I’ve been busy at work here in the studio, and I have twelve fresh from the dyepot colors of Polwarth for you. This wool is great, it has the soft hand of merino without the slipperiness. You can see all of these in the Polwarth section of the shop.
Again, I hope you’ll stop by and check out the new colors. Next week, I’ll be shipping club, and I’ll pull a new fiber from the closet-o-fun to work on!
At long last, I have new striping yarns on our fantastic Journey Sock Yarn!
Why did these take so long?
Well, self striping yarn is a whole different animal.
The yarn has to be wound into long repeats, and I didn’t want to play it safe….I wanted some wide stripes so you have room for some fancy stitch patterns (only if you want, though!).
After I wind the yarn, I have to tie it up securely, and move it to the dyepots….dye it, dry it, and unwind it….all without tangling. It took a bit for me to find the best way to do this.
I hope you’ll agree that these are worth the wait. I want them all. ;D
If you aren’t familiar with Journey, it is a lovely 4 ply sock yarn. With a proportion of 75% Superwash Merino and 25% Nylon, it is sturdy, round, yet soft. Journey is one of our thinner sock yarns, likely to fit in your regular shoes, depending on the pattern you use.
Oh, and there’s regular Rainbow Stripe, too (to complement our Tropical Rainbow Stripe)! Get a jump on Christmas, snap up these yarns for a quick and easy project. Great for socks, of course, but would be cute for a baby sweater or longies. Or use as weft for a scarf on your loom! You can view all our sock yarn here, check out the non-striping yarns on clearance when you stop by!
So, yeah. I promised striping yarn today, didn’t I? I should know better, because when I set myself deadlines like this, life crops up. So, you can have a teaser!
Here is Koi Pond, on Journey, which is a fabulous sock yarn of superwash merino and nylon, has a nice twist, and four plies!
I do have Rainbow ready, but not a sample knit up; and I’ve been dyeing a bunch of colors on Polwarth combed top. I’d say look for those next week, but I’m afraid to!
In my ‘free time’ this week, I’ve been participating in Spinzilla, on the Stringtopia team. Yesterday I needed to wind off my bobbin (usually having only one isn’t a big deal, but in a race it would have been nice to switch). I’ve been spinning my color samples from August’s Tiger Club, and trying out my new lace flyer for the Hansen miniSpinner. I didn’t think I was spinning especially thin, but look at these results:
That’s over 900 yards of singles, from not a whole lot of fiber. I spun the rest last night, I’ll have to get that measured and added to my total. I’m pretty happy with this….I was throwing fiber at the wheel (which was problematic at times….I’d get curly-q’s that would hang up on the guides, and stop wind on), and watching Pride and Prejudice (Colin Firth looks so nice in green). So if you consider all that, I can spin much faster, now….about 180 yards an hour. I’ll have to see the ratio for the last bit….I paid better attention to when I started and stopped, and spent a little less time futzing with the tension.
Hope you all have a nice weekend, in our part of the world it looks to be the last really nice one, as far as shirtsleeve weather. Next week we move to sweater weather, and cozy wool sock weather. Bring it.
Ah, September. A time for back to school, apples, and cool evenings curled up with a cup of tea and a good book. I have always enjoyed the look of a well stocked library….books with colorful bindings, gold leaf lettering, perhaps the books are faded on the spine but bright on the covers. I wanted to capture this rich experience with September’s club color, “Ancient Tomes”.
The sock yarn is Panda, a blend of superwash Merino, Bamboo Rayon, and Nylon. It is a nice long wearing and smooth yarn. It fit well with the theme, as it takes color beautifully, but the bamboo gives it an incredible shine and lends that faded look in the right light. I dyed the yarn in short sections which should lend an overall mottled look, or possibly a stacked spiral, depending on the size of your project.
September marks the return of Polwarth to The Painted Tiger. I love this wool, soft like Merino, but with a little more heft and tooth. Short sections are used here to represent books lined up on a shelf. This will make a fun marled yarn, or you can ply with something else…or deconstruct it to fit your vision for these colors!
