sweetgeorgia

Go big or go home.

This Wednesday, I shipped my biggest order yet to the brand, spanking new Make One Yarn Studio in Calgary, Alberta. Not a wholesale order, per se, but a really big order on behalf of the Make One Sock Club members. Whatever isn’t snatched up by the sock club knitters will go in the store starting June 20th… Amy at Make One (bless her!) is also a Buffy fan, so there’s extra Slayer, Willow and Angel in the mix!

Yes, it was a little freaky and a little intimidating, but I wanted to take on this order as a test for myself. I wanted to try and see what making a big order would be like… how difficult… how tiring… how fun… how exciting?

Well, I survived. So slowly (slowly, slowly) but surely, I am going to start taking wholesale orders. The details aren’t all complete yet but should be ready in a couple weeks. In the meantime, if you are interested in setting up a wholesale account or at least receiving a wholesale info package, let me know here: http://sweetgeorgiayarns.com/about/wholesale.php

There’s no dye session this weekend since we are off to the HOW Design Conference in Las Vegas. It’s basically four days of company-sponsored hedonism for 3,000 graphic designers in the middle of the desert. Crazy, crazy. I’ll be the one knitting a sock in the back of the room.

And we all came crashing down…

Doh. Well, saying the Sweet Shop update didn’t work exactly as I had expected would be quite the understatement.

I have to apologize to everybody who was trying to get on the shop site today and just… couldn’t… connect. I’m so so so sorry! We crashed the server yet again… The server guy and I spent about three hours on the phone this afternoon trying to work things out but in the end, we had to disable the site. There were about 500 people trying to access the site at the same time and those hits were taking up about 99% of the server resources. But not to get too technical, we had to kill it so that it wouldn’t cause any more problems for other people trying to access other sites on the same server. sigh. These are growing pains, I guess.

But here is the new plan. The shop is being set up on the new dedicated server right now. It will be the only site on the server, so hopefully it will be able to handle all your affection! We’ll need to wait for the domain name to fully move over to the new server, but I hope to open on Monday, May 8… sometime. I’m nervous about giving a specific time, so it’ll have to be sometime Monday for now.

I really appreciate everybody’s patience and support! And it makes me so happy that you like the yarns… I just want to be able to get these yarns out to you!!

The Sweat Shop.

There’s this running joke among my friends where everytime someone mentions “The Sweet Shop”, someone else will say “Oh, you mean ‘The Sweat Shop’?” Tease as they might, the DH, my friends and my family are always so supportive of my wacky ideas. When I first opened shop in September, Jen was one of the first to send me her congratulations and it’s a message I go back and read from time to time.

I can’t really say that I’m a one-woman dye/spin/design operation because I just couldn’t exist without the support of the people around me. From Glenda (also a knitter!) at the print shop who printed all my new yarn tags so I wouldn’t have to continue hand-trimming each and every one… to my bookkeeper who has worked through my exasperating pile of receipts to get things ready for my accountant… to Richard who re-skeined yarn pretty much every evening last week and tied the yarn tags… to Michelle who stayed up with us until about 10:30 pm on Sunday night helping us package the yarn orders for shipping on Monday. I owe her a really good beer.

If you bought yarn on Thursday, you’ll see the new tags… with the colourway written in Michelle’s delightful handwriting. I took the opportunity to print tags for some new base yarns too… so look for up to seven new base yarns (silks, silk and merino, kid mohair lace, yum yum yum…) coming to the shop in the next few weeks.

By the sweat of my brow, I am grateful everyday.

Shop, shop, shop

Phew! As of this morning at 2 am, the shop is now sold out!

My server and I were completely overwhelmed by the response at 12 noon yesterday — in fact, the server crashed and I had to call the server guys to get them to reboot it! He seemed mildly amused that the machine was conquered by yarn shoppers. I didn’t find it particularly amusing though — I was freaking out.

Hmmm, I’m going to need to find a way to prevent future tech issues. It may involve moving the shop site to it’s very own server and allowing for more connections, or maybe a server cluster, or… or…

In any case, I really appreciate everybody’s support and enthusiasm for these yarns! You guys make me so happy!

Coal Harbour Socks

I’m having a most miserable week… so tired all the time but feeling very wired. I keep asking myself, “Have I had too much coffee? Have I had enough coffee? Am I hungry? Am I full?”… I just can’t tell anymore. This could all be attributed to the fact that the office two doors down from me is being renovated and the constant drilling is driving me insane. There is sawdust everywhere which has made the whole floor smell like a hamster cage.

There’s also some low-level craziness around here as Jet Li and Jason Statham are filming in and around our building and also at Brioche bakery & café across the street. In fact, if you walk by the café today you’ll probably see the funky little bamboo shutters and the little Chinese entrance they added to the front of the café. Very odd. It’s kind of disappointing that with the renovation of the suite on my floor, the production people opted to use a different floor for one of the scenes… otherwise, there’d be Jet Li fighting evil in front of my door!

Anyway.

Maybe I will feel better today because I am wearing new socks.

These socks are so new that I haven’t even darned in the two ends yet. I put them on this morning for their photo shoot and they were so comfy, I just couldn’t take them off (plus we were running late) but maybe I can bring myself to weave in the ends tonight. Richard was very amused watching me take pictures of my feet.

Coal Harbour Socks

• Pattern: Wendy’s Generic Toe-Up Pattern
• Yarn: SweetGeorgia Yarns Superwash Sock in “Coal Harbour”
• Needles: US 1 / 2.5 mm Addi Turbos
• Notes: No changes to Wendy’s pattern. I knit a 6 inch leg and still had 18g of each skein leftover. So if I had more patience, I could have knit a way longer leg. I was also a little impatient with the foot, so I could have knit about 1/2″ more foot before starting the short-row heel.

And in Sweet Shop news, the next big shop update will be Thursday, April 6th at 12 noon PST! There will be about 20 skeins of Superwash Sock, 35 skeins of Speed Demon and 10 skeins of Handpainted Sock yarn. Of course, I am still working out kinks with this new setup and I really appreciate everybody’s wonderful feedback and suggestions. One of the changes is that once yarns are sold out, they won’t appear in the product listings anymore — this way, you only see the stuff that’s available. Yay. There’s a new page that shows all the sold out yarns only.

Ok. I’m off to get more coffee from the film set… I think.