*Excluding wholesale items and monthly sock/yarn/fiber clubs. Not applicable for wholesalers. Prices as are as marked.
Fall Sale
We have a fall sale going until September 29th! All of our yarns, fibers, and kits- including naturally dyed and undyed- are 30% off*. This includes our house sock yarn, spun for us by a small mill, handpainted rovings, and many, many different types of handspun. Go shop at Midnightsky Fibers now! Midnightsky Fibers Shop
*Excluding wholesale items and monthly sock/yarn/fiber clubs. Not applicable for wholesalers. Prices as are as marked.
*Excluding wholesale items and monthly sock/yarn/fiber clubs. Not applicable for wholesalers. Prices as are as marked.
Loooooooommmmmmmmm@!!!!!!!!!
Quilt scraps finding an enexpected life as the start to even out my weaving.
I've managed to kill enough lamps/lightbulbs that yes, candles are totally a viable and awesome way to weave by...(never mind the not using electricity). All the candles in my apartment are in containers so the cat can't catch his tail on fire. Ok really, everything is in containers (honey and a butter bell for butter)).
The roving carder, umbrella swift, and giant box-o-yarn take over the space for the loom. Which is awesomely just so slightly larger than my folding wood desk, so it stays in place.
Autumn Socks
I came up with these on a whim while taking a long drive down to our annual family reunion, which always takes place just as fall is set to begin and as the last of the tomatoes become ripe.
Autumn leaves socks- the first socks of autumn. With many more to come. Well, they will be once I finish them- I have exactly two decreases and seaming both toes left to finish (I have an excuse! I can use them to teach the last segment of my sock class...those other dozen pairs languishing in the corner waiting to be finished- just ignore those for now).
The yarn is dyed in a totally natural dyebath, mostly logwood grey and a bit of cochineal and lac, 100% wool, slightly thicker than a "usual" sock yarn. For these socks I am doing them at 48 stitches around (same as I would use for sea wool or fleece artist basic sock)- my usual "number" for socks is 56, for reference.
Now look closely at the gussets for the heel. Notice something fishy going on there? I took a cue from Cat Bhordi's new book (New Pathways for Sock Knitters
) and changed the placement of the decreases- with no ill effect I might add- in order to be able to create the base stem of a giant leaf, which expands then ends at the very tippy top of the toe. Decreases on the underside of the toe mirror the top decreases to decrease to the toe, which will eventually be grafted closed. Increasing on the top of the foot and later on the bottom add to + shape the leaf pattern.
I'll get around to writing the pattern out in the next week or so, once I finish teaching my sock class so I can actually take decent pictures of the socks :)
Granola Yarn
So I said I would be doing a yarn update unless life got in the way. Well, it did. Such fun and exciting events like LONG dentist appointments, drives home, not getting much sleep, and playing long games of Carcassonne late in to the night- complete with lots of Chipotle and mojito-whiches brew. POint being...no yarn update yet. While I am admitting things I should also admit that there might also be a new loom in my household (I have impressive bruises from carrying it from the PO to prove it!), a Dorthy, so that could also possibly be the real reason I have been MIA...
While on the subject of looms, my cay *really* likes it when I warp the loom, all those carefully controlled threads (ok, rug warp) flying around, rolling around paper, then flipping through the reed- the most exciting part!
BUT! There is good news to end all this- my yarn is now at Granola Yarn, so you can go find more of it over there! Mostly lots of my handspun, some recycled and handpainted yarns too.
While on the subject of looms, my cay *really* likes it when I warp the loom, all those carefully controlled threads (ok, rug warp) flying around, rolling around paper, then flipping through the reed- the most exciting part!
BUT! There is good news to end all this- my yarn is now at Granola Yarn, so you can go find more of it over there! Mostly lots of my handspun, some recycled and handpainted yarns too.
New Project in 6 colors.
O man, you don't even want to see the color coded chart for what this is planning to be...Let's just say there are 3 background (MC) and 3 CC (the foreground), and they don't change at the same time. Good thing I have lots of colors of markers!
I am knitting socks in this color, with displaced gussets (not in the usual place), that comes together cleverly to form the base of a giant leaf that goes all the way across the top of the instep, and ends at the tip of the toe.
local sheep, local food
The lack of spell check that uses my gender editing and has all my yarn-y words added to it is killing me- and really, I aplogize for the spelling and typos. You can really blame it on either, since there is about an equal chance of both. Oh, and I despise IE on principal, so it is killing me to have to use it- the particular laptop I am using (since mine stayed at home- though there are at least 3 computers on the boat that I am aware of, lest you worry that we are not properly connected to the outside world here) has nothing exciting on it, including lacking Moxzilla.
