Rainy Day

on a rainy day, bright yarn and craft books make me happy

I live in central/eastern Vermont. I don’t ever remember getting rain during the winter as a kid. I guess we can go ahead and blame it on global warming. Despite the forecast, the kids still went to school, so I got a work day after all.

I spent the majority of the day re-skeining yarn. Re-skeining yarn is the process of taking freshly dyed and dried skeins of yarn and re-winding them. This neatens them up and also allows the colors to blend together in the skein.

Whenever possible, I like to photograph my yarns both before and after re-skeining. Some knitters like to see the yarn before- It allows them to see how long and regular the color repeats are, which in turn allows them to choose the best suited pattern for the yarn.

the same yarn before (left) and after (right) reskeining

Others are more concerned with how the colors will blend after they’ve been knitted together. Photographing them both ways makes me feel like whatever the customer’s preference, I’ve done the best job I can in letting them know exactly what they’re getting. That’s important to me. I don’t want any unhappy emails!

getting there!

Now, what else do I have to show you today? Oh yes, my 9-5 socks. I haven’t worked on them for a few days, but my new sock blockers arrived this morning, so I was able to photograph my progress. It’s not the greatest photo I’ve taken, but it serves its purpose.

I also got to photograph some freshly dried falkland roving that I dyed up last weekend to spin. This is some of the practice fiber I bought when I was first learning to dye.

hand dyed falkland roving. yum!

I would love to sell dyed fibers some day but for now I only dye it for myself. Four ounces of fiber doesn’t look like much all spun up but it takes up a HUGE space to dye. It’s worth it though. There’s nothing quite like spinning up fiber that you dyed yourself.

Well, I think that’s it for today! So far, 2009 has been great (the whole first week of it) and I’m actually following through on my goal to blog more often. Now to work on those other goals…