Batts

Element batts now available in the shop!

Little shop update

These things

Are here.

Coming up tomorrow:

Element batts

May Spin-Along openings

And I haven't forgotten about the second part of the series on start-to-finish batt making!

Weekend Color Explosion, Part 1

It's a beautiful sunny day with a bright blue sky. Which is extra-special, because we've had nothing but cold gray days for quite some time around here. The good weather couldn't come at a better time, because this weekend is going to be one of much dyeing and carding. On the agenda: ARTinis for future club shipments, Phat Fiber samples (OMG late! again! gah!), and if there's time left over, lots of yummy batts for the shop.

I thought I'd give you a peek into my creative process and let you see how batts come into being, from the white woolly beginning to the colorful batts you see listed in the shop. So. Here's what's going down.

I do all of my dyeing with Greener Shades heavy metal free professional acid dyes. They work great and I absolutely love them. They're one of the least toxic kinds of dye out there, so I feel comfortable dyeing with them in my kitchen, so long as I am careful. (Which for me means using gloves, a dust mask, and safety goggles when I mix the dyes, and NEVER using any of my dye implements for food).

My dyes are acid dyes, which means they'll dye any protein fiber. Protein fibers include all animal fibers (wool, mohair, angora bunny, silk, etc.) and a few synthetic fibers (Soy Silk, milk fiber, and nylon, which means both firestar and the nylon that's used to make socks more durable).

What my dyes don't do is cellulose fibers, which means natural fibers from plants (cotton, linen, hemp, flax, etc.) and a few synthetic fibers (all forms of rayon, which means Tencel, viscose, and bamboo fiber, which are all almost identical, but differ in what they're made from and are sometimes produced using slightly different techniques.) They also don't do any other synthetics, like polyester, acrylic, acetate, spandex, etc.

But that's okay, because those aren't used much for spinning anyway. The only spinning fibers that I frequently use in batts that I can't dye myself are the rayons (Tencel, bamboo, viscose). I can dye my own milk fiber, but it's easier to dye with the same kinds of dyes used on rayon, and is kind of a pain to dye with acid dyes. So I usually buy these fibers hand-dyed by other fiber artists who are set up to work with these kinds of dyes.

And of course I can't dye angelina sparkle fiber, because that's a kind of plastic that can't be dyed by mere mortals. It has to have the color added during the production process while it's still molten. Once it cools and solidifies, the color can't be changed. This is also true of a few other things, like Ingeo corn silk fiber and EcoSpun fiber made from recycled soda bottles.

But I can dye almost everything I'll ever want to spin with myself, so I'm pretty content with that. And it gives me a good excuse to buy beautiful hand-dyed fiber from other fiber artists. Which I did recently! I snagged some amazing bamboo from LushMommy on Etsy. I wanted a lot of different colors in fairly small amounts, so I snagged 2 oz. each of four of her delightful multi-colored colorways. And I love the fiber I got. Her colorways are amazing, with nice even dye jobs in a wide range of colors. You should totally check her out.

These are the colorways I picked up:

They are, from left to right: Brook, Last Call, Electric Boogaloo (light), & Faerytale.

These are going to be incorporated into several different types of batts,

so the first thing I did was separate them out into individual colors.

And now I'm going to go dye up lots and lots of wool to go with them.

Check back in a couple days to see the batts they've become!

Goings On

Things are afoot. There have been secretive goings-on.

And there still are!

Lately, I have been doing some planning. Not your everyday, garden-variety planning, mind you. Hardcore planning. With paper and calculators and calendars. And hope. And caution. And back-up plans. The kind of planning you do when you are hoping to pull off some big cool things, but aren't sure yet if you'll be able to swing it.

So. Many plans for many potential endeavors are slowly forming and shifting and taking shape in my brain.

And I'm not going to tell you what they are yet. Because they might not happen. Or they might not come to fruition when I expect them to, and instead go down at a totally different time. So they will stay under my hat. In my brain. Percolating.

But I can tell you one thing that's going to happen.

Over the next few weeks, my shop is going to experience a renaissance.

Over the last several months, I have been neglecting my shop a bit. When I moved in August, it was really stressful (because moving is always really stressful for me, and even though I ended up in awesome new digs, this move was insanely un-smooth). I felt off-kilter for a while, and it showed in my dyeing. I found myself dyeing different colors than I usually do, and drawn to different textures than I usually am. It wasn't bad, per se, but there was less variety in my shop.

And right as I was starting to find my way back to on-kilter (because if you can be off-kilter, I for one maintain that you must be able to be on-kilter as well), my aunt died. She was sweet and kind and lovely. And it hurt. A lot. I scaled back my fiber commitments for a while, because I just didn't feel up to dealing with much of anything.

And when I started getting back to all my fibery pursuits, I still didn't feel good. I did all the things I do, dyeing and carding new batts for the shop, answering convo's and emails, hanging out on Twitter and Ravelry, and trying to find my rhythm again, but I didn't feel well.

My artistic spark was gone. I didn't feel drawn to it, I didn't feel driven to create, and even colors didn't matter to me the way they usually do. And it snowed. We had one of the snowiest winters we've had in years. Snowfall after snowfall, with the sky always gray and overcast and the light always slanted and dreary and the wind always bitter cold.

I'm not sure what happened. It was no one thing, but rather several little things, and the passage of time. Whatever it was, I'm starting to feel better. I still miss her a lot, but for the first time in a long time, I have my spark back.

Colors are amazing again. I am overflowing with ideas for new colorways and new series of themed batts. And I'm feeling drawn to the colors and textures I haven't used in a while. My old favorites, like old friends I haven't seen since last summer, and new combinations sizzling in my mind's eye waiting to soak into wool for all the world to see.

So I can tell you one thing.

I bought 10 lbs. of wool.

And, at least in terms of dyeing, I'm back in my groove.

So these are the before pictures.

(The wool is bigger than I am!)

The after pictures will show up in my shop over the next few weeks,

in the form of dozens of new batts.

Yes. Dozens.

Yay!