My brother has some new additions to his farm:
Cows!! Aren’t they cute?!!! They are two young ladies who according to Steven are “the beginning of the herd”. Cool! They arrived after our fun weekend at the farm so we will have to meet them the next time we go visit.
I’m taking a crochet class. Yeah, I know… A bunch of knitters just said, “WHY!!???” The answer is: because I like to learn new things. So far I have learned the basics like single, double, half double, triple crochet. I can make a groovy granny square if the pattern is not too complicated. I can not, however, seem to crochet in rows. In knitting, when you come to the end of the row, you are at the end of the row. There is nothing to discuss; you have no more stitches on your needle, you are at the end of the row. Switch hands and do the next row. With crochet the end of the row is a much less concrete concept (at least for me…) I have been taking my crochet class at Knit-A-Bit in Westfield, NJ. Knit-A-Bit is my LYS and if you are ever in the Westfield, NJ area you must stop by. They have three rooms of wonderful yarn and one room of books and other fun stuff. The crochet teacher is a very, very patient woman who has listened to me struggle to figure out what is the end of the row. She has showed me a gabillion times. I still manage to create wavy, weird not even or straight rows of stitches. She has politely suggested using stitch markers to indicate the end of the row (”Stitch markers are your friend…”) I think I am at the point where I will have to use a stitch marker to show me where the end of my row is because my method of taking a good guess just isn’t working. My plan is (when I can figure out where the end of the row is…) to knit a scarf in a lacy crochet pattern in one of SpinningYarnsOnline variagated colorways, probably Pool. When I get started, I’ll have pictures….
There will be a store update later this week. We are working on more new colorways. The first batch were a big hit! Thanks to everyone who bought them. We have replenished our inventory and will have more new colorways soon.
I have begun spinning some of the roving that I bought at the MA Sheep and Wool Festival. I started with the superwash merino since I have successfully spun merino before. Here is the first bobbin-ful.
What, you don’t see a picture??? That’s because WordPress is not letting me insert pictures into my post today. If there was a picture, you would see that I have spun a beautiful bobbinful of a greyish, purple-ish tweedy yarn with some flecks of yellow and green. I plan on spinning another bobbin and then plying them together to make a nice worsted weight yarn. I’m not a very experienced ply-er so any tips from you spinners out there would definitely be appreciated.
A quick store update, the new colorway Confetti is a big hit. I have sold almost the entire first batch. I will be painting/dyeing another batch soon. Since I am using a different (and slightly more complicated) painting process, the next batch might be slightly different. I will update the picture on the website and here (hopefully) accordingly. Thanks to all you Confetti lovers out there!
Well, we had a great weekend at the farm. We road tripped it up to Massachusetts to hang out with my brother and his family and to go to the Mass. Sheep and Wool Festival. A great weekend was had by all. The farm was beautiful.
This is a picture of my husband playing Trac Ball with the kids near my brother’s truck and four wheeler thing. I’m not sure if you can see that my husband had a sweatshirt on with the hood tied up around his face. It was COLD when we got there. Spring was having a hard time getting itself together in the Berkshires.
Friday evening was spent preparing Clover, the Cotswold sheep, to be shown. Here is how a bunch of kids wash a sheep. My sister-in-law was the supervisor.
Clover is a very tolerant and polite lady sheep. She was washed and primped and put in the truck and carted off to the fairgrounds for her big day. At the fairgrounds we got to meet my niece’s new lamb, who will go by the name Lilly. Here is Ella and Lilly in Lilly’s pen at the sheep barn.
Ella got to show her new little lamby the next day. The sheep is just a little babe and was very well behaved for a first time showing.
Here is Ella showing Little Lilly. The gentleman whose tushy is facing the camera is the judge. He was very serious about his job and took a great deal of time looking over the sheep and its handler. At the end he went up to each kid and told them what they were doing right and what they could improve for their next show.
This is Jack showing Clover. The sheep is obviously not a little baby lamby anymore and is practically the same size as my nephew. Jack showed her like a champ. I had to politely ask my husband, who thought he was at a major sporting event, to stop shouting, “Show that Sheep!!!, Show that Sheep!!!” I think the people sitting near us figured out that we were not from around there and that we were kinda new to this sheep showing thing.
