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!

We partnered up and dyed BFL and Superwash Merino top with Amy’s oven method and also a cold-pour technique. In the oven method, we wet out the fibre, arranged it in the oven pans and then poured dye in whichever pattern we wanted. Then citric acid solution was poured over the entire pan and the pans were baked at 280 to 300 degrees, held at that temperature for ten minutes and then allowed to cool down. With the cold-pour sample, we put the superwash merino in a pot of cold water and poured dye over top. There’s more water in this method, but since we used superwash, the dye struck pretty quickly so we got splotchy fibre. Unexpected results… but it’s going to be fun to spin up.

It was happy times as I finally got to meet Jacey Boggs of Insubordiknit in class this morning. In fact, we partnered up for the dyeing and it was so cool to chat with her. There’s so much to learn from everyone.

Jacey is an absolute sweetheart and she is, at the same time, so confident and also very humble about her achievements. She’s the talent behind the new Sit n’ Spin DVD and teaches the technical skills required to be proficient at making art yarn. She podcasts and she blogs and she’s generally just a productive whirlwind of creativity. Yep, she’s awesome and she’s coming to teach at Madrona Fiber Arts in February 2010 if anyone in Vancouver is interested in really learning the skills to spin art yarn.

My afternoon session was all about drum carding with Deb Menz, a long-time hero of mine. Her book, Color in Spinning, turned me on to nearly everything I do today — dyeing, working with colour, creating colourways, and spinning handpainted yarns. So, of course, seeing Deb do simple things like strip a batt or pull combed fibre off a hackle was … like a celebrity moment for me.

I got her to explain to me her “major key” and “minor key” concepts from the book and I finally got it. Major Key colourways include the entire range of values but in different proportions so the yarn looks a bit more salt-n-peppery. Minor Key colourways include a small set of close values so the yarn looks closer to semi-solid with very little internal contrast. Good to hear it from the source, because that chapter in the book totally confused me.

Our class was about experimenting with the three different properties of colour: hue, value, and saturation. So we started with a single colour of fibre and split it into six portions. With each portion we blended in a smaller portion of another colour to create a variation… so a single colour was shifted warmer and cooler, darker and lighter, duller and brighter. Some of us used drum carders and others used the large hand combs or hackles. I went through all the trouble of packing my electric Fancicard, so I chose to use that for the entire class. Here are my batts:

Feeling very, very blessed, I was lucky enough to finish the day with a couple hours at the spa (a very special and lovely gift) and also a bit of a trip through the spinners’ market. After a test drive on the Schacht-Reeves 30″ saxony wheel and a few lustful glances at the Lendrum Saxony, I treated myself to some 80/20 Polwarth and Bombyx silk blend in a silver colour and some sock yarns from Blue Moon and Abstract Fiber as well as a Sheep 2 Sock kit from Blue Moon. It’s kind of nice to feel like a stash-hungry, wheel-coveting spinner again… at least for a moment.

Back in July, I had the privilege of attending Earthues’ Dealers Conference, a week-long full day and night workshop on handpainting with natural dyes and indigo. I was a bit hesitant at first since it was scheduled to begin on the night of my birthday and it was a bit sad to think I’d be spending my birthday alone in some random hostel with 15 other strangers… but it ended up being such a wonderful, inspiring experience. I don’t know how it could have been better. We spent from 10 am to 5 pm handpainting and dyeing various yarns with Michele’s natural dye colourways, left the Ballard studio for some dinner with the group, then returned each evening for another one or two hour lecture. One evening, Michele and Kathy demonstrated, side-by-side, the difference between their bio/organic indigo and the indigofera guatamalensis. These women know their indigo.

Another evening, we discussed eco-friendly dyes and minimizing resources including water and energy. Really simple things like covering your dye pots allows the water to heat up 22% faster. And another evening, Michele presented her projects with communities in Senegal and setting them up for natural dyeing and production.

Always, I think my greatest inspiration comes from seeing the infinite variety of exquisitely sophisticated colours that are possible from just a few natural dyes. Every time I see the yarn samples laid out in front of me, something in me is challenged to increase my skill and knowledge in dyeing and natural dyeing. It’s both comforting and exciting to think that I have all my future years to explore new aspects of dyeing.

