sweetgeorgia

FibresWest 2012

FibresWest comes and goes so quickly each year. It’s like a rush to pack and ready everything on the Wednesday, getting the car rentals and driving an hour out to Abbotsford (each way — over the weekend, it’s over six hours of driving) to set up our booth on Thursday. Then Friday and Saturday whoosh past, meeting and greeting customers and friends, both old and new. We drove through a monsoon to get to Abbotsford and throughout the show, there were moments when the whole festival collectively paused to listen to the intense hail coming down around us. But despite the harsh March weather, it’s a wonderful time to reconnect with fibre people… and learn new things.

Two years ago, I attended Interweave’s spinning retreat, SOAR, in Delavan, Wisconsin and watched a classmate (Stetson) in the Margaret Stove Lace workshop spin on a Russian supported spindle. It was the most fascinating thing to watch and I desperately wanted to learn how to do that. So I looked around the SOAR marketplace but couldn’t find anyone who was selling Russian spindles… only tahklis for cotton. It’s been a while, but just this past weekend at FibresWest, I met Caroline Sommerville of Ancient Arts Fibre Crafts who had a huge table FULL of supported spindles.

I managed to escape their booth with just one supported spindle. A bottom-heavy Russian spindle in Jatoba wood, weighing 43g (#1 in the photo). I tried practicing on it with some of our merino bamboo silk fibre, but Caroline says the fibre is not appropriate to the spindle… rather, the spindle is better suited to cashmere and yak and very very short stapled fibres. Excuse me while I paw through my fibre stash for some extra cashmere to practice with?! I’m torn… I want to spin beautiful wonderful fibres with this spindle… but I don’t want to waste said beautiful wonderful fibres as I practice. Teresa was also bitten by the supported spindle bug and ended up going home with a gorgeous blonde wood Tibetan spindle… and then sent me this video:

Carina, the unintentional enabler, bought a larger Turkish spindle on Saturday morning (possibly to do some plying?) and announced that there were only four more Turkish spindles at the Fibres Plus booth. I had to go look and the warm, red Arbutus wood was too seductive to refuse. So I unintentionally ended up with a second tiny Turkish spindle. My parents also have a large Arbutus tree in the front of our family home, so of course, there is a bit of sentimentality thrown in there too. This spindle is lovely and TINY at 21g (0.74 oz) and even smaller than the first one I bought at SOAR in 2010. And it’s a wonder why I always end up spinning fine yarn.

The Arbutus wood has an otherworldly kind of wavy grain to it and very interesting but soft figuring also. It’s small enough to carry around in my purse but so delicate, I’m afraid I’ll crush it. Maybe I should get a little plastic box from the Daiso for the spindles so that I can carry them around in my bag. I did see another spinner carry her series of Tabacheck Russian spindles in a hard wine bottle case. Very smart.

Despite all the hard work to set up, the many hours of driving, and the long hours in a very very cold venue, I’m so happy that I got the chance to be at FibresWest and get inspired by all the other fibre artists and craftspeople around us. From potters to button makers, from dyers to weavers, I’m grateful that everyone made the effort to come out and share their passions too.

For all the Judith fans in Vancouver…

The Greater Vancouver Weavers and Spinners Guild is hosting their annual Memorial Lecture on Monday, March 5th, 2012 at 7:30 pm and they snagged the beloved Judith MacKenzie as their guest speaker:

ALL TEXTILE ENTHUSIASTS ARE INVITED TO THIS FREE LECTURE

Guest Speaker Judith MacKenzie presents “The Tinkuy Conference in the Sacred Valley of Peru”

Judith MacKenzie, has been a textile artist for the last 30 years. Her work appears in private and public collections. Judith teaches throughout North America, is a published author and regularly featured in Spin-Off Magazine.

In 2010, Judith was present when four hundred weavers of the Americas gathered in Urubamba, Peru, in the Sacred Valley near Cusco for Tinkuy de Tejedores. Participants travelled from the Navajo Nation, Mexico, Guatemala, Ecuador, Bolivia, Argentina, and Peru for this unique textile conference. Judith will transport us to Tinkuy de Tejedores both visually and through her experiences to this ground breaking event.

