Tour de Fleece!

I read about this recently and thought it sounded like a great idea! For the full story, go to the Tour de Fleece headquarters, but basically it's a self-imposed challenge for spinning for the duration of the Tour de France. So, starting today spinners everywhere are starting their challenges! My challenge is to work on some Cashmere that's been a part of my personal history for quite a long time.

Many years ago, before I moved to Oregon, I had this passion for all things fibery (that much hasn't changed!), and I thought maybe I'd be interested in raising fiber goats. I'd had sheep as a child (Southdowns - 4-H project with my brother), and while I like sheep, I didn't much like the idea of what you need to do with tails of lambs. So goats sounded like they had potential. With a very good friend, I visited 2 goat breeders here in Oregon - one Angora goats, and one was Cashmere. I don't remember the name of the Cashmere breeder, but I know she lived somewhere pretty close to here because I remember going through the town where Woodland Woolworks was at the time - Yamhill, and wishing there was time to stop. Funny old world, isn't it? Anyway, Cheryl and I bought a couple of ounces of Cashmere each with the plan being that I would spin the fiber for both of us, and she would knit us some fabulous scarves. I THINK there's about 8 ounces total, but I can't find my scale.

So, my challenge for the Tour de Fleece will be to spin as much Cashmere as possible. And Cheryl, I think as penance for taking so darn long to get brave enough to spin this lovely fiber, I should either knit it or weave it into scarves for both of us... That may be a challenge for another day though. First step, get spinning!!

I'm trying to talk a couple of other people here into joining in the fun, so there may be more to report.

It's whatever kind of challenge you make it - perfect! To spin is to win!

Happy spinning to you,

Diane

What happened to June?

Good grief! No wonder I'm being chastised for not blogging lately. I thought those last 2 entries were in June, but noooo, they're from May! I lost a month, oh dear.

Well, Black Sheep Gathering, of course, eats up a lot of June, what with ordering for it, packing for it, loading the trailer, being there, unloading and then figuring out what we have after all is said and done. While packing the trailer I thought a picture of the STUFFED TO THE ROOF trailer would make good blog fodder, but of course it didn't happen. Maybe for OFFF I'll remember! Oh, and a pic of the booth might be nice too.

Black Sheep was, as always, a lot of fun. It was a little hot on Friday but we tried not to whine too much, knowing it was still nearly 20 degrees cooler than it was my first year as a vendor there (talk about your trial by fire - a gazillion degrees and I had the worst cold I've had in YEARS, ugh). There were many fabulous and wonderful things to see and touch and dream about, and friends to catch up with and hug, and things to learn and teach. Ahhhh, and soon it will be time for OFFF, and more of the same! Life is good.

I do have some pictures of some dyeing I did recently. We have this new cool Seacell/Silk blend yarn and I wanted to see how well it dyes. I'm not the least bit scientific - measuring is not my forte, repeatable will never be on the agenda. I greatly admire all those dyers who can make a consistent product! I dyed with both Landscapes, and with Procion - and used heat with the Procion, rather than doing the maybe more expected cold batch/soda ash routine. I would like to know how that works on this yarn too, but there wasn't enough time really that day. I dyed with my sweetie's daughter A, who enjoyed it too I think, though the gloves were not a good fit! A is 9, and has small hands.

Anyway, I like to dye using a couple of spaghetti jars with different colors of dye in them, inside my dye pot with water, acting as a double boiler. I drape the skein of yarn across and into the jars, and move it around a bit to get all of it dyed, and maybe mix some colors together.


Below is the yarn getting rinsed - I didn't have much dye wash out (I didn't use much dye either for one skein of yarn, maybe something on the order of a 1/4 teaspoon of each color). Looks like I didn't get quite as much coverage between colors as I might have liked, but I think it will be fine.


And here are the 2 completed skeins - Procion on the left, and Landscapes on the right. The silk gives it a nice luster! Interestingly, the Seacell when wet does indeed give a bit of a whiff of the sea! It goes away when it's dry, but it's definitely there when wet. I was surprised!

I'm going to knit a lacey scarf for A with the Procion version - feather and fan, should be fun.

One of the perks of Black Sheep is that all of us that work the booth hang out together in the evenings - go have dinner at Thai and Indian places (YUM!), and then knit and gab usually entirely too late into the night. I talked Anita into teaching me to knit the "other" way - picking, rather than the throwing I've always done (self taught). So I'm trying really hard to continue that and make it be the way I knit, cause it certainly looks like it's a lot faster. My poor unsuspecting skein of Seacell/Silk was my guinea pig (I had this crazy idea I could learn the technique while knitting the scarf, but GOSH my tension looked horrible!)... so I can also report that the yarn stands up fine to being knit and frogged and reknit. Really - learning a new technique should be done with a nice worsted weight wool instead of a slippery lace weight. Character building. You'll notice there is no picture of the scarf in progress. It's not! Yet anyway.... but it will be.

I uh, found another pair of sock needles at home and started another sock too. Not that there's been any progress on the socks OR green sweater written about in May... But I've finished my 2nd Jaywalker sock, and I'm about done with the Balance tee shirt I knit, except the neck thing has to be changed. I do adore starting things.

Happy 4th of July!!

Diane

She's here!