I spent the week among fifteen amazingly wise and talented women and it was undeniably inspiring. I met a woman who raises CVM sheep in New Hampshire, another woman who makes her own goat cheese in Idaho, another woman who designs and makes handmade naturally dyed rugs in Nepal AND teaches full-time at the university textile program, women who have been natural dyeing for thirty years now… and they are all incredibly diverse examples of living and working out their lives on their own terms. It’s the kind of message I needed to receive on my birthday, I think. That however unconventional our careers and paths may seem, a life can be built on a passion for fibre. That however difficult or challenging it may seem, others have gone before you and it has been done. Nothing is impossible.

I talked about changing my dye practice from very sharply variegated colourways, requiring a shameful amount of plastic waste, and moving towards a more water- and energy-efficient workflow. That is the reason I have moved more towards kettle-dyeing, semi-solid shade colourways and multiple colour overdyes… so that I could better take advantage of the low-impact benefits of acid dyeing.

Also, I related to the guild members how natural dyeing is not a benefit to the environment for larger scale operations and noted how Lorna’s Laces Green Line ended up being dyed with conventional synthetic dyes.

Regardless of natural vs. synthetic dye sources, I’ve also tried to implement the colour principles that I learned from Michele Whipplinger including the idea of chromatic neutrals. That is, I’m trying to dye more complex browns and greys as opposed to colours that are so obviously… colourful. Colours that are slightly desaturated and more rich in depth.

I’m also working with a new 50/50 silk and merino laceweight base yarn. It’s a slightly heavier laceweight, but so glossy and gorgeous. It’s 765 yards in a 100 g skein and I’m looking forward to knitting up something like a Swallowtail Shawl in it. It has been, so far, taking the colour so well and I’ll be adding it to the online shop soon too.

There are so many things to learn and so many things to explore. I’m happy that I’ll be spending the summer dyeing more of these deeper, richer colours in preparation for the autumn.

the fibre // merino
Merino. For me, this fibre was so tempting, so enticing, I had to learn to spin it very early on. Usually, new spinners are steered away from merino and to stronger, longer stapled fibres, but spinning a skein of sproingy, super squishy merino will have you hooked. Spin this fibre with a worsted drafting method and you’ll get a beautiful and classic yarn.

the colourway // renewal
Spring is a time to renew and be made new. These colours make me think of potential, flexibility and growth. There are longer stretches of rose and lavender and shorter intervals of gold and rust and tulip leaf green. Spinning this all together and 2-plying back on itself might be a recipe for skeins of muddy looking yarn. Maybe take this opportunity to try spinning a fine, firm singles and then Navajo plying into a 3-ply in order to maintain the clarity of the colours.

I truly like to believe that we can renew ourselves. That we can be made fresh and new. That no one is keeping score of your past mistakes. That you can always try and do better. For myself personally, I’ve dedicated the month of May to trying to improve how I think about things. To really try to believe that no one is watching or waiting for me to fail. That I am doing my best and that hopefully a smigen of good will come of it.

To follow up with the previous post about meaningful work, part of me felt very ungrateful for having written it. I think that despite the great expense involved with creating and setting up this studio and business and how stressed I might get about making this all happen, I am very blessed to be in this position. I realize that in our current economic situation people around me are losing their jobs and that the cost of living and healthcare for everyone is very high. It does seem to be quite a luxury to be able to even make an attempt at your dreams.

And I’m so excited to present this series of semi-solid colourways for the SweetGeorgia sock yarns as a dye-to-order series. Available in the Superwash Sock or the slightly thicker, Superwash Sport, we’ll be dyeing as many skeins of these colours as you like. Over time, I’m looking to expand the series and also add back our more variegated colourways. I know that knitters want what they want when they want it, so I’m hoping to provide this option to many of you.

From left to right: China Doll, Raspberry, Pistachio, Saffron, Tourmaline, Orchid, Boysenberry. As for the colours, I think I was subliminally inspired by the Visit Mexico campaign that has been omnipresent in Vancouver buses. I’ve never been to Mexico, but my love for fish tacos seems to make me think I might like it.

