it has stayed cold here on the west coast of newfoundland. there is still alot of snow. i buy bouquets of spring flowers and bring them into the house - daffodils and tulips. if i don't have flowers, the only colour i look at when i'm eating my breakfast each day is in the fruit bowl in front of me. red and green apples, deep orange tangerines. yellow bananas speckled with brown by the end of the week. these are the colours in my "fruit bowl" yarn that i listed in my shop yesterday.
my friend niki has just opened up her etsy shop at knixhandknit. niki makes the best hats (both for children and adults). they're soft and durable and beautifully designed and lined with fleece so they're warm and hold their shape. here's happy little finn modelling his knix hat.
last december i had a booth at the toronto one of a kind show where i was selling my handspun yarn and knitwear. the first question people inevitably asked was "is this newfoundland wool?" and i had to say no. newfoundland fleece has been surprisingly hard to get. there are few sheep here now compared to in the past and they are raised mainly for meat. when the sheep are sheared the fleece is discarded and would be in too rough a state for a spinner to do much with it. after my interview last week when i put out a call for a source of fleece, i got quite a few calls and emails. i needed a source that was fairly close to where i live so that shipping wouldn't be too expensive. and i also needed someone to wash the fleece for me. this is not a big job if you're only washing a few ounces but a big job if you're dealing with pounds. early in the week i got a call from kay in daniel's harbour (if you're not from here you've probably seen daniel's harbour on the news - it's the community that is eroding into the sea and there was amazing footage a couple of years ago of a house seemingly being swallowed up). kay has fleece and she's willing to wash it (she needs to wait till the weather changes because she washes it in tubs and dries it outside). she sent me a sample yesterday. the sheep are "newfoundland heritage" a hearty breed that's been in the province for centuries. the fleece is soft and wirey (kind of like newfoundland men!)- a perfect combination for spinning and knitting.
when most spinners buy a braid of hand dyed roving, they card it and then spin it. i've never done that. i treat the braid as a paint-box. i take it apart. i tear off bits of colour. i rearrange. and then i add these bits to other types of fleece and fibre. i add sparkle sometimes. clumps of mohair locks. cut up commercial novelty yarns. the whole experience is a creative adventure. this is what i did with the lighter skein of yarn. with the rest of that braid (from taossunflowertoo) i decided to see what it was like to spin straight. the resulting skein is lovely. the colours remind me of a desert pre-dawn. but the process was boring. i felt like i was just a spinning machine. my "creative" input wasn't there. all the artistic decisions had already been made by someone else in the dyeing. so i won't do that again...
yesterday my fleece arrived from martie in new mexico. martie's shop is taossunflowertoo. we've been "online" friends for about a year now. a few months ago we decided to do a big trade - 2 of my handknit shawls for the equivalent value in roving. and here it is! as warm and sunny and inspiring as i'd hoped. just when i need inspiration - with still too much snow outside and still too cold and with a big order of yarn to spin. all set now (as she rubs her hands together). i immediately spun up "spring grass" - martie's fleece and mohair fibre locks combined with a little white merino, some snippets of cut up novelty yarn and some luscious soysilk.
my dream is to live in a home where everything has it's place. nothing will be shoved in or tossed or piled up. i'm working flat out on spinning and knitting now. no sewing or painting or rug hooking in the forseeable future. so yesterday i began removing everything from my studio that isn't yarn related. this is how i want my brain to look...
i'm always looking for names and inspiration for my skeins of yarn. recently my sister was putting nail- polish on herself and her 3 year old grand daughter lily. each nail was to be a different colour. some of the nail-polish was old and the labels had worn off. without hesitation lily started naming the shades. "grapefruit kiss" was one. and "lady and the tramp". here is my "lady and the tramp" yarn.