This has nothing to do with knitting, or spinning, or weaving, or dyeing, or really any sort of fiber. Too bad!


This lovely filly was born a couple weeks ago, and she's a dandy! Saying a newborn is cute is redundant, but true. Here she is, about a day old - already contemplating hay. What IS this stuff that mom chews on all the time?

And this is about a day later, out for a romp in the arena, getting mom her exercise as well.

She likes to jump things, but I didn't catch any good photos of that. She's a Davenport Arabian, and if you'd like to know more about this bloodline, this is a good starting point - http://www.davenporthorses.org/history/ . Homer Davenport, who imported the ancestors of these horses in 1906, was born in Silverton Oregon!

Hurray for babies!

Ancient History

I talked about this sweater a few months ago (and said "ask me again in two months". Ahem. No progress.) I started this sweater in 1994, and I'm up to the sleeves! It'll be a nice sweater someday. But heck, it's not like I can wear it this summer, so finishing it up over the summer should be perfect, right? The yarn is Heilo from Dale of Norway.

I like doing both sleeves at the same time. Makes the going slower, sort of - but when you're done, you've got both sleeves and they MATCH without having to make notes and measure a bazillion times. Just like the attraction of doing 2 socks at the same time. Not that I've tried that yet, but I like the idea.

I definitely have a ways to go on the sleeves, plus they're - what's it called? saddle shoulders? where they come up the arm and across the shoulders and end at the neckline. I like the cables and stuff. Must work on this sweater....

Meanwhile there's a few more socks that have been started because, well, I could. The first one is Lacewing from Fly Designs in color Desiderata. It's a dream to work with! I also have some in Halogen, with thoughts of combining the leftovers from both colors in a scarf... It may be a while, having not cast on the Halogen socks yet!

And then these ones below are in the merino/tencel blend that I dyed - boy howdy did it take the dye nicely, or what? I started out doing a pattern from Favourite Socks, but the colors were competing too much so I switched to regular old Helen's Favorite Sock from Fiber Trends. This would have been a really handy one to do both socks at once, since now I have to remember just where I left off from one pattern and switched to the other! Ah well.

What are you knitting these days?

Also considered

I thought I'd show some of the other pictures we took in our search for a likely front-page-of-the-website picture... We all brought in some handknit socks and tried to think of ways to show them off to best advantage.

First, posing with the sheep. (does he look like a sheep?)

Then a chorus line:

Then another view:

Or maybe without feet in them...

Or maybe a closeup??

Alright. We need some nature in here. Where are some flowers?

Wowee, those are bright! What about socks in trees?? A nice touch of silliness, maybe.

And then we got the one we thought was just the ticket!

So there you go, Diary of a Homepage Picture.

Happy weekend! Happy Mother's Day! Give your mom a hug, I wish mine were here so I could, I miss her each and every day. I love you mom!

Diane

We've launched!!!

The new website is LIVE! I think it looks fantastic, and sure hope that you do too. There's still a ton of work to do on it, but it's got a lot more stuff on it, and more information and photos will be added daily. It's been a long road to get here, but I think you'll agree it was all worth it. Everything in all our catalogs, and all the stuff that didn't even make the catalogs is on the site now.

Go check out the beautiful Mickey Mouse daffodils on the front page, proudly posing with handknit socks. The daffodils are in Karen's back yard. We had fun going around Carlton looking for likely photo opportunities for our socks.

More to come!

Diane

Weighty matters

We're coming down to the wire! We're set to launch our brand new website (same address - www.woolworks.com) in under 2 weeks (gasp!) and we're feverishly trying to get as much done as possible. Getting everything done is not possible, of course. I think the nature of a website is to be "under construction", because as everyone knows - things change. New items are brought in, things get discontinued, things change price, more information becomes available....

With our new website launch, we're going to do delivery charges a little differently. We want to do ACTUAL shipping charges. That means that we need to know what everything weighs.
E v e r y t h i n g .... There are approximately 16,000 individual items in inventory. Well - should say SKUs, because some SKUs have multiples in inventory (10 balls of yarn X, color Y). So we're weighing things and entering them. We're getting images of them. We're writing up descriptions of them. It's a rather big job. Back to the shipping charges - you'll get the opportunity to see what it would cost to send your package via Priority mail, or UPS, and decide which way works best for you. It will be based on the weight of the things you order, rather than some other seemingly random method of assigning a delivery charge. If you buy a lightweight but expensive item, it won't cost as much to ship as it would a heavy cheap item. We're hoping that people will like this. I wish we could send stuff for free, but it does cost money to ship stuff, plain and simple. We will continue to offer the free shipping for orders over $300 (except floor looms, which are sent by freight company..... fuel surcharges have tripled in the last 6 months...)

AND we just finished up the spring knit catalog. It is at the printer, hurray!! Typically it's about 2 weeks from printer to mailbox, so look for it soon! Right about the same time the new website launches! egads.

AND I somehow got talked into being the vendor coordinator for Black Sheep Gathering (it seemed like a good idea at the time - I mean, I DO want to give back to the Black Sheep community!) and I'm trying to get all that stuff worked out and sent out and managed.

So if the blog seems a little neglected, maybe you'll understand.

Oh, and I have a mare due to foal in the next couple weeks...

Timing is everything! :)

Happy spring!

Diane