Wensleydale is crazy stuff. I was originally drawn to it when a fellow guild member was spinning up some hand dyed Wensleydale… it was kind of glossy and shiny like mohair, but slightly lighter and loftier. And it took colour so well! Since that time last year, I’ve spun up Wensleydale in several forms. From very fine 2-ply to make a thin but strong sock yarn to thick bulky lumpy bumpy singles that are weighty and glossy all at the same time. The fibre itself has a very long-staple and is very lustrous with a broad, wavy crimp. Wensleydale fibre is generally considered the finest of all the longwool breeds. When you first start spinning it, you’ll immediately notice the long staple length and adjust your spinning and drafting. However, you spin it, I hope you enjoy the colours! They blend upon spinning and create a lovely heathered and mottled look which I find a little mesmerizing.

And if you have some time tomorrow afternoon, think about joining us for the “Spinning Little Luxuries” session on Saturday, February 7th from 1pm to 4pm. We have space, four different wheels you can try out (Schacht Matchless, Schacht Ladybug, Louet Victoria, and Ashford Joy), and a TON of new fibre… including the cashmere and silk 50/50 fibre above. We just received two shipments of luxury fibre including yak, baby llama, black diamond carbonized bamboo, soysilk, silk+merino, camel+silk, cashmere+silk, tussah silk, and cultivated bombyx silk. You can still sign up for the class here: http://shop.sweetgeorgiayarns.com/collections/classes-at-the-studio/products/spinning-203-little-luxuries and I’ll also be offering many of these undyed luxury and exotic fibres on the shop site here: http://shop.sweetgeorgiayarns.com/collections/undyed-fibre.

Happy spinning!

I’m constantly thrilled and delighted with the new colours and colourways that come forth when I get to experiment and dye in the moment. There is so much that I have learned about dyes and colours just by having the opportunity to try different things… something I would have missed if I continued to dye the same colourways over and over again. Dye results like these make me excited about the next dye session.

This very special skein of yarn is going to my girlfriend, Mary Joy of Yummy Yarn, (currently not rock climbing) from California. When I drove back from San Diego to Los Angeles two weeks ago, MJ and I met up at Hermosa Beach for a long, very hot, very sunny walk down the beach. It was so good to meet her in person… after all, she was one of the first people to inspire me to try spinning. This skein is all hot reds and golds and I hope MJ will make something wonderful with it.

Finally, this is a custom dye project I took on for a long-time customer. She’s been supporting my little yarn biz since it started and although I usually decline custom dye jobs, I do take on the very very special ones. This was a custom dye batch of CashSilk Lace for her wedding shawl… inspired by the colours of the hydrangeas on the cover of the Real Weddings magazine. I’m absolutely delighted and grateful to be involved in someone’s wedding in this way. No white wedding shawls here… it’s beautiful colour.

Happy cashmere day to you.

Well, it was a bit of a mess. The blacks wouldn’t take in the yarn and the excess kept running out into the yellows, making everything a bit grey/green and hazy… The red dots bled (of course, silly) and ended up being huge salmon-coloured splotches. It was devastatingly ugly. AND then I had to apologize to the girls for the yarn not turning out. All because I was too chicken to say “No” and too optimistic to think it wasn’t possible.

So the ugly abandoned yarn sat in an ugly old cardboard box with some other ugly yarn disasters, never to see the light of day.

Then this year, during the move to the studio, I excavated all my yarn from the old house… the good stuff, the undyed stuff, the old stuff, and the ugly stuff. It became so obvious that I should overdye the yarns or that I should weave them for charity things… or both. The yarn was still fabulously squishy and it was still 100% fine merino wool … in face, nothing was “wrong” with the yarn at all. It was perfect and ready to be made into something.

So, I absentmindedly dyed one skein of disaster “Kill Bill” in fuschia and another two in a kind of spruce green kind of colour. It’s kind of my fall back… overdye everything in hot pink. Hot pink saves the day. If you dye, you’ll know that overdyeing with acid dyes never knocks out the other underlying colour. It’s more like a glaze… so whatever you put on top will still allow the underlying colour to shine through. So fuschia over clear yellow gives clear red… it’s pretty exciting (to me at least). And green over yellow gives… well yellowy green. Maybe it’s the pending holiday season working its subversive and subliminal charm on me, but somehow, I ended up with the cheesiest, most cliché colour combination: holiday red and green.