There are a few spots open in Tiger Club for October if you’d like to join the fun! Check out the details in the shop.
I’ve been working hard at the dyepots and have some beautiful BFL wool combed top for you. I love BFL (Blue Faced Leicester)….not only are the sheep attractive, the wool is lovely…soft and shiny. Plus it is a longer wool, so it is naturally strong. Perfect for socks, but also for shawls and whatever else you can dream up!
Hover for their names, click on over to our BFL Section to purchase!
(Autumn Splendor is featured in our ad in the current Fall issue of Ply Magazine! We also have it on Targhee, and will have Polwarth, too.)
And last, but certainly not least, I’ve been working away at replenishing the striping sock yarns. I have Grand Old Flag for you, and Tropical Rainbow Stripe. Look for a regular ‘crayon box’ rainbow, plus other colors soon! Here’s a link to our sock yarn section.
And just for fun, more BFL. I love how proud this young man is of his flock!
Our family was driving toward our Colorado vacation this summer, and with hubby driving I decided to enjoy my May/June issue of Hand Woven. A few pages in, and WHAM! I knew I had to make these colors for Tiger Club! This picture is by textile designer Jack Lenor Larsen, and is entitled Montage, Villa Nove. This scan does not do it justice, the shades of teal, orange, and bronze just shimmer off of one another.
These colors have great potential for mud if allowed to blend, so I decided striped would be the best plan. Our yarn is Safari, which is a blend of superwash Corriedale and nylon. The repeat is quite long, about 43 yards!
To match our yarn, I have some lovely Superwash Corriedale combed top, and I hand painted it in sections. This technique gives you a huge number of possibilities. You could spin straight and either chain ply or divide the top before spinning into the number of plies you want….or ply with a solid…something matching one of the colors, or maybe a brown. You could make a fractal yarn, or you could disassemble the top and play on a blending board…..or remove a color you don’t care for. Let your imagination run wild and have fun with it!
Tiger Club is currently open for September subscriptions if you’d like to join in the fun!
It finally became apparent to me that I just needed a little more space to dye, and many fewer steps to accomplish it. I’ve just (mostly) finished moving around and remodeling our laundry room to make it easier to work.
A few months ago was Phase One. I rearranged the ‘furniture’ of the room…which involved extra ducting and some rewiring to have the dryer on the other side of the room where it should be….next to the washer. I have serious love of this side effect of the studio move. Anyway, now that I have a clear space, I moved my handy metal cabinet over there (to the side of the awkward metal pipe sticking out of the floor), and put my countertop back on (it have been across the dryer before, which worked, but not ideal. Because I could back the cabinet up to the side of that pipe, I gained 18 inches of room! To use the vertical space, I put up some 2×4’s and installed pegboard. Love it. I moved in my dyes, and now I have room to dye, even with all those bottles on the counter. There’s even the perfect place underneath to tuck my spin-dryer.
I had a problem, though…I’ve had to walk to the bathroom to get water…adding a ton of walking to dye days. Good for me, I suppose, but not very efficient, and full of ‘doh’ moments when I fetched not-quite-enough water and have to get a smidge more. So Phase Two was a sink. I bought most of the stuff for this when I purchased things for Phase One, but summer came and was crazier than I always think it will be (note to self, do not make big plans for summer).
Anyway, I have this nice table that was built for a knitting machine. It’s too short for me, and doesn’t hold up well to the side-to-side movements required, so I’ve been using it for a project table, and finally kicked it out of my fiber studio entirely. Voila, place for a sink. I purchased a nice acrylic sink at our local Habitat ReStore, and picked up a faucet and drain tubing and such at Home Depot.
The plywood of the table wouldn’t be great for such a wet area, so I also looked for vinyl flooring remnants. They didn’t have anything that small, so I went with self-stick floor tiles. Cheap, and works….and hey, matches my sink! We are not going to mention the tube of caulk that refused to set up and had to be totally removed. Ew.