At the Ma. Sheep and Wool Festival there were tons of animals, vendors, food and fun. There were Spinners.
And there were llamas. Here are my girls posing with a new llama friend.
But most of all there was stash enhancement.
Above is a picture of what I took home. The beer was supplied by my husband and was a perfect ending to a great day of sheep, wool, llamas and fun. The specifics of the haul will be detailed tomorrow. (Sneak preview: lots of merino for spinning and a beautiful new spindle.)
I have two daughters. They are sweet, lovely girls who are heading (way too fast for my liking! Time just flies…) toward becoming terrific, strong young women. As they grow, it amazes me how they handle life’s lessons with courage, dignity and humor.
Yesterday, unfortunately, they had to handle a little life lesson that I wouldn’t have expected them to face. As a reminder, we live in Suburbia (Targets galore, supermarkets, malls, schools close by.) It’s pretty predictable and it works for us. My brother, (whose farm we are going to visit in a few hours) lives in the Middle of Nowhere, Mass.: Big farm (to a Suburbanite’s eye), lots of farm animals, rolling hills, etc., etc. They have nature up there on a different level than we do here in typical suburbia.
Anyway, I was talking to my brother on the computer yesterday a.m. (Instant Messaging) and he casually let me know that the barn cats and three chickens were no longer members of their farm family. These are the same two cats that my daughters have been talking about playing with all week. The cats and chickens got eaten by something (I think he called it a Fisher Cat???, he’ll correct me if I got that wrong.) So now I am left with a major problem. Around here, cats don’t get eaten. How the hell am I going to present this to my daughters??? My husband and I discussed it: Should we tell them the cats “went away”? No, my niece and nephew know what happened to their barn cats so that won’t work. We decided honesty, delicately delivered, would be the best course of action. Of course, I would be the deliverer of this information.
For reasons that I can not explain (and I might have to do some soul searching to figure it out) I dropped the cats no more bomb on them at the the local diner. Maybe I thought the girls wouldn’t freak out in a public place???… These are girls, preteen girls. They freak out wherever and whenever they feel like it! This was not an award winning smart mommy-ing moment on my part. My older daughter dealt ok. She had a look of horror and sadness but held herself together . She can be quite stoic. My little one, the ten year old, was not so stoic. She lost it in the diner and was a crying puddle of a girl, burying her head into my chest, heaving with tears and sorrow. Of course, it was at that moment that the really sweet waitress came over to our table to take our order. This nice waitress, only a teenager herself, gave me a look that said, “Evil Mommy what did you do to that poor little girl”. We had a lovely meal.
More about the farm and the Mass. Sheep and Wool Festival to come. Pictures of stash enhancement will be shared!!
The weather cooperated. We actually have the sun shining today so I was able to take a picture of Margarita.
It’s not the greatest picture of yarn I have ever taken but for now it will have to do. Margarita has been given its name by my friend Beth M. She took one look at the yarn and said “Margarita!! It’s a Margarita!!!” Hmmm, I wonder how she came up with that name? I guess she is quite aquainted with margaritas…. As an aside, I knew someone in college who drank a few too many margaritas and got sick. Like really, really sick for a whole weekend. She spent the rest of her college career claiming that she had the flu that weekend. Yeah right, the margarita flu. Crazy college days….
A quick update: as we are going to the Mass. Sheep and Wool Festival this weekend, any order received between 5/23 and 5/26 will not be processed until 5/27th. Sorry for any inconvenience but the yarn and sheep and roving are calling me.
I spoke to my brother yesterday (whose farm we will be staying at) and by this weekend he should have 2 market lambs, another show sheep and two baby cows. (Yes, I am aware that baby cows are called calves although I have heard that that question was removed from the childrens’ IQ test because not enough kids/people knew that…It was skewing the results. Baby Cows just sounds so much cuter. I have calves on my legs and they are not cute in the least bit, so baby cows it will be!)
Enjoy the yarn!!!
We have new colorways up on the site. They are in stock and ready to go! The first is Confetti.
Confetti is a lovely mix of yellow, blues, greens and purples. It is painted in a random pattern so no two will be alike.
Next up we have Blueberry Buckle.
