Where I'll be

Here are some places you can find me in the upcoming days.

1) Coquitlam Farmer's Market (details at www.makebakegrow.com) on January 13 and February 9. I'll be bringing a ton of yarn with me -- vast amounts of my single ply Corriedale, and as much sock yarn as I can make between now and then. Come visit me, and bring a big shopping bag for the gorgeous local food you can buy directly from farmers in the area.

2) At the Port Moody Arts Center (details at http://www.pomoartscentre.ca/pages/pdf_files/winter_spring/w08_adspecint.pdf). I'm teaching a class in how to knit sweaters without a pattern on Wednesday evenings. Shaping a sweater doesn't have to be a complicated affair; I'll teach you some basic calculations and basic sweater shapes, and you'll feel like you can take on the (knitting) world once the class is over. Plus, you'll have a new sweater.

The second class is a Knit Cafe on Saturday mornings. This is an open classroom, sort of like a knitting group with a mentor. All are welcome, from people who have never touched needles before to more advanced knitters who want some guidance in some specific techniques. Do you have a half-finished project that you can't make progress on? Do you want to know how to follow a chart? Work with two colours at once? Do cables? Or maybe you don't know what you want to learn, but you just want to go with the flow and see what's being taught that day. I think the Open Class is gonna be big fun. Basic materials and tools will be available for purchase at cost (including my own handspun yarn -- I can't pass up an opportunity for potential sales -- but you can bring your own, too.

As always, my yarn is available on my Etsy shop (link to the right) and at Three Bags Full.

I have a bunch of pink, lavender, pink/white/brown, and eggplant yarn drying inside. I might even photograph some of it this afternoon -- stay tuned.

I'm famous! (In Coquitlam)

So it's all silly, but at this moment I am absurdly proud of having been interviewed by one of the local papers, the Tri-City News. The interviewer got most of the facts right, and the photographer took a wonderfully glam photo of yours truly. The link is below -- read the article, then come back and tell me I'm pretty:

http://www.bclocalnews.com/tri_city_maple_ridge/tricitynews/entertainment/12873486.html

I'm spinning orange sock yarn, and on my drying rack is a yarn I'm titling Myfanwy. Tell me why I chose Myfanwy, and I'll...well I don't have any useful giveaways. I'll be very impressed though, and I'll ask you to be my friend.

The love between a woman and her mittens

If this love is wrong, I don't want to be right. Above is shown a mitten in progress, both front and back. I'm so pleased, I can hardly tell you how much. It might be unnatural.

The first mitten is now complete, and the second is begun. Don't ask me for the pattern, because that scribbled-on graph paper in the first photo? That's my pattern.

I've knit with my own yarn before, but somehow this feels more special. Maybe it's because I know I'm preparing. I'm practising spinning this fiber, trying to get it thinner. I got it down to a worsted weight, but I need to get to a DK in order to do a Starmore pattern. I'm practising dyein the fiber in gradations of the same colour. I tried to get 5 distinct shades, but what I got was a light (not as light as I wanted), a dark, and three of much the same shade in between. And I'm practising my stranded work. It's improving. I have ordered this little plastic doohickey, looks like a ring with two guides on the top, for stranding both colours on the same hand. Right now I do my foreground colour in my left hand, as I usually knit, and my background in the right hand -- slow, and awkward, and not nearly as quick as I'd like. I must practice my "throwing" technique.

Here is a picture of me spinning the shetland. This is my usual spinning location (by my desk in the livingroom) and uniform (comfy jeans and fleece, sleeves pushed up because I hate having fabric on my forearms when I'm doing any sort of handwork). We're trying out a new camera -- not bad for low light, hm?




I'm theoretically doing the mittens as prep for my sweater, but the mittens themselves are really fun and satisfying, and fast! The first mitten was complete inside 24 hours (after the wool was ready of course). I'm having visions of a second pair in gradations of cherry pink, with a chocolate brown foreground. Maybe some sort of a leaf pattern?

Cooking up mittens

I'm cooking up something new -- something just for me. I handspun some Shetland wool, undyed. I tried for sport weight, but I think it came out more like a DK -- will need to practice that for my next project. Then, I put half the skeins in a charcoal dyebath, and half of them I dyed in varying shades of purple. My plan is to make a pair of Norwegian style, 2-stranded colourwork mittens. I was considering Eunny Jang's Anemoi (http://www.eunnyjang.com/knit/2006/12/anemoi_mittens.html), but the yarn might be too thick to make the pattern work. I'm also considering doing them in the Alice Starmore pattern for her Lindisfarne sweater.

