Fuzzy Shale Shawl

Yeah. I feel awesome right now. It took me somewhere in the neighborhood of 6-8 hours, I wasn't watching too closely. Even in ridiculously fuzzy yarn that sticks to itself like Velcro, the shawl was quite simple to complete. I also learned a new technique to go with it - Norwegian purling - which is nice and speedy compared to the continental purling I normally do. Also, Russian bind off. Didn't know that one, either. And it is GREAT. Fast and stretchy, my favorite type.

Just prior to this I completed three scarves for some friends of mine who are moving away, using up some cat-barfy but beautiful eyelash yarn I've had in my stash for seven years. I couldn't pull them off, but they will love them. Browse my Ravelry projects and check them out.

Next to cast on - Pembroke, from the newest edition of Interweave Knits. It's going to be lovely, just wait and see :)

What I do know, however, is that it makes one stunning shawl.

Case in point: Linky!

Overdyed Slubby Mittens of Squishiness

Yes, I'm still too lazy to insert my own pictures. It's a PITA on an iPad.

And because I am the laziest blogger in the land and don't want to insert a ton of images, I'm just going to link dump from my Ravelry page, which is updated much more frequently and has details on all the projects, too.

Click me, I'm fluffy!

Click me, I'm fluffy, too!

Me three!

No wonder my hand is sore, right?

Yup, there's more!

Last one (for lunchtime, at least) ;)

I have been a productive little knitter, no? Just last night I over dyed some interesting *cough*ugly*cough* ultra bulky, slubby stuff that has been languishing in my stash for half a decade now. It's a beautiful violet-blue and I'm making it into mitten for myself tonight. I also have some Crystal Palace Merino Stripes from back in 2004/2005 that I'm turning into one, maybe two berets, and a simple shawl. It's pretty, but has a weird texture. Nice and warm, though, and suitable for these projects.

Once all this crazy stash busting is done, I will take it a step further and knit up Pembroke Shawl, from the current Interweave Knits edition, in the final leftovers of green from Callie's Alpaca Baby Blanket. It will be over dyed a gray of some sort, I'm excited :)

Be praying my hand doesn't fall off from abuse, it's worth it for the music, cake, and fluffies!

I just knit up a washcloth using Misty's marvelous modifications to this easy little washcloth and it turned out very cute, If i do say so myself. I made it only 32 rows wide, as I prefer palm-sides dish cloths when trying to scrub things, but other than that I followed her lead. It took maybe an hour of knitting :)

Also, completed earlier this summer was a cute little crochet hook roll, which didn't fit easily into a project tab on Ravelry so it gets documented here. It was about the easiest thing to sew in the world, and much more personal than buying one. LOVE IT!

And as a small aside, aren't my babies cute? Yes, I'm biased.

That's all she wrote, folks!

Weight was 210 prepregnancy, so about 50 pounds down, and I have only gained about 6 pounds since then, which is awesome! I am feeling great this time around and looking forward to the birth sometime at the end of September or beginning of October. That's about all the update I have for now, see ya!

I decided to relist the shop items I have yet to sell, just to see if there is any interest. I still think the colorways are beautiful and hope they will find a good home sometime soon.

I also have been contemplating and mulling over what I will do with my fiber business, and have come to some conclusions after half a year's break. First off, I still LOVE dyeing and spinning, and will continue to do it in limited fashion, if only for personal enjoyment. I am also absolutely planning on continuing this as a career down the road, if/when time and space allows. I have come to the conclusion that to do this with the gusto it deserves will require a good 6 hour block of time each day, as well as a shop separate from the main house. These are not things I am able to acquire right now, so a continued break makes sense.

I have also decided that I will probably sell my yarn mostly locally, as it is a better market with a bit less competition than online retail sales, which seems to require constant attentive undercutting to make the sale. I love my online customers and will probably list goods on Etsy, but I don't think I will make that the bulk of my operation. Custom orders are still welcome, but I do believe I will eventually shift my focus to physical storefronts instead of virtual, given that there is a very steady yarn market up here, with a great tourist boom each year.

Life is still going well for me and the family - the girls are getting SO big, with Callie almost three and counting, using her imagination, and drawing very well. Lilah is now walking, though her language skills are a bit inarticulate (she makes up for it with volume, though!). Peter, my husband, is even busier with personal projects and is now gone from home far longer than he was last year, this has contributed to my decision on continuing the status quo in terms of yarn production. We're all doing amazingly well, busy and happy with all the beautiful little things in life.

I have some personal fibery updates I will be posting soon, mostly little knitting projects and some great Christmas presents I received, and my goals for 2010 include working on my personal spinning and knitting a bit more, along with continuing to lose weight and now, happily, trying to conceive our next child.

I'm doing just great, and hope you are as well. Take care!

Other than some spinning not much has happened on the fibery front for the reasons previously reported. I have a custom order for cotton dyeing I have been WOEFULLY slow on, mainly because, while I know how to dye cotton, I have never done my current method of controlled, reproducible dyeing with it, so I need a solid block of time with relatively few interruptions to work out the dye concentrations and formulas.

Sadly every Saturday I have had open, initially, has filled up with something or another that pushes time for dyeing out of the way. Hanging out with friends, house maintenance, church obligations... there has been NO time and it's been pathetic. I really do have to buckle down and do this, though, as the gal who wants this yarn has a deadline approaching for its' creation. Putting it off for one reason or another is no longer an option!