The lecture will be held at: Kanata Co-operative Community Building, 7155 Blake Street, Vancouver, BC.

Back from TNNA

We escaped the cold and wet snow in Vancouver last weekend to Phoenix for the TNNA Winter Show. It was such a complete 180 in terms of weather, but it did not go unappreciated. I love wearing flip flops in January.

After all these years, we finally debuted our beloved SweetGeorgia Yarns at our first ever TNNA booth. We brought Tough Love dyed up in every single colour, as well as all fourteen of our base yarns. We had buttons and fibre… and Schacht was so awesome as to lend us a brand new Sidekick spinning wheel for the weekend!

Both Teresa and I managed to convince our husbands (Hubert and Dan) to join us on the trip, which was a great thing because we really really appreciated their help. And I think Hubert got hooked on spinning over the weekend too… he’s considering refining his spinning skills to spin laceweight so that Teresa can knit it. A perfect combo, I think.

This being our first show, we really didn’t know what to expect. From shipping things ahead of time, to setting up on Friday, to three days of sales meetings… it all worked out better than I had hoped. As we took off from YVR on Thursday morning, I still hadn’t received confirmation that our yarn shipments had arrived in PHX and it was SUPER stressful worrying about whether we would have ANYTHING to show in our booth. But as Teresa, Hubert and I touched down three hours later, I got a notification that our parcels arrived… just in time. We picked up our rental car and headed to a 2-bedroom condo that we had booked (so much more relaxed and less expensive than staying at a hotel). Dan joined us on Friday to help with the booth setup and the Sample It event.

The weekend went remarkably well and I was so happy that we finally met some of the yarn shop owners we’ve been working with already, and also so happy to meet new shops that we’ll be working with this year. Our booth was just a hop skip and a jump away from Deep South, so we got to see a ton of extremely talented designers every day… Grace Akhrem, Anne Kuo Lukito, Pam Powers, Ysolda, CocoKnits and Wendy Bernard from Knit and Tonic. Stephannie Tallent, who is about to launch her gorgeous new book “California Revival Knits“, also hung out with us at the booth.

We were really buoyed by the wonderful and positive response we received about our booth and about coming out to TNNA. Clara Parkes from Knitter’s Review even stopped by to chat! I’m sure we will do what we can to make it to Columbus in June. Despite all the anxiety and stress around shipping and deadlines, there’s really nothing that beats meeting up with knitters in real life. My reward for all this hard work? A couple scoops of Late Night Snack (never seen it in stores until last week!).

Yarn Harvest Yarn Crawl 2011

We’re happy to be participating in the upcoming Yarn Harvest Yarn Crawl for 2011! Come visit the studio on Saturday, September 24th. We’ll be open from 9 am to 5 pm.

We’ll be offering 15% of Yarn Harvest purchases and an additional 5% off for Fraser Valley Knitting Guild members. As always, we’ll have a handful of seconds that will be available at 50% off.

Presented by the Fraser Valley Knitting Guild, the Yarn Harvest is a yarn shop crawl in Vancouver and the Fraser Valley. You’ll need to purchase a $5 membership fee which will get you a Yarn Harvest pin, 15% off most of your purchases at participating stores, and an official Yarn Harvest swag bag for the first 200 registered Harvesters. Read more about it on the FVKG website.

Knit Social Vancouver Yarn Swap

It feels great to be back at the studio, dyeing and getting orders ready. We’re also getting ready for the first ever Knit Social Yarn Swap that is happening on Saturday August 13 from 10:30 am to 1:30 pm at the Cambrian Hall at 17th and Main.

The Yarn Swap is open to all for $4 admission. Bring your full skeins of yarn for swap or trade. Partial skeins are welcome for the Free Table. We’ll also have a table with some of our SweetGeorgia Yarns and some seconds too. I’m hoping to go through my own sweater yarn stash and release a few full bags of good yarns to the swap.

A Vancouver Yarn Swap
August 13 from 10:30 am to 1:30 pm
at the Cambrian Hall
215 E.17th just East of Main
Admission $4

See here for more details and we’ll hope to see you there!