Anything Fiber Sale 2016

Yesterday was the Anything Fiber Sale which was an absolutely wonderful experience. It's set up to be a place for people to go and destash the fiber related stuff that they've decided they're never going to use. So it's basically a big yard sale for just fiber arts stuff. The booths are relatively inexpensive so I thought it'd be a good opportunity to take my dyed wool out to the public and see if there was any interest. I wanted Jackie to come with me but unfortunately her hip has been hurting her real bad. Fortunately my good friend Sue decided to come with me - she had some really cool needlepoint kits she wanted to offer for sale.

It was a four hour drive and table set up started at 7:30am - that meant we had to leave at 3am. Hoooly cow, I was sure Sue would bail after I told her that but no! That woman is intrepid! So with a car full of Jackie's detash stuff, 36 braids of hand dyed wool, and Sue's awesome kits we hit the road. Despite my best plans, we arrived late at 8 am but we still had plenty of time to set up before the 9:45 am deadline and take a walk around the place. There were a lot of vendors will awesome stuff including some folks selling merino for $3 a braid. THREE DOLLARS! My heart did a little flip flop, I don't mind telling you. I thought after people saw that, no one would want to pay for my stuff which was priced between $10 and $14 a braid, depending on what the fiber content was. I felt really anxious at 10 am when the doors opened and people started coming in.

There was a great crowd - people were actually lined up at the door. A few people showed polite interest but kept walking and I started to think I would never sell anything ever when a fellow walked up, chatted with me a bit about wool properties, and then bought a braid of corriedale in a colourway I named smoldering coals.

My first sale at a fiber show. <3

That sale really gave me a lot of courage - no matter what I wouldn't have to go home and admit that no one had bought anything I made. And that really helped loosen me up. I made an effort not to lean too hard on people who showed an interest (don't you hate the awkward feeling when you just want to browse but a very talented and well-intentioned sales person / artist tries to sell you?) but I passed out cards with my website address, answered questions, and generally had a great time. People actually wanted to listen to be babble (at excessive length) about the material and mechanical properties of wool! Amazing!

I sold 18 braids of wool, precisely half of what I brought. I had two tables - one with one wool and one with destash stuff and Sue kindly ran the destash table so I could focus on my fluffy stuff. We did pretty well. Even neglecting the destash stuff, once I account for my material costs, booth rental, and gas money I made a modest profit on wool sales alone. That's just amazing. It's given me a lot of hopeful confidence and I'm looking to team up with Julia, my fellow dyeing friend, to get some booths at local fiber festivals.

I learned a lot of things:

1. Different people have totally different tastes in colour. I think we all know my feelings about blue and Jackie has often encouraged me to be more adventurous in my dyeing. I have produced some braids I thought were downright ugly. Jackie insisted some of them were really beautiful but I was pretty sure she was lying with a motherly affection. In reality all of my favourite braids like Witch Queen and my graceful blue and green blends sold but so did my least favourite braids. I came home with stuff I like but don't find very exciting - isn't that interesting?

2. Felters will buy hand-dyed wool. This is my bias showing through - I don't really felt much, though I've looked into the wool types that felt well for a potential customer. As a spinner, I've selected my wools and dyes to suit other spinners. I had no idea felters would be such a big marker but I think atleast a third of my sales went to felters. Wow! That's pretty neat to me because I'm in North Carolina where a lot of finer sheep breeds don't do as well. To get semi-locally sourced merino and the like I've got to head north where there's a less oppressive humidity in the summers. But Romney sheep do well here in NC and in the beginning I bought a lot of reasonably priced romney wool top to practice my dyeing on. I thought I'd have to abandon my Romney - it's great for durable garments like hats and mittens but it's really not as soft and fluffy as a lot of people want their homespun to be. But Romney is great for felting! So I have a great excuse to keep supporting my local Romney shepherd.

3. I can't be trusted with a pocket full of cash at a fiber sale. I guess we already knew this. :p Sue, that wicked enabler, watched the booth so I could go wandering around several times. I didn't go crazy though, I just made a some purchases that I feel really good about. I got some camvas aprons for my little table loom, some Chicagoo sock knitting needles - I've been wanting to try them out. I got a knit picks binder for Jackie and also all the dyes that were for sale at one wonderful booth. :x That's an investment, right? Hardly counts.

