Newly dyed roving ready to sell

Much of today was spent braiding, weighing, tagging and photographing the newly dyed roving. I love all the colorways......sure wish I could spin them all but next best thing is to spin a sample of each to help sell them. I am eyeballing a couple that may be snuck out of the bin into my own stash.

This is the 50% merino/50% tencel blend - the sheen on this is incredible.

And this is the 60% merino/40% bamboo - equal in sheen and just as lovely.

These will all be showing up in my etsy shop eventually, tired of looking at the monitor now after spending so much time editing these pictures plus others of scarves and towels that I have to get away from the computer.......and go spin some samples. If anyone is interested in any of these colorways before they get in the etsy shop or go to my spinning group next week just put a comment below with your email contact info and I'll get back to you.

Another dye day.....

 It was another good dye day, this time merino/bamboo.......Bailey is always a big help

This is where he spends quite a bit of time on dye day laying under the mini japanese maple squishing down flat the hostas and vincas........it's nice and cool in there.......but Bailey look at the camera.....

 "I'm looking now mom but that sun is too bright"

"Did I hear you say we're done mom, we're really really done for the day and I can go inside and sleep on the bed under the ceiling fan with the air conditioning going? Whoo Hoo"

Successful dye day.....

Today was a very fun and very short dye day - here it is 2pm and I'm ready to shower after dyeing 10 pounds of merino/tencel roving. It's hard to show what the roving looks like in a photograph but the sheen is incredible due to the tencel. I'd love to spin each of these colorways....but being realistic I can't spin some of everything I sell, there are not enough hours in my day, let alone lifetime. I do get to spin a little sample of each to help sell it though so I do get satisfaction from that. The one on the far right, the grays and taupes is so beautiful. I can picture it being spun fairly fine and knit or woven into an elegant shawl. I might have to think on saving a bit of that for myself.........or I can just dye something similiar when I tackle the 10 pounds of merino/bamboo on the next dye day.

Handspun samples

Here are some handspun samples for the roving dyed last week.....don't look too closely at my spinning quality, these are 'quick & dirty' samples. Other than the 3rd from the left which was a commission for my Burning Hot colorway all are the type of dyeing technique I devised last year. The aim is for many colors, sometimes analogous colors, sometimes not, but no stripes/high contrast barber poles. I'm happiest knitting or weaving with handspun that does not create stripes so that's what I've been dyeing. I'm not overly concerned if that limits how quickily I sell my roving or how much I sell - if someone is looking for high contrast, strong colors there are plenty of other dyers out there doing that. I'm doing what I enjoy.....

On the weaving front I finally....yes finally....finished that towel warp - 13 towels cut off the loom yesterday, washed and dried awaiting hemming.

Hand-dyed Silk Hankies

The dyed silk hanky photos are ready for listing in the etsy shop. I know this probably looks like a mish-mash of color - it's 20 of the 22 colorways. There approximately 1 ounce of each which spun thread thin will yield a tremendous amount of yarn.

My favorite method for spinning a hanky is to pull off one very thin layer (one cocoon's worth), punch a hole in the center with my finger and then start pulling it out into a large circle eventually breaking it at one end - so what's left is a long length of silk roving ready to spin. In spinning I make sure I hold my hands far apart as the silk fibers are very long and strong. It will want to spin thread thin on it's own.

Oh, just had a thought, some may not know what a silk hanky is. A silk cocoon is degummed and stretched over a square frame with one nail in each corner which is where the hanky shape comes from. Many of these cocoons are layered on top of one another. Usually the hankies are a pretty nice square like some of those above, but my last order of them were pretty weird shaped, not so pretty but will spin just the same. This same process may be done on a form similiar to a hat form which creates what are called silk caps.

Camera duties.....yuck.....

I've said it before the job I dread the most is the photography part of selling my wares. It takes a long time to take multiple pictures to get a decent one, then edit them, then resize them for etsy, then file them. Next was to weigh it all and tag it......then listing in the etsy shop.....long drawn out process after a dye day.....

So today I took pictures of the roving, not a bad job since I only dyed 6 pounds of this merino/tussah last week (2 braids of each). These will be going up for sale in the etsy shop as soon as I find time to list them. 

