Busy bee

So far, I’m having a pretty productive New Year so far, and because I’m feeling chatty, I’m going to tell you all about it!

But first: We still have a couple of spots in Camp Pluckyfluff February 7 & 8. If you live in the South or Midwest (except in/very near Chicago), this may be your best and most economical opportunity this year to learn/spin/play with the fabulous art yarn spinner & author Lexi Boeger. The $350 workshop includes two full days of Camp Pluckyfluff classes, plus your accommodations in a great old school building, all your meals and snacks, supplies, and equipment use (plus a dandy goodie bag!). We have plenty of wheels, so if you’re flying, you can save the shipping/baggage cost. Your meals and snacks will be covered (yes, we can accommodate special diets–just ask), you’ll get to stay in a lovely old classroom, and spin, knit, and drum card to your heart’s content after hours. You’ll also get to enjoy the beautiful country sunsets and meet our new little flock (pictures below!).

And while I’ve got my Harveyville Project hat on, Spring Yarn School (May 7-10) registration is now open. We’ve dropped the price back down to $450 and added a 4-month installment plan to help you budget the expense. AND if you really want to get your spin on and sign up for both workshops (they’re 3 months apart… you deserve one little old workshop a quarter, don’t you?), you’ll get a FREE Dye Lab session (including fiber) the Sunday night or Monday morning after Camp Pluckyfluff!

Now, let’s talk about me, shall we?

I decided to do something new for my Uberlist this year. I made up my uberlist in the usual way, but I also made a supplemental list of alternates, and I’m going to review the thing once a month and chuck any I’ve decided are totally stupid or undoable, and swap them out with alternates. Yay me! I’m also using the space around the illustrations in my shiny new datebook to record a little diary entry each week.

I’ve been busy dyeing up Pluckyfluff fiber. I wanted to include spinning fiber in the package because one of the things I love about Yarn School is that you get EVERYTHING: scads of classes, meals, snacks, equipment to use, goodie bags, an lots and lots of fiber. I’ve always been a prix fixe gal (those steakhouses where you pay $40 for your Porterhouse and they want another $6 for a freakin’ 25 cent baked potato just make my blood boil). I’m going to try to do one dyepot a day all week so there’s a sweet range of color.

I’ve also been dyeing fiber to bulk up some stuff I’m getting combed at Zeilinger’s annual sale. I have two lots of old rovings from some random long-ago fleece that I dyed & I’m having them combed. Then I have a giant bag of washed alpaca I dyed. I’m going to dye up some wool to blend in because I prefer a blend myself. And I also have almost 40 pounds of chocolate merino I bought last fall on a whim (it was cheap! I couldn’t resist!) I need combed. I’ve also got a few random fleeces (sheep and alpaca). I think I may send one batch a month. The sale decreases 1% each month, but I don’t think I can afford it all in one go.

Winter Woolfest was freaking awesome! It was the Saturday before last in Wamego. It was super cold in the morning–perfect weather to get wooly. The turnout was great–there were knitters & spinners from all over Kansas & Missiouri & a few from even farther afield. There were wonderful free classes and demos all day, I met so many amazing people, it was really fun, and I’m so proud of & grateful to Jen for putting together what promises to be a really wonderful tradition! I’m already excited for next year!

I’ve also been knitting a lot. After THREE goes at the yoke, I finally successfully completed what was to be my own Cobblestone. This was my second Cobblestone. The first one was for Ron. It ended up being a bit too long due to the bottom-up knitting, so I decided to knit the yoke first, bottom up, then knit the sleeves and torso yoke-down. But because I’m not very bright, I ran into a few problems. The first time, I think I was watching TV and only cast on the stitches for the sleeves and one side. But because I had it on small needles and it was all bunched up, I didn’t realize my mistake until the end, when I had a child-sized yoke.

I frogged it and started the yoke again, this time being certain all stitches were accounted for (since I was fudging the pattern and started midway through, it’s not like it was a simple CO X stitches; it was counting stitches from the point of picking them up around the sleeves and body–still simple, but apparently too complicated for television knitting for a dunce like me). I knit the yoke, then worked the body and sleeves down for a good length. Voila! But something seemed off.

Then I realized that instead of centering the back of the body along the back of the yolk, I somehow got everything off kilter and center back was over the back left armpit. Well, with the short rows, that made the yoke a couple of inches longer on one shoulder than the other. Not an awesome look.

Luckily, with the yoke worked bottom up, it was easy to frog that part, and with the sleeves and body already the right length, just work up. Et voila!

Except I don’t think I tried it on enough–and also, it’s just the nature of a relaxed fit sweater in a man’s size not to fit my small-breasted, large-hipped build just so–because it was too big and saggy (much frumpier than this picture reveals–I can’t help but reposition myself to look less frumpy even when I’m theoretically trying to illustrate frumpiness; ah, vanity).

I like my sweaters fitted as a rule. But, it fit Ron perfectly (the one I made him originally was too big, too, even after I shrank it as much as I dared), so he’s very happy now.

I am still planning to make myself a ladies’s Cobblestone at some point, definitely working the yoke up, sleeves/body down, but taking the extra time to do the math for a smaller size, and shape the body for a girly fit. But after knitting the better part of a kilo of the stuff, I want a break from the Donegal tweed.

So my 2009 January Sweater will be my Stockholm Raglan, made from the handspun I made from the fiber I got when I visited Stockholm. I plyed it with handspun made with Beaverslide natural black roving to give it more subtle color shifts, and also to get a lot more yarn out of it. And I’m alternating the three colors in skinny stripes with a recurring pattern designed to match the unequal proportions of yarn I made. It goes green blue green yellow green blue green blue green yellow. And it keeps the  yellow from overpowering the design. It will just be a simple fitted raglan with a wide neckline. The fiber is more sturdy than soft, so the wide neck means the neck of whatever I’m wearing under it will keep it from bugging me.

And I made a bunch of extras when I was preparing for Winter Woolfest so I could follow up with a shop update:

And Cathy and I made some more of our swatch books, which I just looked up and discovered I never blogged! It’s called the Acid Dye Quick Reference, and it has real wool color samples, kettle dyed to give a good representation of what you can really expect of your in a medium saturation of every single Jacquard Acid dye color. They’re lettered and decorated with Cathy’s adorable illustrations, and they’re on a big ring, so you can take them apart and rearrange them as you wish for planning colorways.

Knit Picks inquired about carrying them a couple of months back, which would be very cool. But even if you’re not a behemouth store, you can carry them as an accessory to your Jacquard acid dyes, because we offer volume discounts if you’re a guild or yarn shop.

There’s also a little Pocket Record that helps you document your own dye recipes. Plus we’re working on a super-macho uber color deluxe mega binder that should be finished sometime this winter if all goes according to plan! For sale in my etsy shop and here, colorsourcebook.com.

This is one we took apart and framed so we could use it for color reference in the dye lab.

And the final bit of news so far for January: the last nameless sheep finally found her name.

Agnes.

Agnes the Merino ewe lamb joins Shetland wether lambs Uncle Honeybunch and Mr. Shivers…

And yearling chocolate Romeny ewe Fudgy the Whale, to complete the adorable little flock of Cupcake Ranch.

They arrived, somewhat muddy, after a wet spell, so I never did get them jackets. Now they’re already full of hay, so I decided to let them all run around naked this year, but after they get sheared in the spring, they’re all getting measured for brand new outfits!  I’ll just deal with the extra work this year. Mmm mmm, that’s going to be some pretty yarn!