Busy, Busy

So I rented a booth at the Fiber Anything Sale, which is a place where people can destash their extra fiber arts stuff. So sort of like a jumble sale but just for fiber arts stuff. It's supposed to be purely for people selling their stuff off but! My prices are already so low I think it could work. :) I'm hopeful, anyway.

So last weekend I went up to my parents' place and Jackie filled my trunk full of stuff she doesn't want to look at anymore. I'm not sure what I'm supposed to do if no one buys it but my yarn cone population may have just doubled. And I have been dyeing my fingers off (Well not so much off as blue. And green. And purple. I'm not good at wearing gloves) and producing many braids in hopes of having a range of colours and fibers on offer when I get there. As you can see... I have been very busy:

So much dyeing! I really feel like I've been improving both my process and my eye for colour... though I'd be lying if I said none of my attempts got quietly shuffled out of sight. :P In any case, today I printed up a bunch of labels so people will know what the braid is.

Look at that. I made that with my own little hands and there it is, looking very nearly professional. I had to send these two braids off to (hopefully) happy spinners who won them in the recent Team Merlin Tree Tour Du Fleece, but I took pictures and I keep pausing to open the image and coo at my own creation.

And We're Back!

Well my imaginary fiber folks, since last we spoke I packed up and moved into Chez Arienna. I got the keys a bit earlier than I expected which gave me a chance to pop over and crawl over the place, get some painting done. I had one moment where I walked into my big (to me), empty house with nothing but a spinning wheel and some knitting for company and I felt so, utterly alone. I got that panicky, I-have-made-a-huge-mistake feeling and was not comforted when I walked barefoot across my yard and discovered a fire ant infestation. Man was I regretting everything.

But then the lovely Cheryle, my Mama Elf, arrived. She brought me an air mattress, flowers, and the rest of my local family to help me paint my house. Somewhere between all the chatter and my newly blue walls, I started feeling a whole lot better about everything.

I felt even better after I'd called the pest control folks. Apparently the county I moved to is just... just ants. All the time. If you check out the county FAQ page it basically sums up to, "The ants are here to stay and I, for one, welcome our new ant overlords." So I've signed up for a lifelong battle against ants.. but fortunately the fire ants are gone now and there's no sign of carpenter ants. So that's that!

I still have piles of unpacked boxes but I'm getting my craft room and goodies back together. This past weekend I finally unpacked the dyes and got to work, putting a couple of pretty new Corriedales up for sale in the shop:

I also *drum roll* finished my homespun February Lady. :D I'll talk about that on a separate post but, man! I'm just so proud. I finished her last week and since I've been halfheartedly working on Jaime's socks. I've just finished the instep decreases on those and have nothing left but a couple miles of foot knitting and a couple toes.

I spun up some merino... First I spun this lovely, beautiful, sparkly purple-grey stuff from my talented friend Julia, you can find her store here. This was a bit of a challenging spin for me because it had some texture in it and I'm too much of a control freak to tolerate that. So instead I paused and worked out each bit of texture and produced the softest, squishiest heavy fingering I've ever touched.

Now I'm not a huge fan of purple but it turns out my friend Christian is, it's is favourite colour. And this particular purple has such a subtle hue that I think we can work it into a fairly masculine scarf for him, using the herringbone stitch. Unfortunately.. I've only got around 325 yards of heavy fingering / DK and that won't make much of a scarf unless we abandon all pretenses of masculinity and go straight for the lace. I experimented a bit, laying it next to some different shades and I decided it might work if I did some stripes with black. And what luck, I had bought 3 lbs of black merino from the wool processors up at the Maryland Sheep & Wool!

I spun up a similarly sized skein but.. oh, boys and girls. The differences between these two fibers is night and day. The black merino is stiff and wiry and rougher against my skin than Romney. I'm really incredibly disappointed. I've given it a wash so far with Soak and a little conditioner - it left a bunch of grey in the water. I'm not sure what else to do because I've got 3 lbs of the stuff and if it all turns out this awful, that's money right down the drain.

What's On My Reading List: Sweater Quest

Because I am moving and shouldn't buy too many new things until all my old things are at my house, last weekend I went to the Stuff Redux, a place similar to my beloved Scrap Exchange but in Richmond, VA. Jaime took be there a month or so ago and I'd made an absolute killing, picking up some acid dyes, some alpaca yarn, and a cone of lace weight mohair all for under $20. I'd considered buying up a bunch of knitting pattern books and then someone, in all the excitement, I'd walked out without the books. I spent the last month gnawing on the table and kicking myself for forgetting them. So my first order of business, on arriving in Richmond, was to go get them. I picked up about half a dozen pattern books (for $1 each!) and found a novel by Adrienne Martini.

