Quick and Dirty Update

Hi! I still exist. In fact I'm working very hard at being Yummy Yarn, so hard I don't have time to blog. Or the impulse, usually. That's the thing, see, I'm not a blogger. I read and enjoy some blogs, don't get me wrong, and I have no bad opinion of the people who do blog, but I lack the impulse to narrate my life, myself. However, I do like to reach out to my fiber people from time to time, and let them know what I"m up to.

Mostly, I'm up to this:

Isn't she lovely? That's the new baby, playing with the fringe of my stashbuster scarf. I've been stashbusting like crazy. After 5 scarves, I got a bit bored and now I'm doing a stashbuster sweater. Here's that in progress:

I'm also back to teaching at Black Sheep Yarns and soon I'll be offering a couple classes at Vancouver's new yarn store, Baaad Anna's. So far, teaching with the baby in tow has been successful; fingers crossed that it continues to work out. I'm getting creative with it. I bring a babysitter to my Tuesday classes at BSY; Friday workshops are done without a babysitter to spell me off. My Baaad Anna's workshops may be done with or without the sitter, I haven't decided. Depends on how the bebe is that week, I suppose. She's getting a lot happier about hanging out in a wrap carrier on my back while I do stuff, so that's bodes well!

My big project this week is getting as much stock as I can, because in a few weeks I'm holding a trunk show! Baaad Anna's has agreed to host my trunk show of yarns, fiber, and knitted objects (those are for show not sale) on the weekend of October 17-18. It's a chance for locals to see all my yarn in the same place at the same time, something that hasn't happened since I stopped doing the Coquitlam Farmer's Market last September. I hope it's a good event for the store, since I always like to see a yarn store do well, and I won't lie, I hope the sales are good.

My Market Schedule

For interested locals, here are the dates I'll be at the Coquitlam Farmer's Market this season.

June 8, 29;
July 20;
August 10, 24;
September 14; and
October 5, 26.

I usually bring all yarn but just some of the available fiber. If you ever see anything in my Etsy shop that you want me to be sure to bring, just let me know the day before.

Buy Local

Just a quick note to remind folks that I will be at the Coquitlam Farmer's Market tomorrow. I have a huge variety of my yarn, so if you want to see everything I have all at once, the Market is the place to do that.

I have less fiber than I'd like though. My sales this month have been overwhelming -- which is great! -- so my stock is low. I have 18 lbs of BFL on order that will likely arrive in time for me to dye on Friday, so expect new stuff to start being available as of May 26th.

I have returned to making sock yarn. I took a long break from doing that, because I just wasn't satisfied with what I was producing -- it didn't match the picture in my mind. I've been learning tons from my spinning class though, and the other day I produced a 165 gram skein of DK weight yarn that makes me really happy. It's here, if you want to see. I used a worsted drawing technique, fresh fiber, low tension, and very even plying -- I'm very happy with the results. Happy enough that I might, just might, make more.

If you're in the GVA, come visit me tomorrow!

Preschooler Surprise

I finished the Baby Surprise Jacket, and I'm thrilled with it. I just followed the standard EZ pattern, but with a much larger-gauge yarn than she suggests. If you do this yarn in the suggested worsted weight yarn (I think worsted...maybe smaller), you get a jacket for a baby. If you do it in my yarn, which is an Aran weight, you get this:


That's my sizeable 3 year old, who usually wears a 4T.

The jacket is proportioned for a baby, hence the short arms. I could pick up stitches along the sleeves and lengthen them, but I rather like the short sleeve. The number of handknit sweaters I end up washing because they got a little food or paint just on the edge of the sleeves is large. Maybe this will cut down a bit on the washing -- dare to dream.

Specifics: I knit this particular jacket from 5 skeins of my own soft-spun yarn. I used a 5mm needle, but I'm a really loose knitter, so a more typical knitter may wish to use a 6 or 6.5mm needle. I had very little of those skeins left over when the project was done. If you wanted to lengthen the sleeves, you'd want 6 skeins. Garter stitch is lovely, but it does tend to eat yarn. Still, the resulting fabric is so squooshy and yum, I think the yarn-consumption is worth it.

The photo shoot was a bit of a challenge. You know how it is. The second your small child senses that you *really* want her to try something on, that is the one time she absolutely will not do it. And if they do it, they will run away from the camera when you pull that out and ask for just one picture.

Here is my daughter 'hiding' from the camera.