And here, I hit a snag, and took another couple of trips to the store. First, I didn’t have a way to hook my drainpipe to the sink. And the way I thought I would hook up the faucet was not quite based in reality. A very helpful associate got me set up with the adapters I needed, and I happily hooked things up. Um, can we say ‘fountain’?
So…another trip to the store so I could wrap the joints more copiously with teflon tape, and I was in business. Heh. I also grabbed an adapter so my hanging lamps would turn on with the regular light. Perfect. So here’s the whole space:
And the new studio in ‘action’. You have to pardon the black and white, I’m working on Tiger Club for August, and it is top secret.
Look what arrived on my doorstep just as I finished:
What timing, eh? Anyway, I’m greatly enjoying the new space, and only have a few little tweaks to do. I look forward to creating lovely colors for you!
Despite all indications to the contrary, I have been dyeing plenty (besides club) this summer. Grand Old Flag has been difficult to keep in stock (there are some now)…which is a great problem to have, and of course we have been enjoying extra trips over the summer. I’ve also been working on a studio move. It is just one room over in our home, but when it is finished I should have everything for the dye studio in one room. In the meantime, I’ve been juggling the two half functional studios, and turned out a nice update for you. (At least, I think so!)
You can easily find this entire update at this link, under the ‘New’ section of the shop.
There is quite a bit of Falkland….I finished dyeing the entire bump. If you love this fiber, grab it, because I won’t have it again until 2014.
I’ve also started in on the rest of my bump of BFL:
And I had a special request by a friend for Tropical Rainbow on BFL/Silk, so I have more from that batch, plus a batch of Merino/Bamboo/Tussah. Fun with rainbows!!
I have some random fibers that were samples or extras for Tiger Club, and they are now released from the no-sell period.
And finally I’ve been working on Mawata Silk Hankies. Fun to spin, or to pull into ‘yarn’ and knit without spinning.
Whew! We’re getting back in the swing of things with school and a real schedule, so the plan is to have more regular updates for you. I’m going to keep working on the BFL and the BFL Silk, but first I need to knock out August’s Tiger Club, which is always fun to do. There is 90 pounds of yarn and fiber on its way from my supplier, and I look forward to showing you what I can do with them!
I’m back, and had a bit of vacation from our vacation! Once I’ve sorted through pictures, I’ll share a bit of that with you.
Right before we left, I sent out July’s Club, and I’m overdue for the reveal. I wanted something with a cool feeling, so I went on a search for cotton. I found it in fiber and in yarn! My original ‘polar opposite’ plan to contrast with June’s ‘Solar Flare’ was to make pale cool colors, but I was getting pretty nice bolder colors, so I decided to go with it. This picture cinched the deal, and ‘Ice Pops’ was born.
Our yarn is very similar to Elann’s Esprit, and is a cotton and elastic blend in a light sport weight. Since they came to me so neat in 50 gram balls, I decided to make them in Fillet of Soles and hand paint them into stripes. Just pull out the waste yarn, and start knitting two socks at a time, toe up, and use up all the yarn!
For cotton, I know many spinners are afraid of it, and I wanted to push you out of your comfort zone, but not TOO much! Enter in this lovely ‘Easy to Spin’ Acala cotton sliver. It is grown in the USA, and is minimally processed to make it easier for spinners. Commercial cotton has all the crimp ironed out of it, and this does not. If you’d like to learn more, and get tips on how to spin it, check out this site, and explore.
We’ll be back to wool for August (and the rest of the year), you are welcome to join us, as there are a few spots open in Tiger Club through the 15th of August.
Just a heads up that The Painted Tiger will be on vacation from July 20 through August 3rd. If you have a fiber emergency, please order by Noon Central on Friday, July 19. Otherwise, I will be sending orders on Monday, August 5th. I look forward to being back all refreshed and filled with new color inspiration!
