So… the site upgrade.

The site upgrade went a bit further than I thought. 

Currently, I have been up to my eyeballs in my day job and baby chickens, funnily enough… so the store has suffered. Really suffered (poor Flannelberry). Funnily enough, as I was torn and trying to figure out what to do (I don’t want to give up the store and I don’t want to to a crummy job) a friend mentioned that if I wasn’t super into the store or was too busy or… she’d LOVE to adopt it. 

Well.

That was amazing. And sad but mostly amazing. She has the time and the computer know how. I have a bunch of stuff too (or at least I’ve convinced her I have hahaha) and so we decided to amalgamate. That’s right – rather than close the doors we’re becoming Flanneberry Creek. 

Cool hey? 

So, check out the new site here:

http://flannelberrycreek.com/

Be forewarned that we’re still figuring out glitches and such but we’re here and it’s really cool.

The site upgrade…

it really is being worked on. There was another Nac Mac Feegle sorta situation but it’s been discovered and is currently being solved.  Thank goodness for people with more computer sense than I!

As for fibre… well we had a Cub camp out this weekend so not a lot of new progress was made on dyeing. The shawl grows and grows. It’s decreasing now and I see there is a light at the end of the tunnel. I think though, I may have made this too heavy to wear. We’ll see.

There is a really cool variation of the shawl I’m knitting in this Just Keep Knitting.

Don’t have your copy? You can order one direct from the publisher.

 

Ok – back to work.

Just checking

I’ve tried to relink with FB so my posts are automatically published. We’ll see if my mad computer skills are awake this early on Saturday morning.

I am SO SELFISH

I just don’t want to be at the computer -unless I’m knitting and watching something historical on it or emailing one of you about something you’d like to order!

 

We had a bit of a blow this winter. We had part of an old, heavy, rotten birch come down on the building that houses the shop. No damage to the fibre (thank goodness!!!) but it’s presented some difficulties and means we’ll be building in the summer (not such a bad thing really, I suppose).

There has been fibre play -even if I have’t been bragging about it 🙂

This is a cutch exhaust dye bath using Aquarelle Liquid Dye extracts. Not the best picture but such a great colour. The initial fibre came out brown with a reddish tone – like cedar or something. This is more chocolatey and I could have keep going. There was plenty more dye in the pot but I need to try other colours (need – hahaha).

 

 

As usual, I figured I’d try the brown but I wouldn’t be blown away by it and how wrong I was!

Now back to your regularly scheduled Kaellingesjal already in progress (and nearly done).

We’ve been busy

Some good news – I saw the hand doc who said basically the same thing as Joanne – use the fingers even when they hurt. So my plan is to start spinning over spring break. It’s nice to know what a normal level of pain would be for them to heal.

The other thing is… well, I can’t tell you just yet. I think the announcement will be in early April but there is very exciting news just around the bend.

 

I can give you a bit of eye candy for now…

 

 

Colours from the dye pot…

So we’ve been playing with colour…

 

This madder is blowing my mind! This is it hitting the dye pot:

 

 

Here are the results:

 

 

Here’s a close up – a more accurate image of the colour. It’s got a more blue undertone than the above picture would have you believe. It’s not as hard to get a more true red with Aquarelle as with ground root.

 

It’s a bit pink for me so I think it’ll go back in to the pot today with either indigo, Himalayan Rhubarb or… hmmm… Lac would be interesting too. Fortunately I have four skeins so I could easily do one of each…

 

In which my butt continunes to be kicked…

Yep. The shawl has one mistake that will live forever in it (and no, I’m not pointing it out) but it’s not kicking my butt. It’s the store. I was trying to switch platforms to a bigger, fancier store and have decided to shelf that project. I have not had time to place orders, update my inventory (although I did get it all logged so I made some progress) or PLAY WITH FIBRE. Ok, I did get a dye project done:

 

(the one on the home page) but there’s been too much computer and not enough fibre.

 

So, I’ve decided to add more features to the current site (like a site map which has been added and a search function that will be added), we’re going to have the yarn sorted by both brand and weight and so on. And I’d like your feedback. If it’s easier/more difficult to navigate, if there’s something you’d like to see and if there’s any that would make the online experience a better one for you.