My eventual goal is to have good enough spinning, dyeing, and fairisle knitting technique to make a full-size Lindisfarne for myself, out of my own handspun. And if I'm doing the dyeing, I can make the sweater in 12 different shades of red, 10 shades of blue, 4 shades of brown. It's my marathon project for this year. Right now, I'm training for the marathon with a short 5K -- mittens. Updates to follow.

Here's the purple yarn cooking:

Green, baby, green.

I have had a glorious week in fiber. In brief, here are the high points:

1) Inky the Squid Boy has turned out to be, not Shetland as I thought, but Corriedale. I two-plyed it anyway, and made something very puffy, slightly shiny, and altogether lovely. I think I shall keep one of the two skeins for myself, and make some fingerless gloves for my mother's husband for an X-mess present. I'm thinking of doing more Corrie as an Aran weight two-ply, and ditching my whole two-ply shetland idea. I may keep the 4lbs of the stuff all for myself, and do some glorious hand dyed, handspun fairisle work with it. Will keep you posted.

2) My skeinwinder, which clamps onto the top of my spinning wheel, arrived in the mail. My previous process for winding skeins involves using a swift clamped onto my dining room table, holding a yarn-filled bobbin on a long knitting needle, and tensioning the bobbin with a beleagered UNO card while I whirl the swift around with my right hand. Thank goodness I have really long arms, otherwise this system would be a total no-go. As it is, it's weird and inconvenient, and if I do more three skeins in a row my shoulder cramps up. My skeinwinder only involves threading the finished yarn up to to the winder, and using the hand-crank to whirl a skein up directly from the laden bobbin. This new device is $100 that will pay for itself in no time, what with all the carrying, tying, cursing, and massaging my shoulder that I'm no longer doing.

3) I have finally gotten the hang of this colour theory thing. I have finally put together some key pieces. My two blues, two yellows, and two reds? (well, magenta and red.) Warm and cool versions of the same underlying colour. Warm and cool. If I want a warm green, I should mix the warm yellow and warm blue. If I want a clear, bright orange, I should mix the cool yellow and the magenta. I know that many people learned this stuff in grade school, but I stopped taking art in grade 6 and never looked back. that's the one piece. The second key piece which I knew about, but wasn't successfully getting to work, was the art of toning down a colour with its opposite, its complement. To tone down red, I should add green. To mellow out a yellow, I should add purple. Put these pieces together and I have successfully created....

4) GREEN!!! Twice in two days, I created more or less the green that I was looking for, and nothing really unexpected happened in the dyepot. I even got a beautiful, even, bright spring green. If you have been reading this blog, you will have heard me complain about the difficulty of managing green, but I'm finally getting it. Expect lots and lots of green coming up.

5) I managed to dye a couple pounds of fiber while my two year old was at home. I usually wait until she's at daycare before I break out the poison and boiling water, but I wanted to see if I could accomplish the task with her underfoot. See, her last daycare day is tomorrow, and I have to see if I can keep dyeing even if she's around, otherwise I'll run out of fiber to spin before December is out.

I have no pictures for you today, because it's dark outside. When I start moving my new fiber inside onto my railing to finish drying, I'll show you some stuff. You'll see some gorgeous carmine red, some fuschia, some spring green and bright blue -- so much fiber all so very pretty that I might even offer some of the corrie for sale.

Inky the Squid Boy

I'm having a peaceful week. I'm working a bit, but mostly I'm coasting. I worked very hard to get ready for last Sunday, and the work paid off -- my stock is high, and full of variety. In fact, when I was struck with a dyeing idea on Tuesday and pulled out my undyed wool, I found that I was almost completely out of the BFL. Time to reorder!

