New Yarn Needs a New Name!

I’m totally stuck. I have this absolutely gorgeous new yarn base that I am dyeing and want to add to our main stable of yarns, but it needs a name! So, with a great suggestion from Aimee at L’Oisive Thé, I’m running this as a contest… help me name the yarn base and you’ll get a skein in the colourway of your choice.

The yarn is 50% of the softest and squishiest superwash merino wool blended with 50% glossy silk in a fingering/sock weight. It’s about 375 yards per 4 oz skein and could definitely be used to knit a pair of special socks, or better yet, a little shawl or cardigan. I love this yarn because it has the easy-care of superwash, but also added strength and lustre from the silk.

I’d like to add this to our website for early Spring, so go ahead and email me your suggestions at felicia [at] sweetgeorgiayarns [dot] com up until February 28, 2010. Send up to 5 suggestions for the name of the base yarn (not the actual purple colour) and also the colourway you’d like if you win… see our colourways here » So far, our sock yarns are called things like “Tough Love Sock” and “Superwash Sock”…

I’m so looking forward to hearing your ideas!!

Six new places to find SweetGeorgia

Since the holidays, I’ve been buried in a pile of dyed yarn, but it’s all getting finished up and send out to yarn shops now. In the next couple weeks, you should start to see our yarns available at a few new venues:

• Once Around in Mill Valley, CA | Once Around is having their grand opening on February 1st so if you are around the San Francisco Bay Area, maybe stop in and see! They are all crafts — sewing, découpage, wreath-making, knitting, stamping, embroidery, glitter and lots more.
• The Tinsmith’s Wife in Comfort, TX | Located in a little antique town, everything about this shop is so warm and friendly.
• Simply Socks Yarn Company online | Catering to the needs, desires and whims of sock knitters everywhere.
• Mad About Ewe in Nanaimo, British Columbia | Our first yarn shop on Vancouver Island! It’s located in the Old City Quarter of Nanaimo.
• Eat.Sleep.Knit online and in Georgia | Soon, we’ll have a comprehensive selection of yarns available on the Eat.Sleep.Knit shop site. They specialize in handpainted yarns!
• The Ashton Store in Ashton, Ontario | This is one of the oldest village general stores around dating back to 1851! Now this old general store stocks knitting yarn and hosts knitters every week.

And lastly, we are going to take a booth at the upcoming Fibres West festival in Abbotsford this March 26 and 27, so come see us and our fibre/yarn in person!

Four Seasons of Fibre Club

We’re getting ready for another brand new year of the SweetGeorgia Yarns Fibre Club. Just last week, I mailed out our 12th installment of Fibre Club offerings… members are still receiving them so I won’t be posting photos of it yet…. but you can follow along on the Ravelry group! Having never offered a fibre club before, I have had so much fun this past year thinking of things to dye and showcase. I’ve had the chance to play with all sorts of fibres that I rarely work with… including Falkland (which seems to be popular with spinners), Shetland, tussah silk and Tencel.

Occasionally this past year, I’ve had a couple fibre club members subscribe but not realize that it was actually spinning fibre. And since they didn’t actually know how to spin, I was perfectly happy to dye up some sock yarn skeins as substitutes for the fibre.

I’m enjoying the creative freedom in being able to dye new colourways and play with some luxurious new blends. I’m even tempted to offer a “Yarn Club” type subscription if enough people are interested.

Want to join us for our second year of Fibre Club? We’re taking new subscriptions now on the online shop and you can always follow along with our Ravelry group. The Fibre Club members have all been so positive and active about spinning up their fibre and posting photos. Reminds me that I need to finish spinning the Wensleydale in my own set of November fibres.