 

Maybe another contest would help? I’ll go see what I have to offer up…

Bindesjal is kicking my butt.

Not one:

but two:

reversals of direction. I guess that is the downside of knitting from a recipe rather than a pattern. Sigh. However, it’s a pretty easy knit – but not boring so really, it could be worse!

 

Edit – ok – I just realized that second pick was a bad one, because it doesn’t really look like the tail is pointing in the wrong direction. Trust me – what should have been the pointy part of the tail was, in fact, reversed so it pointed into the body of the shawl.

On the needles

Two really cool things are happening at Flannelberry these days… We have been playing with Botanical Colors dyes:

Now that I’ve got a sense of these amazing dyes (I’m using the Aquarelle) they’ll be going up on the site.  I didn’t want to list them before I had played with them. Let me say I love them. They’re as easy as any of the acid wash dyes and oh my goodness! The colours. Stunning.

The other news is that we have more Little Red Bicycle heading north to us and it looks like we’re going to be the lucky ones to carry a new line of yarns from an indie dye collective. Way too exciting.

Oh yeah – and on the needles is this:

This is a recreation of a shawl from a Denmark Museum – well, it’s the bottom border of what will be a shawl. I’m a bit intimidated by the recipe but love knitting historical items and I really love supporting anyone who takes the time to unravel the mystery of these old items. If you want to join me in honouring this masterpiece, you can pick up the pattern on Ravelry.

A quick lesson in rigid heddle weaving…

So… I was working on a weaving today yesterday and realized… I have something to share with you.

So first of all let me begin by saying that the original post of this just vanished into the ether when I tried to post- thanks WordPress.

Ok – so let me really begin by saying that sometimes you have a friend who knows something you don’t, who no doubt learned it the hard way and is sharing information with you to make sure you don’t have a similar experience (right Frazzle?). And while you listen to that friend and take her advice, you don’t think about it quite enough and you keep having the same problems over and over again. For me that’s been tension on the outer edges (selvedge) of my weaving. This time I doubled the strands in the outer two heddles and eyes of both sides thinking that this might help. Well, it didn’t. Things got sloppy again. So my edges start off fine, end up really tight and then end up too loose. It’s a bizarre problem that made no sense, had no answers and was just a fact of weaving… or so I thought.

First let me say – if you have this same problem and you do things like hang pens or other oddities off those strands to increase the tension, it turns out neither you nor I invented that. It’s called a temple (check out these cool homemade ones). Anyway, that helps but there’s no way that’s the sum total of the solution.

Ok, so I thought that’s just that. That tension issue is part of why temples were invented – because everyone has that problem. And then I was messing around with the current WIP and realized what it is that I’d been missing for so long. It’s the drawing in. The unevenness in my selvedge is why I’m having some tension trouble – I’m sure of it.

So here’s the situation as I see it. When I’m throwing the shuttle, I’m carefulish about the outer edge and throw at roughly a 45* angle but… when my weaving space is getting full, that angle is compromised just due to lack of space. And it’s not quite enough, I’ve realized. What happens is that the edges end up all wibbly-wobbly

Exhibit A.

So that’s my weaving over one session. See how it’s progressively drawing in closer and closer to the middle? Well, it’s not supposed to do that. I can tell myself it’s no big deal or it works out in the end but really it turns out it doesn’t. I’m pretty sure that problem is part of what happens to the tension on those outer edges. Because when I leave it and come back to it watch what happens:

Exhibit B

See how you can’t see the underneath edges? Because I’m allowing for enough weft yarn. I had an epiphany that this is likely tied into the tension problem I have been having. If I can keep the sides consistent, I bet the tension isn’t going to go so crazy. There’s no rhyme or reason to it either – sometimes it’s too loose and sometimes too tight but it’s rarely right!

So how should it look to do it properly? Well, when I was paying attention it went like this:

And then at least this much yarn for the weft:

You might have too much and get these little neps (didn’t get a picture of them). You can easily rethrow that thread or leave them. I think I’m going to incorporate them into the next weaving as a design element – they look pretty cool really.

 

So, I hope this helps someone. I’ll let you know if it makes the next weaving a bit more selvedgely smooth!