26 lbs of undyed wool is on its way to me, and I'll undoubtedly have a big production week when it comes, but until then, I can regroup, and experiment a bit. I was struck with this idea. Or rather, I was struck with a neat yarn made by someone else, and I stole the idea. The yarn I was knitting with -- just a partially synthetic Patons yarn -- had one ply of black yarn, and one ply of various colours. The effect was a sort of all over tweedy, but with different accent colours. It would be easy enough to dye for -- just make a bunch of pure black, and then short bits of various other colours, joining one to the next as the whim strikes me. Here's the first attempt to dye this style of colourway:


I also did one batch of what I presume is my shetland wool. It was in an unmarked bag. It felt like the shetland, but the differences between the fibers are somewhat subtle, until they're washed. Once it dries, I'll know for sure what it is. I was asked to do some "boy" colours, and I rather like how this turned out -- it's all inky. Dark enough to be manly, but varied enough to be interesting to spin and knit. I call this "Inky the Squid Boy." (I've been watching a lot of Buffy lately.)



Lastly -- this one is brand new. It's a wool/soysilk blend. I ordered a single, 4oz package, just to try it out. My attempts at dyeing a merino/silk blend haven't gone great -- the stuff is touchy! And I hated spinning with it too. So, no more of that. But I have these wool/seacell socks that feel so wonderful, so I thought I'd try to spin enough of the wool/soysilk to make myself a pair of socks, and we'll see how the yarn turns out, how it knits, how it wears. Then I'll consider the possibility of making more for friends or for sale. In the meantime, I still want to show off the dye job, because it breaks my heart with the colourful blendy wonderfulness.

To market, to market

I'm off to the Coquitlam Farmer's Market tomorrow, and I have never been so ready for a market day. I have 4 bags full of yarn (big bags), a rack of yarn still drying in my bathroom that I hope will be ready for labelling in the AM, and a tote full of the assorted stuff I usually need. Pen, business cards, calculator, extra bags, and a knitting project. Swift, and ball winder -- 'cause I'm a full-service yarn booth.

I'm looking forward to this market. The Winter Market is an annual (indoor!) event, and apparently it's fairly popular. I'll be glad to not have to worry about cold fingers, raindrops on my labels, and wind blowing my business cards away. And I'll be glad to maybe get into the holiday spirit, just a little -- the craft vendors will certainly have some Christmas-y stuff to show.

And I have 11 skeins of sock yarn to sell. That may not sound like much, but honestly the stuff sells so screamingly fast that I've never had this much in stock at once. How did I accomplish it? Spinning like crazy, and not listing. I hope I sell out tomorrow, but if I don't, I'm sure some Etsy buyers will be happy to have a few skeins posted at once.

If you're in Port Moody tomorrow, come visit me at the Social Rec Centre. Yeah I know, the Coquitlam market is held in Port Moody. We're a close-knit community. Or series of communities. That's life in the suburbs.

It just occurred to me...

I have a dyepot! And dye! No, I haven't become very very stupid, it's just that a paradigm shift is required. I know all about the dyeing of white stuff. But it didn't occur to me until just today that I could dye stuff that already had colour on it.

Backstory (short): I bought the new Cat Bordhi sock book, and it is blowing me away. After all this time and all this knitting, I didn't think a knitting book could do that, but it did. I decided to make some socks, and I bought these lovely skeins of Koigu to make them with:


I need a bit of contrasting yarn to make some stripes with. I have quite a little stash of leftover nuggets of Koigu, remnants of a long-standing but mostly now cured Koigu addiction. I had a bright orange that might work, but it wasn't quite right. What I really wanted was a forest green. I didn't have that.

But I have a dyepot.

So tonight, I turned this:


Into this:


I'm so jazzed about these socks that I might even post in-progress sock pictures.

Colour Therapy

I had a seriously bad day yesterday, but I had to do some dyeing, no time to sit on the couch with a gin bottle and the remote control. I decided to combat the bad mood with some silly, candy colours. My very favourite. The pictures below are of a rack of blue faced leicester, some destined to sell some destined to be made into sock yarn, then socks. I'm picturing a row of candy-coloured feet as I type.















A closeup:



And some sock yarn drying -- I did some more sedate colours in the last batch, and I'm spinning them up now:

Butcher, Baker...

I'm sitting here reading someone's blog of their year on the 250-mile diet (their more relaxed version of the 100-mile diet), and spinning some sock yarn for Bev, a woman who met me at my farmer's market booth this summer and is now taking my sock knitting class -- knitting her first socks with my yarn.