I took pictures of the silk hankies too - 22 different colorways....finished editing them and found I missed one - argh. Now I have to go open the package and take a picture of that one. Resizing of these photos still needs to be done. Oh, and then there was weighing each, labeling and packaging it. I've now spent the majority of the day on these chores.....I wished I loved this process more than I do.

Dyeing....and a new friend....

Yesterday I dyed 6 pounds of merino/tussah - a very manageable amount with time left to mix up more dye stock solution and weigh out 10 pounds of merino/tencel and 10 pounds of merino/bamboo to dye in the near future. I can't wait to spin up some samples, that apricot colorway is beautiful. The golden yellow and golds with deep red are special orders, at least part of it is, the rest will be up for sale as soon as it's dry enough to braid, weigh and tag.

Here's my new friend Perry the Peacock, although I'm not sure I really want him hanging around the house. Yesterday evening he was hanging out just 10 feet from the front door but it was dusk and too dark to get a good picture. This morning he was halfway up the hill so it was tough to get a picture but these are my attempts at it.

Here's a side view of Perry. Some of you may remember that we had Phil the Pheasant hanging around on this hill for a while buddying up with the turkeys - not sure where he went or who ate him but he hasn't been around in a long time. Now I'm wondering where Perry came from......if I see him again I'll give a call to Wildlife Images to see if they're missing a peacock, they're just down the road a couple miles. If you're ever in SW Oregon they have a great tour you can take.

Back to the dye pots.....

I'm finally back to the dye pots and my body is feeling it from standing on concrete all day. I forgot how long it takes to dye silk hankies, you wouldn't think 1 1/2 pounds of them would take very long to dye since I regularly dye 10 pounds of roving in a day and have dyed up to 20 pounds in a day. Hopefully they'll be dry shortly so I can go collect them, the wind is picking up and being so light they'll be all over the place if I leave them out there much longer. Tomorrow I'll be dyeing some merino/tussah roving. Then I'll be watching the temps to see when the next dye day is.

Blueberry Pot Pies

Yum - blueberry pot pies right out of the oven, recipe courtesy of A Farm Girl's Dabbles. I've love to stick a spoon in one of them to find out how yummy it is but we're having company this evening so I better not. I'll serve these with vanilla bean ice cream.

Hot day....perfect....

....perfect for blocking scarves that is....not perfect for spending time out in the sun. I waited until the sun passed the area I'd be sitting for skewering in blocking wires and pinning down both scarves. I used the blocking wires on the blue handspun knit scarf, just pins on the alpaca crocheted scarf......

Biscuit fire 10 years later....

Yesterday was the 10 year anniversary of the start of the lightening caused Biscuit Fire here in SW Oregon. We lived through that massive 500,000+ acre fire that wasn't declared entirely out until sometime in December of that year.

We were on 30 minute evacuation alert for a week when they were worried about it coming over the ridge into our valley endangering 17,000 people and during that time there was only one way out as the road heading south into CA was closed due to a fire. We had our vehicles loaded pointing out the driveway. and ended up moving out for around 5 days since Sam had to head out of the valley for work and didn't want me staying out there in case there was an evacuation, although I would sneak home during the day to check on things. We parked our 5th wheel at a friend's place and stayed in it there and then left it for a while after we moved back home so we'd have a place to live if the worst happened. Relatives had their house red-tagged which means if the fire approached the firefighters would not try to save it because of the terrain and danger to lives to try and fight it.

It was a scary time driving with headlights on in the middle of the day, listening to updates on the radio all day long, tears streaming down my face as I drove seeing the flames & smoke thinking about what would happen to the valley if the fire did come over the ridge. We would have eventually been just fine but there's a large number out there that are very poor and do not have insurance, it would have been devastating in so many ways. What has happened in CO and other areas this summer is so sad, I can't imagine what those communites are going through - we were lucky the fire didn't come over the ridge.

There is still controversary over how this fire was handled, resources were stretched thin because of fires elsewhere, help from CA turned down in the beginning, it was/is the feeling that this fire was pretty much ignored in the beginning because of it's location - the Illinois Valley area. We could see the flames and smoke but not a firefighter or helicopter in sight until it really got going. One good thing came out of it, when a fire starts here in SW Oregon now it is jumped on exremely fast with large numbers of resources.

