sweetgeorgia

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.

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.

Autumn brings new colours, yarns and a free pattern

SweetGeorgia has been a busy place this summer. Since returning from the week-long dye workshop in Seattle, I’ve been dyeing for wholesale orders and shipping to yarn stores. Make One Yarn Studio in Calgary was the first to receive their shipment of a wide selection of our yarns. And this past week, we finished orders for Unwind Yarn House in Ontario and Black Sheep Yarns in Port Moody, BC. I’ve been re-establishing old relationships I had with our retailers and on the look out for new retailers as well. Personally, I am so very excited to start seeing our yarns in stores again and am excited about the opportunity to make and design new colours and yarns.

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Deeper into Colour

The Coquitlam Guild gave me a chance to speak last Thursday about natural dyes and natural fibres, and while I did talk about my experiments with natural dyeing over the past few years, including starting up the Supernatural SweetGeorgia collection of naturally dyed yarns, I think I ended up talking about dyeing and craft and burnout. How do we renew and regenerate ourselves after burnout? Do we even come back to the craft which took us down in the first place? I related this to principles and values that I learned in the completely unrelated activity of surfing and talked about how it gave me back the balance, simplicity and focus, and the appreciation to even attempt to dye things again. I’m not sure my “surfing as metaphor for life” goes over in weaving and knitting circles, but it’s the honest truth about what I believe.

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.

Renewal: April Fibre Club

It’s already May and here was what we did for the April Fibre Club…

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.