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.

Drum Carding with Abby and Spinning for Socks with Janel

Today was the final day of retreat sessions at SOAR and I had the privilege of being in Abby Franquemont’s morning session to learn about blending with a drum carder. Abby is a powerhouse of knowledge about all things related to spindles, fibre prep and spinning in general. She just seems to know everything about everything. Luckily for us, she is a prolific writer and you can read her articles on a huge range of fibre-related matters on her website. She also makes fabulous blended batts… and so we came to her to learn the magic behind making such batts.

We blended up colours that we disliked, colours that were garish, colours that definitely looked ugly together… and got some really very beautiful blends out of them. The beauty of the drum carded batts were that we broke up all those colours and desaturated them, making surprisingly harmonious combinations of colours and textures. We used a wide range of fibres including Corriedale, Merino, alpaca tussah silk, bamboo rayon, tencel/lyocell, camel, and firestar.

The magic or secret behind making these beautiful batts was really simply patience and building the layers of fibre slowly. Working too quickly or trying to put too much fibre on the drum carder simply resulted in clumpy, bumpy and streaky batts. We worked slowly (in fact, we were late for lunch), and put the blend through about three times. Another thing Abby confirmed was that (depending on the fibre), you can’t card something too much. She related it to brushing your hair… it’s not really possible to brush your hair too much and damage it. Same with fibre, generally.

Most of the drum carders in the session were Strauch Finests or Petites and a few Pat Green Deb’s Deluxes. I brought my own Pat Green Fancicard after a bit of encouragement and in the end, I was so glad I did. I got to learn all the blending on my own equipment without having to change from carder to carder. Some of the students got to use Judith’s personal monster motorized drum carders… crazy huge and super fast carders. It would have been so cool to have a go at one of those.

My afternoon class was with Janel Laidman and was on “Spinning for Socks”. I had been so looking forward to this session because… well, I came to SOAR to spin, and soon realized that all my sessions were about colour or dyeing and didn’t require a spinning wheel. So I was looking forward to finally doing some spinning. And spin we did. For three hours. Straight. Power spinning. Spinning for sock yarn requires high twist in the singles as well as high twist in the plying to help prevent abrasion damage.

Our first sock yarn sample was a three-ply sock yarn made with a ply of mixed BFL, dyed BFL and dyed superwash BFL. Spinning tight singles and then three-plying quite tightly as well. The second sock yarn was a cabled yarn of a ply of superwash merino, merino/tencel, Ashland Bay merino/tussah 70/30 blend, and dyed BFL. These singles needed to be spun super fine in order to make up a fingering weight after basically four-plying it all together.

Although Janel suggested that we use a tight twist for the singles to make harder-wearing socks, she did mention that we could spin softer singles and then ply tighter as that is how most “pearl”-looking commercial sock yarns are constructed.

Both classes today were pretty exhausting (in fact, I face-planted into my hotel bed shortly after Janel’s class for a 20-minute power nap before dinner), but the wealth of knowledge in these women is such an amazing resource for us. I am quite grateful that they are so generous and willing to share their knowledge, some of which is used to do the things that pay for their mortgages. These are just hard-working, truly passionate people who seem to love what they do. I just want to be in the room to soak up even a drop of their wisdom. I think that makes coming to SOAR worth it.

Dye Crazy and All About Colour

After a good nights’ sleep, I started Friday morning with a dye workshop with Amy King of Spunky Eclectic. Our dye room was actually one of the beautiful River Lodges with a wonderful view of the golf course. Great natural light lit up our session which was made even more cozy with the fresh hot chocolate and marshmallow break midway through the morning.

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.