After living through that I proclaimed that if we ever moved I wanted to live in a cement house with a metal roof out in the middle of acres and acres of irrigated pasture. Well, we moved the next year, just over the hill from that valley and what did we buy but a house in an extreme fire danger area, up on a hill with draws on either side of the house and only one escape route, a fire can move up a hill at 40 mph. So, I live each summer holding my breath hoping for no fires, I wake up during the night thinking I smell smoke, I survey the horizon for smoke plumes several times during the day.....hmm, living on the coast looks more and more inviting all the time.....

I finally started weaving on the towel warp I put on before we went to the coast for 9 days - felt good to be throwing the shuttle.....in-between running up and down the stairs doing laundry and packing up orders.....

Before it got unbearably hot this morning I worked outside on blocking the shawl recently spun and knit. It dried in no time laying out on the blocking foam on the patio table. Here it is blocked......I can't wait for cool weather to wear it.....or a trip over the mountain range to the much cooler coast......

Christmas in July

No, I'm not rushing the holiday and I'm not yet planning my gifts, don't even have any gift giving ideas yet. But I thought I'd jump on the Etsy bandwagon and have a Christmas in July sale....even if I am almost 2 weeks late. Anyhow, there's 20% off in each of my etsy shops through the end of the month. At checkout use this discount code - xmasinjuly2012  (this discount cannot be combined with any other discount)

For handwovens, hand-dyed silk scarves, felted items and hand-dyed roving and silk hankies check out my eweniquely ewe etsy shop

For Ashland Bay rovings of all kinds check out my eweniquely ewe fibers etsy shop

back to the heat......

Unfortunately our 9 days on the coast has to come to an end....within the hour we'll be leaving the breezy beautiful 60 degree weather to drive just over the mountains to our valley where the temp should be right around 100....amazing what a difference a handful of miles makes.

No more pictures to share, got lazy with the camera after the first part of the week. We enjoyed the small town July 4th parade and then fireworks over the water right down the hill from the house. I painted 5 pieces of furniture, 4 of them in a soft light seaglass green color...2 spindle headboards, a quilt rack and a sweet little book table with carved flowers in the ends. The 5th piece, a magazine table, was painted a dusty light teal. We walked miles and miles this week and I'm feeling it since so much of it includes hills, most of it from the house but we ventured to the South Slough one day to hike....we knew it was trouble when all we kept doing was heading downhill....which meant the trip back to the car was all uphill. I finished another long inkle warp, read a book, caught up on magazines. All in all it was a much needed break for both of us, Bailey will be taking his break tomorrow when he'll spend the entire day recovering from his time in Bandon-by-the-Sea. Tomorrow it's back to work, I've got orders to mail, need to start thinking about dyeing and get back to the looms.

Check out this post from my cousin Claudia's blog, 2 places I need to visit next time I'm in Eugene, not to mention the Saturday market.

All in a day's work.....well, maybe that's play....

I warped up the inkle loom yesterday......

Here's the first couple inches.....

Here's all 140 inches.....ready to put the second warp on.....sorry, can't tell what this project is until after Christmas....yes, that's a long time.....actually it will be here before we know it.....

Some of my hand-dyed superwash merino I've been spinning a bit here and there, finally plied the first spindle's worth.....

Hydrangea in the yard - I don't know much about them but I think the acidity of the soil has to do with the color but here are several colors on one plant.....

I love these colors......

Life is good......

Finally......

The Shaelyn Shawl is almost finished - blocking will be done in the next week or so....then the lace sections will show more. I added a few more repeats than the original pattern since I wanted a full size shawl. I ended up backing the final row of knitting out, made for too heavy of a bind off, took a while but am happy I did it. A reminder from back when I started this - I spun this Ashland Bay Merino Tussah in the Del Mar colorway originally for a vest but then decided on the shawl when it was a bit too heavy for the vest pattern. I wanted a shawl that wasn't just lacey and pretty, I wanted one that would actually keep me warm - this pattern is perfect, a bit of lace (will show more when it's blocked) and enough stockinette to make it warm. Doing the happy dance.....