Slate Grey Days Ahead

It’s true, Vancouver is usually pretty grey during the winters — especially February and November (when, I believe, it rained 28 out of 30 days in 2009). So, I’ve sort of avoided dyeing any sort of grey hue. The crisp lighting in the studio encourages me to dye brighter, more saturated colours, but I love and I live in greys and neutrals. Sure, I love a little nervous/awkward chit chat about my shockingly hot pink socks or my hot turquoise hat, but I can relax in a colour like this slate grey…

This pattern, the Vine Yoke Cardigan, is wonderfully written. It’s sort of a fill-in-the-blanks worksheet and so far, the lace pattern seems to be working out just as Ysolda says it will. I’m enjoying the knitting of it as it’s going pretty quickly. Although I won’t finish in the 10 days someone else on Ravelry took to knit this, hopefully it won’t be in my queue for a year… unlike other projects.

So, for Winter, I’m adding this new Slate grey colour to our palette of Dye To Order yarns as well as the Cypress green above. It’s a bit woodsy and murky, a darker and more desaturated teal green. Both these colours will be available in all our yarns, although it might take a bit of time to get it all entered into the online shop. If you don’t see it, just email/txt/twitter.

Another change we’ll be making to the offerings is that our Superwash Worsted and Superwash Sport yarns will be available as larger 4 oz skeins now… more than double the 50g skeins we were doing originally. Hopefully for you sweater knitters, this just means fewer joins and more continuous knitting time. I think we all need more of that. And the opposite is true for the Silk Lamb Lace — we’ve changed the put up to 60g of 625 yards of laceweight goodness. More affordable at this skein size and perfect for the smaller shawl designs that have been popping up!

Year One

Technically, today is exactly one year from the grand opening of the SweetGeorgia Yarns Studio. It’s been four years since I started dyeing yarn as SweetGeorgia Yarns, a year and two months since I moved into the studio and exactly a year since we had our open house. It’s been a whole series of learning opportunities and growing pains, for sure, but I imagine that we’ll always be changing and learning. With my personality, there’s a lot of attempting to run before walking and a lot of falling on my face in this business. But there is also the joy of discovering new things and meeting amazing people in the process.

One of the first challenges I had was trying to define or describe this space to people. Located on the fourth floor of a live/work building, it’s not a typical retail environment. It is an industrial-looking workspace, complete with concrete floors and walls, where we make hand-dyed yarns and spinning fibre. But I know that people came to the studio expecting to see every single yarn in every single colour and often I received (and still receive) phone calls asking if I carry Rowan yarns. No, it’s not that kind of yarn store. Maybe one day, but not today.

And so it was very important this past year for us to begin working with real, beautiful yarn stores again. I so much want for people to be able to touch and feel the yarns in person and to be able to experience that in their local yarn store. Nowadays, when you come to our studio, you will very often see (and smell!) yarn drying, yarn in the middle of being packaged or yarn being dyed. There actually is just a little bit of yarn on hand for retail sale. Most of what is in the studio now is being made to go out to shops. I love that the yarn shops can focus on beautiful displays, great customer service and keeping their shelves nicely stocked. And I love that by working in this way, I can focus on making beautiful yarn for those shops.

Absolutely, you can come visit our studio and see work in progress. And absolutely you can come see colours in person and make a custom order. And definitely, you can request dyed-to-order yarns and fibres from our studio online. But I encourage you to visit the fine local yarn stores that are now carrying SweetGeorgia Yarns… including L’Oisive Thé in Paris, France… our first time in France.

So this is kind of why we didn’t host a big party at the studio on this very rainy Vancouver Sunday. Well, because the studio floor is being taken up by yarn racks and bins of undyed yarn.

Instead, we are celebrating our Year One anniversary with a brand new website, a Free Shipping over $100 sale (for US & Canada), and a new pattern in Twist Collective featuring our Superwash Sport yarn. I’m sure that in the upcoming year we’ll have a few more falling-on-face-type experiences, but we are committed to focusing on developing more beautiful yarns and fibres, distributing our yarns and fibres through our website and fine retailers, and also designing more knitting patterns to inspire you. Happy anniversary.