Tomorrow is Got Craft, and I have the usual pre-show jitters. I'm afraid I won't have enough stuff, I'm afraid no one will buy anything, I'm afraid I'll have not enough breakfast and too much coffee and be a manic mess whenever I try to talk to anyone, prompting the public at large to start referring to me as "that insane yarn lady." (I'm pretending that they don't already.)

At least I have a ride. My car broke down on Wednesday, and the garage I like can't look at it until Monday...and how will I get downtown with all my stuff you ask? Fortunately, the Skytrain is not involved, as amusing as it would be to carry 8 garbage bags full of wool on public transit. No, instead, the lovely and generous Amanda of Ebbandflo Designs, a vendor at Got Craft who just happens to live near me, will be giving me a lift. Me and my giant bags of wool. Fortunately, she sells jewellery which is small.

I am so buying her lunch.

Coming Events

I'm doing a couple public events in the upcoming weeks, and they are these:

April 12-13, noon to 5pm: The ArtsConnect Port Moody Studio Tour. This annual event is a chance for the public to visit many of Port Moody's several artists in their own studios, or, in the case of those without public-friendly studios, in public venues. I will be at the Station Museum with my wheel, my yarn, and my fiber. To get the map of the whole event, click here.

May 4, 11am to 5pm: The Got Craft show on Commercial Drive. The Got Craft blog is profiling all the vendors one at a time, so check it out!

May 18: The Coquitlam Farmer's Market begins its 12th season on May 11, and I'll be there as a vendor on May 18. I intend to be there every three weeks, all summer.

And as always, my yarn and fiber is available at Three Bags Full.

I made a wool tree!

Is it wrong to be just a little in love with myself today? 'Cause I am. 'Cause look what sprouted up in my dining room:


I'm very proud of my work. I'm also certain that I haven't done nearly enough to prepare, I don't have enough stock, I'm going to be doing a lot of handing out my business card and hoping people contact me later, but hey, I can't do anything about that now. I have worked my fingers off the last three weeks, I bought as much supplies as I could afford without digging into high-interest credit, and I've accomplished quite a bit. It's a balancing act, doing this small business. I want to keep enough stock around so that anyone who finds me can probably find something to their taste, but not so much that I have more than i can afford tied up in the stock. I want to buy enough supplies to keep my stock high, but not so much that the business is living on credit. So, a balancing act. But an interesting one.

Look! Yarn:

Back to the steam

Today, I'm hitting the dyepots, and hitting them hard. Three Bags Full has indicated that they want more rovings, and Fibrefest is coming, so I'm trying to keep the stock high. I'm also low on sock yarn, so I'll be snagging a few braids for my own spinning.

It's nice to be back to it. My daughter finished with her daycare at the end of November, so I had all of December and the first two weeks of January with her in the house, as well as Christmas visitors. I can spin under those conditions, but dyeing requires unbroken time to get anything useful done. Today -- I have unbroken time. And a full pot of coffee!

Here are two pots full of wool and dye, cooking away:




The Farmer's Market yesterday was better than last month, in terms of sales and the warmth of the room. I was prepared yesterday with wooly tights, wool socks (handknit), jeans, boots, a tank, a very thin sweater, a thick sweater, a scarf, arm warmers (handknit Koigu), a hat (handknit handspun), and mittens (handspun handknit). I'm nothing if not a walking advertisement for the benefits of wool, and the joy of knitting. Needless to say, I didn't find myself needing all of those things, which is great, because when I'm wearing all of them, I look a little bit like I'm the victim of some sort of knitwear pile-on.

The Winter Market is getting a number of the regular visitors, those who frequent the summer market, but there are new faces too. I continue to enjoy talking to the various crafters who visit my table and tell me about their projects. I'm afraid I was slightly in "pounce" mode though. More than one person heard me respond, seemingly casually, "You know, I teach knitting at the Port Moody Arts Center.. I managed to give out all of the brochures I brought with me, and there seems to be interest in my classes. Not that I didn't enjoy the 3-4 students per class last term, but more would definitely be better.

I didn't trade yarn for anything, but I bought 3 loaves of bread from an amazing baker, a few pounds of organic fuji apples, eggs, carrots, strawberries (thank the flying spaghetti monster for vendors who freeze their stuff so they can sell it in the winter!), ethically and organically raised beef, and fig stuffed olives.

Lastly -- I did indeed write up the pattern for the colourwork mittens. It's available on my shop for a small fee, but free if you buy the yarn from me. Here's a suggested colour combo that I really like:

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.

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.

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).