I was pleased to see not only Plenty: Eating Locally on the 100-Mile Diet
at the book store up here in Ganges, but also one of the biggest selections of environmental and green living (including cob and strawbale) books I have seen in one area. Alisa Smith is also the author of "Plenty", another local eating book, and they run the 100 mile diet webpage, which is often discussed with other sites like Eat Local, The compact (the yahoo group and blog), and a variety of other locavore sites. Yea, there is even a wikipedia entry for locavore now.
When I told my dad how excited I was about this he told me I should start a farm with sheep and an alpaca to guard them, and even some chickens (not for eating of course for me...). I had to remind him that I go through way too much wool to keep my own sheep- if you have seen the giant box of doom full of 30 pounds sock yarn sitting in my house recently, you know what I mean (I'll spare you the annoyance of trying to fit over a hundred pounds of wool plus an obscene amount of clothing and even more yarn in to any given storage space). Nevermind the fact that I can only handle lanolin in small amounts, which makes processing anything more than a couple pounds a huge annoyance. So much for the sheep idea eh?
Along the same lines of sheep...previously that morning we had tried to rent a car (we meaning my dad, since I of course can't rent a car [have to be 23]) to go visit a local sheep farm, only to find there were absolutely no rental cars on the island. Bummer. Only lots and lots of scooters. Considering the road conditions- super fun gravel with potholes- and lacking proper attire or even leather jackets with us, we settled for just searching out some of the fleece from ArtCraft, one of the local galleries instead.
Woolen/batt comboish prep, naturally colored, and lends itself wonderfully to a combo of worsted and woolen spinning. Altogether a nice break from my usual roving, though it would have been nice to have the elctric wheel here to get the higher ratios I need for a proper sock or lace weight with the long draw. I settled for spinning it with the combo method (lest I kill my legs, it is quite hard on the ankles to peddle madly like that) and navajo plying it to a very light dk- not quite fingering weight though.
The lady on the boat next to me wanted to know if I was weaving or knitting. I haven't had someone confuse my Kiwi with weaving since highschool (the principal, no less!). After assuring her that the fustic dyed skeins (bright yellow natural dye) I was hanging from the deck were in fact, not the act of me weaving, my dad cut in to tell her that they were actually the result of spinning to make the yarn for the weaving or knitting. And told her all about how I dyed the fiber myself too, and how we had found fleece at ArtCraft and how that was what I was spinning now.
Whew. It is abolutely amazing to me how much of a time suck the internet can be, judging by the length of this post. :). I am still annoyed at the lack of a spell check.
I was pleased to see not only Plenty: Eating Locally on the 100-Mile Diet
at the book store up here in Ganges, but also one of the biggest selections of environmental and green living (including cob and strawbale) books I have seen in one area. Alisa Smith is also the author of "Plenty", another local eating book, and they run the 100 mile diet webpage, which is often discussed with other sites like Eat Local, The compact (the yahoo group and blog), and a variety of other locavore sites. Yea, there is even a wikipedia entry for locavore now.
When I told my dad how excited I was about this he told me I should start a farm with sheep and an alpaca to guard them, and even some chickens (not for eating of course for me...). I had to remind him that I go through way too much wool to keep my own sheep- if you have seen the giant box of doom full of 30 pounds sock yarn sitting in my house recently, you know what I mean (I'll spare you the annoyance of trying to fit over a hundred pounds of wool plus an obscene amount of clothing and even more yarn in to any given storage space). Nevermind the fact that I can only handle lanolin in small amounts, which makes processing anything more than a couple pounds a huge annoyance. So much for the sheep idea eh?
Along the same lines of sheep...previously that morning we had tried to rent a car (we meaning my dad, since I of course can't rent a car [have to be 23]) to go visit a local sheep farm, only to find there were absolutely no rental cars on the island. Bummer. Only lots and lots of scooters. Considering the road conditions- super fun gravel with potholes- and lacking proper attire or even leather jackets with us, we settled for just searching out some of the fleece from ArtCraft, one of the local galleries instead.
Woolen/batt comboish prep, naturally colored, and lends itself wonderfully to a combo of worsted and woolen spinning. Altogether a nice break from my usual roving, though it would have been nice to have the elctric wheel here to get the higher ratios I need for a proper sock or lace weight with the long draw. I settled for spinning it with the combo method (lest I kill my legs, it is quite hard on the ankles to peddle madly like that) and navajo plying it to a very light dk- not quite fingering weight though.
The lady on the boat next to me wanted to know if I was weaving or knitting. I haven't had someone confuse my Kiwi with weaving since highschool (the principal, no less!). After assuring her that the fustic dyed skeins (bright yellow natural dye) I was hanging from the deck were in fact, not the act of me weaving, my dad cut in to tell her that they were actually the result of spinning to make the yarn for the weaving or knitting. And told her all about how I dyed the fiber myself too, and how we had found fleece at ArtCraft and how that was what I was spinning now.
Whew. It is abolutely amazing to me how much of a time suck the internet can be, judging by the length of this post. :). I am still annoyed at the lack of a spell check.
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