I'm spinning the yarn and ruminating as I read the blog (did I tell you all I've learned to spin and read stuff on my computer screen at the same time? Bliss.), thinking about this writer's new relationship with a local miller, several local farmers, a local butcher, etc. I'm thinking about how much I enjoy buying a whole loaf of bread from the baker, and asking her to slice it for me. I like buying a cut of meat from the butcher, knowing he created that cut himself. I'm a coffee snob who grinds her own beans just before brewing the coffee, but if I weren't, I'd like buying whole, fresh-roasted beans and asking the coffee person (?) to grind the beans for me. There's just something really nice about picking something whole, something fresh and lovely, and then talking to a real live person who is providing this lovely thing for you, for some final processing of the item. You get to reflect. You both get to feel some satisfaction -- the seller, from seeing that the item that was created with care is being received with appreciation, and the buyer, from knowing that they are receiving something that was made with intent, by a person who has a face, a name, a personality, and a whole life that is now touching yours in this small but significant way.

I reflected on this braid of roving I'm spinning up, and how Bev plucked it off my display line at my booth. She handed it to me, and asked me to spin it into sock yarn for her -- whenever I have time. She told me not to hurry, and I haven't -- we both knew, I'd get to it when I got to it, and we'd see each other several times in the future. There are a few people who regularly make requests for colourways they'd like to see, and there are a few people who see my dyed roving and ask me to set aside a specific braid to spin for them. I had someone ask me to make her "something I can make slippers with...any colour is fine." I made something, and she loves it.

I am very devoted to making relationships as I make transactions. Whenever possible, I eat out at a local restaurant where I know the owner by name, and where my husband attends the informal jam sessions on the weekend. Whenever possible, I buy my meat from the butcher who can tell me which farms each cut comes from, or the one who told me all about when his baby boy was going through a rough crying phase. I buy my groceries from a delivery service that often follows up my emails with phone calls, "just to make sure you're happy with everything," and those phone calls come from the same four or five people, not one of a thousand CSRs located somewhere in the Indian sub-continent.

And now, it seems that I'm on the seller side of some of these relationships. I couldn't be more tickled about it.

This Week in Wool

I got a new shipment of supplies on Monday morning, so I spent my two child-free days this week applying dye to wool by means of boiling, acidic water. My house stinks of vinegar, but there are many pretty wooly things to look at. In fact, I've decided to take a new approach to decorating:


It's hard to get the wool fully dry outside in this cool, damp season, so after the wool has dripped outside fora couple days, I move it inside. Through the winter, my railings will form a large part of my drying strategy. It alarms my husband, though, when he walks down to the front entry way and is greeted with the hanging wool-tentacles.



My dyepot has mellowed from the somewhat stormy mood it was apparently in on Tuesday; today I managed to produce a bunch of lovely, sagey green, as well as a marvellous batch of purple.

Awesome socks!

Hey check out these socks, half-knit from some of my yarn! Aren't they gorgeous? I'm gonna dye up a bunch more of the rovings these came from; feel free to email me to reserve one for yourself (in either roving or yarn form)

Well that was nice

I just came home from my last Farmer's Market of the season. The whole Farmer's Market thing -- the whole selling yarn for profit thing, for that matter -- is new this season. I started in March with the idea that maybe it would be fun, and if I could do it without actually losing money then I'd call it a good thing.

I signed up for the whole season of the Coquitlam Farmer's Market, May to October, every other week. Most people don't buy yarn on impulse, so I figured my only shot of making the market work for me was to build a following who could expect me regularly. Come every other week, and fondle the yarn. Go home, consult pattern books, consider potential projects. Come back and fondle again. Maybe ask some questions. Check out my demonstrator projects.

I am completely thrilled with how the whole thing has turned out. Today, it was cold (12 degrees C) and raining -- not a pleasant day for the market. But this market has a regular clientele, people who come every week for the excellent produce, and among the regulars, I seem to have my own regulars. Today, every sale went to someone who has come to my booth before. I talked to two students from the knitting classes I teach -- students who learned about my classes because they met me at the Market. I made tentative arrangements to give a private lesson. I helped one of my first customers, a woman that I taught how to knit in May, finish and cast off her first scarf.

Upcoming dates: Nov 18, Coquitlam Winter Market (www.makebakegrow.com). Nov 24-25, Maternal Creations Fair at Pomegranate Midwives on East Hastings (Vancouver).