The Road to SOAR at Sunriver

These past few days, I’ve been madly working from early to super late at the studio getting yarns finished and orders out the door so that I could make it down to the 27th annual Interweave Spin Off Autumn Retreat in Sunriver, Oregon. With all the work that needed to be done and all the sleep that needed to be had (and was not had), I was hesitant about leaving Vancouver at all. Up until the very last minute, I kept wondering whether or not this was a good idea to go. Still a bit wary about travelling so far on my own by car, I started my road trip this morning by getting up at 3:30 am and hitting the road by 4 am, making it to Seattle by 6:45 am and … finally, after almost 10 hours of driving, I reached Sunriver.

I’ve always held that the Pacific Northwest is uncommonly beautiful and I felt absolutely in awe to drive through from British Columbia through Washington to Central Oregon. It’s autumn and the leaves are fully golden and rust coloured. Driving through some narrower passages of highway, the pine trees are exquisitely tall and the deciduous trees sprinkled amongst them shed their leaves in a magical pixie dust kind of way. I had zero time to do any research about getting to Sunriver, so I let the GPS determine my route. So, of course, I had no idea that I’d be driving through the snow resort town of Mt. Hood. It was brilliant to go from pitch black and pouring rain at 4 am to glorious snow and sun by about 10:30 am. Got me all excited about starting snowboard season.

And then almost directly after the Mt. Hood National Forest… I hit a super dry, desert-like stretch. It’s sort of at the end of this stretch that Sunriver is at. The resort is in the middle of Deschutes National Forest and I believe there are a number of golf courses in the area. But the rooms are lovely… complete with outdoor deck and adirondack chairs and a gas fireplace indoors… perfect for evening spinning.

So far, I’ve had about 20 minutes to spend at the spinners’ market. Not enough to decide on anything yet. Maybe some lovely natural dyed spinning fibre? Maybe a square-shaped spindle? I did spin on Lendrum Saxony again today for the second time in my life and it’s pure joy. I spoke to Gord Lendrum about getting one and there just seems like there’s none available anywhere. Ah well. The dream wheel will stay a dream.

Dinner tonight was followed by a brief, casual fashion show of the handspun creations of our attendees. Beautiful things like “my first ever handspun knit into my first ever lace shawl” or “wedding ring shawls” or “angora handspun that doesn’t shed”. Two of the pieces that I swoooooned over were the following:

Okay, from what I remember, this is 100% silk handspun and navajo-plied. The yarn is 80 wpi PLIED. And then it’s knit into a triangular ostrich plume shawl. I got to touch this one and I can’t even imagine how fine the singles must have been. Exquisite spinning and such fine lace knitting.

And this sweater had a lovely history. The yarn was spun over many years from a fleece that was purchased 16 years ago. And then the maker designed and knit and unknit the sweater a few times, never seeming to reach completion. Then finally after the support of her friends, she managed to complete it on the plane ride to SOAR today. Makes me feel a bit better about those two fleeces I’ve been storing.

Well, I’m tuckered out and my eyes are going to pop out of my head soon. I’m taking Spunky’s dye class tomorrow morning, Deb Menz’s carding class tomorrow afternoon. Time for sleep.

Ballard Slouch

I owe this blog a whole lot of posts. But let’s start off with a simple and slouchy hat that I designed while I was sitting in my car for over 90 minutes, waiting to cross the border into the US to attend the Earthues Natural Dye Studio workshops in Ballard, Seattle, WA. A lovely clover lace pattern is the basis for this slouchy beret-style hat. Its easy-to-memorize lace pattern makes for a very simple and elegant one-skein gift. Since that day in July, I’ve made four of these hats in different yarns and colours and tested different sizes and gauges. I like this result the best:

Knit it up in a luxurious and drapey Merino Silk Aran or a lush and cushy Superwash Worsted yarn. I love how the lace is gentle and uncomplicated. It decreases seamlessly at the crown to form a beret-type shape. The simple pattern lets you add repeats if you like to make a slouchier hat.

The 2-page PDF pattern includes both charted and written directions. And it’s available via Ravelry or the shop site. And it’s free. My gift to you this crisp fall morning. Keep your head warm.