I have tons of knitting I need to do this upcoming fall as well, including a sweater for my mother-in-law that is her Christmas present. The tricky part is that she had yarn taken from another felted and slightly shrunk sweater that she'd like incorporated into this one, but it is sock/sport weight and finer than anything I'd use for the rest of the sweater, and I fear there is not enough to do the whole garment. The other problem is that it has many break and short lengths because I had to unravel a sweater to get it, and the sweater had some funky construction. What I believe I will do is work the body of the sweater in a natural colored light worsted merino I have, and then think up a colorwork pattern for the yolk and top of the sleeves to work in her yarn, and maybe around the cuffs as well. I think I am just going to work the sweater as a raglan with some ribbing down the sides of the body of the sweater, so it has a more tailored fit.

I think with the oatmeal reclaimed yarn doubled up the gauge difference will only be slight. The biggest issue is that I have to essentially draft a pattern from scratch to fit my needs with this project, and that is both time consuming and complicated. I can do it, granted, but it's a pain. Still, after this dyeing project is through I will be making a concerted effort to spend at least an hour an evening knitting this while I watch tv. It needs to be done, there's no way around it, now I just have to buckle down and DO it!

On the family front - we're boring, what can I say? Lilah had two teeth for the longest time but just jumped up to five with her two top teeth and one eye tooth coming in. She can cruise along furniture now and crawl with amazing speed, and is getting bigger every day. She's a real joy 99% of the time.

Callie is a typical rough-and-tumble toddler. She has a huge vocabulary and can now count to 20 pretty reliably and say most of her ABC's. She can identify almost all capital letters and the numbers 0-9, she just hasn't quite learned that those numbers can combine to BIGGER numbers and that the letters combine in sound to form words. But I'd say she's ahead of the curve for her age now, after spending her first two years of life languishing at her own pace :) Her favorite activities include digging in dirt, coloring, and getting horsey rides. Ah, to be a toddler!

Peter is ridiculously busy, as always, but doing very well. He won a spot to speak at an important bridge conference in Sacramento this September, and gets to talk about his design to engineers from across the country. I am VERY proud of him!

Life is just chugging along here, going pretty well. On the weightloss front I am down about 25 pounds from the end of winter and going strong. I'd say that is about 1/4 of the way to my goal, and I am chronicling the nitty gritty details, complete with fat pictures, stats, and all my struggles with habit change over at Weight Issues: Taryl's Weightloss Chronicles. It's definitely the good, bad, and ugly, but I am coming out of this victorious, pound by pound, and honestly it's taking up a lot of the time I'd spend dyeing or doing general fibery pursuits, which accounts for some of the blog silence. I'm still here, just occupied with other matters.

Unfortunately it has also come to pass that I believe shutting down my business, except for the occasional custom order, is the best thing for my family. I have been praying about this a lot and I just don't have time to be both a business owner and SAHM and homeschooling mom and wife and housekeeper and all the other various hats I am currently wearing all at once. Something has to give, and I truly feel I can't give my family and myself the attention deserved and still run a business during this season of my life. The economy has affected the luxury market, of which my business is a part of, and that makes volume and sales slow, but I'd have probably made this decision regardless.

I am not closing shop or quitting forever, not by a long shot. I will still ship current stock items and take custom orders, but I am lacking time to market and further my business beyond dabbling. Down the road, when I no longer have small children or homeschooling to mess with, I will pick this back up again and go at it hard. But in order to do what I want to do with it I would literally have to put my kids in daycare and work a normal 8 hour day from home, were I to do my business justice. It is not something easily dabbled in halfway, and so I am choosing to put 100% of myself toward my bigger duties and shelve my personal goals and dreams in the short term.

It was a painful decision, and I honestly feel like a bit of a failure, but I have to make the best decision for my family even though I LOVE what I do. I just don't have enough hours in the day to give this what it deserves, and thus I am prioritizing. Custom orders are still welcome and I'll sell and ship anything currently listed, and maybe add items from time to time, but no actively furthering the business for now.

Watch this space!

I needed this for me and my health, and fiber arts (and indoor sedentary behaviors in general) were in direct competition for my time.

I will continue to blog and take custom orders and sales, but I won't be doing too much in the way of stock creation or promo deals like phat fiber. Watch this space for linkage to my new, separate weight loss blog. I didn't want to brain drain and post progress pictures and weigh-ins on this space, so it gets its' own home if anyone is interested.

Thanks and sorry for the extended silence! It was unintentional but very necessary. I just haven't been around a computer much lately :)

On an "awe!!!" note, Callie told me she loved me for the first time tonight! I have been waiting over a year to hear it :)

Here is what I am dashing to add to the shop over the next hour - We have two Aubergines on very different wools (Corriedale Cross and Superwash Merino, they take dye extremely different despite the original colors being from the same dyelot), Rhubarb Superwash Merino, Fall Glitz Corriedale Cross, and Bubblegum Corriedale Cross.

The two Kaleidoscope Rovings, Fall Glitz and Bubblegum, turned out amazingly lovely.  Very complex and fun.  This was also my first batch using Superwash, besides the Phat Fiber Samples for April, and I was quite surprised to find out that the treatment used for Superwash causes the yarn to take dye very differently when used on roving (the differences on yarn seem to be quite slight).  The strike was extremely fast - the moment the dye hit the fiber - and resulted in sections of more intense color than the normal strike, along with a lot more blotchy white.  Interestingly it should spin up to look about the same as any other fiber in that colorway, as the white will reblend with the darker patches and give a soft, heathery look, but it was quite an experiment and unexpected given that the dye used was the exact same, just on different treatments of wool.

The Rhubarb and Aubergine Superwash is the same as what went out in the Phat Fiber Sampler, so if you like these colorways be sure to snatch up full sizes.  I will also be offering other Helena's Garden colorways in Superwash as well.

Anyway, that was the quirky dye experiment for the week :)  If I am doing a custom colorway for Superwash Roving I will have to remember the strike differences and compensate the DOS accordingly, which is very good to know.