Eight Year Old Girl at Heart

Apparently, I'm an eight year-old girl at heart, or else I'm already mourning the end of summer. I honestly didn't set out on Tuesday morning to dye an entire batch of bright pinks, oranges, and yellows. My first batch was going to be bright -- I wanted to do up a whole bunch of The Emperor of Ice Cream for an upcoming craft fair, since I think the babyish colours will sell well to the mothers of babies who attend this fair, but that was all I meant to do in those tones.



While Emperor was cooking, Mary (the knitter of the gorgeous My So-Called Scarf pictured in an earlier entry) came over for a visit, and I just did some simple stuff while she was here -- an orange and pink kettle-dye job, using the dye leftover from Emperor. Then when Mary left, I found a convo from someone who wanted to buy some Barbie Girl but only if she could have more than one skein of it -- enter the three batches of pink I cooked, trying to get a good match to the existing skein. I eventually overdyed one batch with some purples, because there's only so much pink a person needs.



After my pink extravaganza, I tried to duplicate an earlier colourway that's been requested, Maiden and Mother, but I ended up with something a little more asian in flavour (I think I'll call it Paper Cranes).



Anyway, it's not that I"m not happy, heck, I'm *very* happy. I love to dye and spin bright, clear, candy-like colours. And I can only hope that people like to knit with them too, because it's all I'll be doing for a couple of weeks. See this orange? I could eat this orange:

Dude...

I am sooooo not on a plane anymore.

Can't wait for Sunday's farmer's market. Can't wait to post new pictures of socks made from my yarn. Can't wait for Tuesday, Daycare Day, when I can play with the 15 lbs of roving that arrived in the mail just before I left for my 3 week family-visiting-extravaganza.

Really can't wait for bed. 3 weeks travelling with a toddler, a time zone shift, and 9 hours of travel (over 2 of which were spent in rush hour traffic) will take it out of 'ya.

It isn't easy being green

I'm still having trouble with green. I don't know if I'm the only dyer with green problems, but here they are:
1. blue and yellow "strike" the fiber at different temperatures and different acidity levels. I sometimes have a pot full of exactly the shade I want, but when I pull the fiber out, a lot of the blue dye is still there, and the fiber is a lot yellower than intended.
2. To mix up green, I have my choice of cobalt, turquoise, and navy, and "yellow" and "gold-yellow." Each blue, and each yellow, has different implications to the final shade.
3. I also have a "green" dye that isn't much green at all, but in fact a lovely shade of blue-green. It has to be mixed at about a 1:1 ratio with yellow to make what I would call green.
4. I don't keep notes.

Some of these problems are things I could solve, but won't (like No. 4). Some of these problems, I'm getting better at (like No. 2). Problem No. 1 is problem No. 1. I think I have just the right shade, it looks great dabbed on the paper towel, but somehow in the pot everything ends up a lot more yellow than I think. Here is some green that is not at all what I meant, but it's kind of interesting nonetheless:



Now here is some fiber I feel less ambiguous about. Check out the one with the spots of orange, dark purple, and chocolate brown. When I spin it, the intense spots will blend with the white to make long, streaky strands of wonderfulness. I can't wait.



And here is my wheel. Oh, sugar sugar. It only takes me about 3 hours to make a sock yarn, but I've been at it for days. The toddler is not being patient with me spinning, and not playing with her. Oh well, wool can wait.

My So Called Scarf

Check. This. Out. This is what someone is making out of my yarn:




I was blown away when I saw these pictures, the stitch pattern is just perfect for the long colour changes of the yarn. Once I can tear myself away from my wheel, I'm totally making one of these for myself. It will be one of my many vacation projects. You can get the pattern here: http://www.sheepinthecity.prettyposies.com/archives/000079.html

And here are the socks that someone else is making from my yarn:


Don't you just love the colours? Granted, this yarn is not for those who demand symmetry in their socks, but if you like socks that are colourful fraternal twins, this is totally the yarn for you.

A study in wool and water

My husband always gets a kick out of when I say "I think I'll dye today" so casually as he's leaving for work. Yesterday was Dyeing Day, and I dyed every fiber of blue faced leicester I had in the house -- about 5 pounds. I enjoyed myself. I was productive. See?