Blueberry Buckle has a nice mix of browns, gunmetal gray and blues. This colorway is would make a wonderful pair of “man socks”.
Both Blueberry Buckle and Confetti are available in fingering weight and sport weight. They are up on the site (http://www.SpinningYarnsOnline.com) and ready for your next project. One more colorway will be in tomorrow’s post. I have to wait for the rain to stop so I can take a decent picture of it.
Enjoy the new colorways!!! There are more to come in the future.
I love this time of year. Spring is such a beautiful time; great weather, fun outdoor stuff. And best of all….Sheep Festivals!! This coming weekend we are roadtripping it to the Berkshires to hang out with my brother and his family. That would be fun enough, but it gets even better. This weekend is the Mass. Sheep and Wool Festival in Cummington, MA. Their link is http://www.masheepwool.org/aboutus.htm. We went last year and got to see all the wonders that are sheep shearing and wool spinning. It was great. My niece and nephew actually show their cotswold sheep in some of the competitions. And of course, there is the shopping! There are vendors galore selling their spindles and roving and yarn and wheels. It’s a knitters paradise. My husband ( a non-knitter) even thought it was pretty cool.
This sheep show (as my brother calls it) is relatively small compared to Rhinebeck and Maryland but I love it because it is not too overwhelming and I get to see my brother and sister in law and my niece and nephew. I will have camera in hand to show everyone the sights. Of course, a full report of stash enhancement will be provided next week!
I believe most knitters, when they think of hand dyed fingering weight yarn think socks. The striping pattern of the variegated yarn makes for an interesting, colorful sock that doesn’t have to contain an intricate stitch pattern. But fingering weight yarn can be knit up into so much more than just socks.
The current issue of Vogue Knitting has a great offering of shawls that I think would be perfect knit up in a hand dyed yarn. Since we have both Variegated Multis and Semi Solids available, your choices are endless.
Let’s take a look at some shawls shall we?
This is a shawl that incorporates beads into the stitch pattern. This would be wonderful knit up in a Semi Solid. The stitch pattern and beads would stand out and I think the shawl would be gorgeous.
This is a circular shawl with a stitch pattern that looks like a starfish to me. I might just have to put this into my “on deck” pile because this shawl just screams to be knit in our Pool colorway.
This is a stunning square piece of lace. This is such a beautiful pattern that would be perfect in any colorway.
So hand dyed yarn is not just for socks! Shawls and scarves, gloves and mittens, they all would work wonderfully! Let your imagination run free and pick a winter project that is a little “out of the box”. You won’t regret it!
At Spinning Yarns Online, not only do we sell lovely hand dyed yarn, but we also sell some really groovy tape measures. Apparently our cute tape measures caught the eye of a very nice Ad Manager at Interweave Press who is in charge of advertising for Handwoven Magazine. She asked me to send some of the tape measures and they were professionally photographed and are in the current Jan/Feb issue!!! Here are some very “not professionally” photographed pictures of the magazine.
Here is the page with the tape measures:
And here is my attempt at a closeup of the text and the picture. Not too great but you get the idea…
The tape measures sell for $5.50 and are in stock now. They are incredibly cute and a must for the well stocked knitting bag. How much of a kick was it to see our name and link in an actual, real magazine?? Pretty big. Huge as a matter of fact!
We are in the process of test dyeing our colorways for the Spring line. We’ve got some real beauties in the works. They should be ready to be put up on the site in the next week. We will also post pictures here (now that I think I figured out how to upload pictures from my digital camera that are not microscopically small or way too big. No, I am not a tech wizard… I dye yarn pretty well but the technology thing is a bit beyond me.)
For our spinning friends, there will be some new colorways added to the site in the coming weeks. We are testing new colorways and will be offering roving in merino and superwash merino. One of my goals for the upcoming year is to spin myself enough yarn to knit a shawl. I haven’t figured out the pattern yet. I guess the roving and the handspun will inspire me.
Incidentally, the Baby Surprise Sweater kits mentioned below have a been a hit at Knit-A-Bit in Westfield, NJ. Hopefully we’ll be dyeing up some more for all you baby sweater knitters out there.
Thanks to all our great customers and we wish you a warm and healthy New Year with lots of great knitting!!! Stay tuned, we’ve got some great stuff planned for 2008!
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