Sweater Quest: My Year of Knitting Dangerously is a novel that bills itself as the story of her year spent tackling the Mount Everest of knitting... A Fair Isle sweater designed by Alice Starmore. She does this while raising two kids and working two jobs and, obviously, writing a novel. This is the sort of thing I can really get behind and I was super excited. All the other knitting books went into a box but Sweater Quest and I retired to my sofa with a glass of wine and a couple of cats. Ms Martini started strong, discussing herself and why she knits and covered a fascinating chapter about the Alice Starmore drama. I had no idea there was a brilliant and litigious Scottish woman out there, producing and defending intricate colour work!

The topic interested me enough that I went out and did some research. I think the issue is more nuanced and double-sided than Ms. Martini presented in her book but I can't really hold that against her. I can say the book sort of slid off after that chapter. I'm about half way through and it's become a painful slog. It's starting to read more of a who's who in the knitting world as Ms. Martini travels extensively and chats with the big names in our weird little world. Whole paragraphs, even pages, are transcriptions of these chats. She also includes a header on her chapters, listing how much she paid for materials... like, $130 for the book with the pattern in it. And that's where the book started making me really uncomfortable.

Knitting is a pretty self-indulgent hobby for me and probably for a lot of people. This is the first time in my life I've had enough money to spend significantly on a hobby (drawing comics is not a major money maker) so maybe that's part of the problem. I feel a little awkward about how much I spend on knitting and spinning. I'm trying to defray the costs somewhat by selling my dyed wool on Etsy but really... I spend a lot of money on fiber. And that's totally okay! I don't have a lot of responsibilities. I'm a single woman with two cats and a small house. Once we're all fed and the mortgage is paid for, I'm not really responsible to anyone else. Even if I shared my finances with a partner I would have spending money written into my budget and I would totally spend most of it on wool.

But it's super self-indulgent. Especially since I live in North Carolina where we get below freezing weather for all of a month during a bad winter. I don't need to knit to clothe myself or my family. I do it because I love it. And I spend lots of money to do it with unnecessarily nice materials. And that's fine, it's how a spend my spending money budget. But reading about Ms. Martini's year long traipse around the country (remember, this was billed as a book about a woman struggling to knit a complicated sweater while raising two kids and working two jobs), meeting the shiniest of knitters, buying the rarest of yarns really throws a harsh light on the wanton consumption aspects of fiber and tool acquisition. Belonging to the same group as the narrator of Sweater Quest makes me feel worse about myself.

I don't know. I don't leave a lot of books unfinished so I'll probably keep reading this but it's put a really bad taste in my mouth. I need to go do some community service.

An Inelegant Sufficiency of Yarn...

So I started packing up my yarn for the move.

Not all my yarn, you understand. Just the yarn I'm absolutely certain I won't need in the next 10 days before I move. So I made a very sensible analysis of the situation - clearly I need my February Lady yarn. And I need the yarn for Jaime's socks (man, I should finish those, huh?) and I need a couple skeins of alpaca in case I go hat knitting crazy. And it's probably best not to put away the rest of the sock yarn for now. And I need to keep my pet skein out so I can admire it's gradients in times of stress...

So I was diligently packing the rest of my yarn and I realized... Gosh, I've got a lot of yarn.

I've always maintained that I have an elegant sufficiency of yarn. That is, enough yarn. Not too much, not too little.. just exactly enough for my purposes. Now granted, some of my purposes involve owning yarn. I like the look of happy skeins on a shelf, waiting to become awesome. I like flicking through Ravelry and knowing I can knit most patterns I see without searching for the right yarn. But even still, I've always protested when people tell me I have a lot of yarn. I mean, it's all still in one room. A room it shares with both my computer, my giant computer desk, a cat tree, and the spinning stuff. If it still fits (barely) in that crowded room, it can hardly be all that much!

But actually packing the stuff and carrying it all downstairs to the box storage area we have previously called a kitchen I've been forced to admit it - I have enough yarn to open up a small modest sized yarn shop. A very specific kind of yarn shop, to be sure. A yarn shop devoted entirely to high quality natural fiber yarns with an unusual proportion of hand dyed, hand spun skeins. A yarn shop that would inspire my customers to long philosophical considerations and deep questions.