I've been really enjoying the dyeing, and getting better results, since I got my big square roasting pan that lets me lay the roving out in longish parallel strips. Because I'm dealing with a square, not a circle (as in my giant dye pots), I do a sort of hybrid between immersion dyeing and handpainting. The big advantage of handpainting is that you use less water and so you can use colours that ought not be allowed to blend, right beside each other. The big advantage of immersion dyeing is that it's like a one-pot meal -- less dishes, easier to prepare. So now, I can use some of the more high contrast colour combinations while still not using a ton of saran wrap (required for handpainting) or crouching down on my back patio for long periods of time (ouchy on the knees).

Anyway, lots of bfl. I especially like how this one turned out:





I can't say it's quite exactly what I intended -- I'm still getting some dye pot surprises, most consistently when I use green. I'm having trouble managing green. It tends to split rather badly, no matter how much salt I use in the bath, and I'm finding that the yellow component kind of intensifies in the dyepot -- or maybe the blue part just isn't quite striking? I know, more acid, more heat, I'm trying. I'll get it.

And here is yesterday's experiment -- pure tussah silk, two 4oz batches of it:


When it dries I'll pull out a few fibers just to make sure I didn't accidentally tangle them up in the dye pot, then I'm posting them for sale. Me, I like to spin a more robust fiber (notice how I don't offer merino? I really dislike the stuff), but I think there are some spinners out there who would love to have some silk to play with.

Wish me a sunny day, and the fleece will dry faster and get turned into sock yarn.

Achieving critical mass

You know how when water turns to ice, a critical mass of the water molecules have to be at zero degrees celcius before the ice crystals can start to form? My yarn is like that too. I need to have a certain number of disparate hanks of yarn is various colourways before sweater sets can start to form.

I seem to have achieved critical mass.

I dye enough fleece in a batch now to make 4 hanks of each colourway, and it takes at least 6 hanks to make an adult medium sized sweater. I have enough yarn to make 3 or 4 different sweaters in different colour themes. Check them out:

CHICK HABIT( LIGHT):


CHICK HABIT (DARK):


RED MENACE:


DIVE IN THE WATER'S FINE:


LIGHT REDS:


Some of this yarn is posted, and some of it isn't. If you see something you like, just email me or convo me on Etsy and ask about it. I'm more than happy to send you group shots of many hanks of yarn, grouped artistically.

As a bonus: if you buy 6 or more skeins of yarn, I'll knock 10% off the price.

Like Christmas, all the time

I know that this is a business and I'm being paid for this, but every time I make up a package of my yarn to send someone, I feel like I'm sending a pretty Christmas present. It's pure projection on my part; I think about opening a box, crinkling the bright paper, and seeing yarn! You can tell what *my* favourite Christmas present is.

So my fiber supplier tells me that he will be getting in some superwash blue faced leicester this month. Anyone interested in trying some sock yarn made from that?

Nice to know a photographer

So there's this woman who visits the Coquitlam Farmer's Market who is a knitter, so she stopped by my booth to see the yarn, and she's also a photographer who always has her camera with her. She has given me the wonderful gift of some pictures that she took at my booth. Maybe it's narcissistic of me, but these pictures make me really happy. Usually I'm either taking the picture or posing with a static smile on my face. I rarely get to see the lip-chewing faces I make while I'm working.





That's sock yarn on the wheel. I have 6 skeins of sock yarn that aren't posted. Two are awaiting photograph, two are already claimed, and two are hanging damply on my railing waiting for enough ambient dryness so that they too can await photography. Sock knitters -- fingers over the mouse button. New yarn will be posted in a day or two.

Group Photos!

"Okay, everyone crowd together for a group photo. Closer. A little...closer...there! Yellow, stop poking pink. Yes, I know he made a face at you. Pink -- stop that. Purple, would you please stand up straight? Oh for the love of...people!! This is only going to last another minute or so, and then you can all go back to your bin to play."


Here are some olives.












And some purples.












And lastly, my favourite, some bright pinks and lemons.

On My Back Porch

Here's a picture of what's currently drying on my back porch. That's mostly corriedale, but there are a couple batches of merino/silk blend. I've been dyeing that stuff just for sale, since I like to spin coarser fibers, but that olive and grapey one, that has me intrigued. As I was pulling it out of its final Eucalan bath and hanging it up, I suddenly envisioned some fingering weight singles, and felt that maybe I would be the one to spin them. I might put that batch aside until my high speed bobbins come in next week.