Luckily, my mother was at the studio and helped me wind the back beam of the loom on Wednesday. It’s best done as a two-person job, but typically in the past, it’s been me scurrying around from the back to the front and back again repeatedly. And the back beam looks perfectly and evenly packed and solid. All my most recent weaving has been mixed up, messed up warps and so seeing this even, consistent warp has been kind of refreshing… and reminder that, yes, I can actually put on a normal warp.

Disasters can be remedied. Every yarn is still a perfect and beautiful thing. It just needs to be cared for and used for its best qualities. There are delicate subtleties in the colour of the yarn that I can’t even describe… they just have to be seen and experienced. Wonderful things can happen when you give things a second chance.

Being in Kyoto, mere blocks away from the traditional weaving and textiles district in the city, I sought out the Aizenkobo workshop. Aizenkobo is a indigo dye workshop and retail shop that produces a number of hand-dyed clothing items using techniques such as shibori (binding and dyeing), sashiko embroidery (hand stitching), ikat and double ikat (resist dyeing and weaving) and also natural dyeing with plant dyes.

Shibori dyed Japanese cotton scarves

Rolls of double-ikat handwoven fabric

Indigo dyed and overdyed sashiko thread

Sashiko on a pillowcase

I met the third-generation indigo dyer, Kenichi Utsuki, who described how his grandfather was originally an obi sash maker and weaver and how they started indigo dyeing. His father ran two businesses — both the obi sash making and indigo dye shop — but discovered that obi sash making was no longer a viable or profitable business. Their family switched to indigo dyeing alone, sold all their weaving looms, and focused entirely on natural process indigo dyeing. He has since been invited to numerous universities around the world to lecture on natural indigo dyeing. His wife, Hisako, is the designer of many of their garments.

Kenichi Utsuki stirring up one of three dye vats

Frothy and foaming indigo flower on the top of the vat, after stirring

His naturally fermented indigo process is significantly different from other chemical indigo processes in that it results in improved colour permanence and vibrancy in the indigo dyed fabric. Whereas we use chemicals like thiourea dioxide or sodium hydrosulfite, his natural ferment process uses wheat husk powder, limestone powder, lye ash, and sake. It allows the dye vats to run continuously throughout the year. I think it gets pretty cold in Kyoto in winter, but apparently they dye through the winter too. Also somewhat controversial is heating indigo vats, and here I could see that he has a heater inserted in the vat. I even watched him taste the dye liquor… eeek.

The natural indigo process produces an incredibly vibrant, saturated and clear blue colour that does not fade. Even pieces that he brought out that were 50 or 60 years old were still a bright, vivid “eggplant” blue. For comparison, he brought out a number of chemical process indigo pieces from all different countries, and the blue colour was much less saturated… greyed. Some of their blues are so intense and deep that they come close to black. On cotton and linen, something like 15 or 20 dips are required to generate the colour range. On silk, however, the number of dips increases to 40 to 60 even. One madder-dyed scarf he showed me was dyed and washed 18 times in order to get it’s intense, beautiful red colour.

Kanoko Shibori tied fabric prior to dyeing

...after dyeing...

...and after steaming.

Utsuki explained how they do not do any of the shibori tying at their workshop and instead hire factories in Nagoya to do this work. He says that each family has their own tying method and pattern that they do over and over for their whole lives. They don’t switch patterns. They simple make the same pattern again and again. That kind of steadfast dedication to one thing allows them to develop true mastery and virtuosity. It makes me wonder, if you think _your_ job is boring, I wonder what they think of their jobs. If they wake up in the morning and think, ah crap, another scarf, another day of making knots… But we are grateful for their exquisite skill and the beautiful things that are produced from their hands.

If you are interested, I brought back two shibori scarves, one madder dyed scarf, and two skeins of the most gorgeous indigo-dyed silk threads that you can take a look at on Saturday at the open house. We are on from 2 to 5 pm on Saturday afternoon at #401-228 East 4th Avenue at Main Street in Vancouver. Go vote for mayor… and then come play with yarn!