Questions like, "Hey. What's with all the blue? Why not some green or something?!"

I think I'll call it the Blue Ewe :D

What's On My Wheel: Not the February Lady

So I thought it'd just about kill me while I was spinning all the brown (brown, brown, brown... so much brown...), but I finished spinning all the yarn for my sweater. At least, I think I did. I might have screwed up the math and will wind up having to desperately try to match the dye... but it's not like I think about that constantly and with a jittery nervousness that keeps me up at night.

This is somewhere between 1200 and 1300 yards of 3-ply wool and the biggest spinning project I've undertaken so far. It wobbles a bit between a dk and worsted weight But I'm still proud. :) I did the main body in a Norweigan / Romney mix for durability and elasticity but I also did about 500 yards (see the caked section up above) in merino for the collar, the top of the yoke, and the bottoms of the sleeves... all the parts where the sweater might touch my skin when work over a t-shirt. Hopefully that's not doing something super crazy because I already started it.

I'm a little worried that the yarn is too busy for the lace panels so I knit a swatch and pinned it as if it had been blocked...

It looks pretty good, colour wise, but I'm not sure how well the sweater will hold a blocked shape under its own weight soo... we'll have to see. This is my first sweater, no one expects it to be perfect, right?

I cast on during the Maryland Sheep & Wool and have knit very diligently all week. I knit on my lunch breaks, I knit at home. I very carefully didn't start any interesting spinning projects so that I wouldn't be distracted from my knitting (except that gradient spin. I had to spin that to work in my new Roadbug. Hardly counts). And I have been rewarded with... a whole yoke of a sweater! And some chest. I'm not a fast knitter, guys.

Maryland Sheep & Wool Part 2

Jackie and I missed the Spin-In. I can hardly believe it.

We had this brilliant idea of going to the hotel before it started to check in, drop off some stuff, and get something to eat before the Spin In. But then traffic was really bad and we didn't realize how totally exhausted we were... We crawled into the fluffy, cloud-like beds and it was all over. Each of us were laying there, wondering how to mention we didn't want to go back without totally ruining it for the other.

Fortunately we were on the same page so pizza was ordered, movies were watched, and we got to bed pretty early. Early enough that I didn't bite anyone when I was woken up at 6 am. We had a lovely breakfast in the hotel restaurant and then skedaddled right back to the Sheep & Wool. First we had to drop off a bunch of alpaca Jackie wanted the mill to process for her - I can't wait to see what they make of it because doing all that by hand is a bit much. 1 or 2 lbs, yes. Not 90. :P

The young man who took our fiber was terribly charming and so handsome that I had to take my sunglasses off to admire him better. We met some interesting people at the fiber drop off (and fondled their fleeces with more glee than manners), especially a wonderful lady named Julie who is raising merino x corriedale sheep. The fleece she had there was a lamb's fleece and so especially lovely but I can't wait to get my hands on some of her fluff! If I hadn't spent all my money and half of Jackie's at the auction the night before, I'd have bought it all up then and there because she was sell it for $5 a lb. Excuse me, I need to wipe the drool off my keyboard.

We watched the Sheep to Shawl competition which was just amazing. Those folks have clearly put a ton of work into practicing and planning. The crowd favourite was a group who were all dressed up in an Alice in Wonderland theme. They were just amazing - their costumes were excellent and they built a little display stand that was right on theme. The decorations were amazing.

After the competition while they were waiting for the shawls to dry to start the auction, this group of clever ladies mingled through the crowd, taking pictures and staying in character. I didn't get to stay for the auction, but I bet it really improved the price of their work. We had to go because Judith Mackenzie, THE JUDITH, was giving a talk on the origin of sheep. This was basically the highlight of the show for us. We got there very early so we had front row seats. In fact, we were so front and center, I managed to make a complete fool of myself.

See, while she was waiting for everything to get going, Judith came over and asked me what I was knitting - I was working on the February Lady from my homespun. "It's a February Lady" I told her. "Ah," she said. "It's beautiful.

"Thanks! I dyed and spun it myself!" I chirped. Just like I wasn't a person sitting there with yarn full of thinner and thicker sections. Yarn that hadn't been over spun in places. Yarn that wasn't a solid column of merino wool foam because I have NO IDEA how to spin Merino!

"It's very nice," she said kindly, while I tried to crawl into the floor, taking me amateur homespun with me.