Okay, so they’re not actually from Russia.

My first Russian spindle is from Carney’s Turnings, which I picked up at Fibres West about a month ago. And then I became so enamoured with it, I hunted down other spindle makers, finally discovering the amazing Lisa Chan at Gripping Yarn. She’s turned over 1,000 spindles and hosts an Etsy shop here. But of course, due to the popularity of her spindles, the shop is empty. So I convo’d her to ask about having a couple spindles made.

Lisa came back with a HUGE list of exotic woods that she has in stock and ready to make into spindles. She makes recommendations about what woods produce the most balanced spindles and even lists the density of each wood, so that you can make better decisions about what kind of spindle you want. Initially, I was hoping for one in East Indian Rosewood, but it wasn’t available… so I chose Purpleheart (dark red/purple colour), Bloodwood (warm orangey/red colour) and White African Pear (blond). Galina Khmeleva of “Gossamer Threads” spinning-fame, notes that traditional Russian spindles are made from birch which is quite a light wood, so I opted for the White African Pear because it was closest to this. The two darker woods are heavier, but so gorgeous. Each spindle is approximately 33g (just over 1 oz). The shape of each spindle is the same and looks like a large, full paintbrush with a tapered tip.

Lisa’s custom spindle process runs like clockwork from my customer perspective. She is prompt with the emails, turns the spindles, invoices and then ships all in a matter of days (of course, depends on her workload). She also makes French supported spindles as well as an original design called the “Rose” which is a French/Russian hybrid spindle (can be used either supported or suspended). Here’s a drool-worthy collection of her spindle photos.

Armed with Lisa’s spindles and the new spinning video by Galina (from Interweave), I’ve been spinning nearly every night before bed while watching tv. It’s been remarkably productive. I can spin nearly soundlessly and not disturb anyone, and I can spin in bed. It’s awesome.

Supported spindles don’t get along with commercial top fibre preparations… unless you get a short-stapled one and spin from the fold (or something like that). So I’ve been spinning up the batts I carded back at the 2009 SOAR with Abby Franquemont. I sort of wish I had written down what was in these batts, but I think the red one is a combination of merino, camel and sparkle… and the grey one is a mix of alpaca and silk. I think.

I’m hoping to try the crazy Russian plying technique from Galina’s video when I finish filling these spindles. You basically ply your handspun single with a commercially spun silk and wind the freshly plied yarn directly onto a round disc-shaped cardboard bobbin. The bobbins are then steamed to set the yarn and are ready to knit from right away. Hope to be sharing some plied yarn with you in the next several weeks!

The new Spring issue of Twist Collective is out now and I’m so in love. It’s nearly 70 pages long and packed full of really beautiful, detailed and tailored knitting patterns. There are light cardigans, summer tanks, airy shawls of all shapes, and many fine sock patterns.

Susanna IC also has a couple new shawl designs in the magazine, one of them being Giardina, knit in our Merino Silk Lace (Glacier). It’s a beaded rectangular shawl/stole that is perfect for summer layering. Here’s a close-up of the beadwork…

I’m also in love with Marnie Maclean’s ruffle cardigan, Regent, and Allison Haas’ socks, Asti (I would never put these socks into shoes — they are too pretty).

Time for MORE SWEETGEORGIA, am I right? But…wouldn’t it be nice if you could get BONUSES the MORE SweetGeorgia yarn or fiber you used? Well then THIS is the craft-a-long for you!

THE RULES:

• THIS CRAFT-A-LONG IS ONLY FOR SGY YARNS OR FIBER. ONE POST PER ENTRY. You may enter as many times as you want.
• EACH POST MUST CONTAIN THE FOLLOWING:

1. A cast on/start date and photo within the dates of the KAL/CAL/SAL, or a prepping photo for spinners!
2. A finish date and photo added upon completion within the dates of the KAL/CAL/SAL! Completed project, or completed fiber spun up if you are entering as a spinner!

• EACH PROJECT must use greater than 50 percent of a skein or standard fiber bundle of SweetGeorgia yarn or fiber.

Now on to the bonuses!

• BONUS ENTRIES FOR EACH FULL HANK OF SGY used after the first one! So let’s say your sweater takes 4 skeins of fingering weight. You will get one entry for cast on and finish, PLUS three additional entries.
• CREATIVITY WILL BE REWARDED. So if you used 3.75 skeins for your sweater and you make a couple of bracelets and a blanket square with the last .25 skeins, you’ll get an extra full-skein entry as long as you provide photos!!
• Spinners will get a bonus for knitting/crocheting up their SGY handspun during the KAL! So if a spinner posts a prep photo and date, then a final spun fiber skein, THEN a project knit or crocheted with that skein, you get a bonus entry! Pre-spun yarn is not eligible for a bonus entry, sorry. :/
• Spinners will also get a bonus entry for each additional 100 grams of SGY fiber. So if you’ve got a double fiber membership and you spin up both of your fiber bundles, you’ll get a bonus entry for that too.
• Don’t worry, I’ll take care of adding the bonus entries for everyone. So for each entry, please just make one post.

THIS KAL/CAL/SAL RUNS FROM APRIL 1 to JUNE 30!! Fabulous prizes will be announced nearer the deadline!! HAVE FUN!

Enter your posts here: http://www.ravelry.com/discuss/sweet-sweetgeorgia/2088880/

Here’s the first puff of merino bamboo silk spun and plied on the new Arbutus turkish delight. I love it. That is all.

FibresWest comes and goes so quickly each year. It’s like a rush to pack and ready everything on the Wednesday, getting the car rentals and driving an hour out to Abbotsford (each way — over the weekend, it’s over six hours of driving) to set up our booth on Thursday. Then Friday and Saturday whoosh past, meeting and greeting customers and friends, both old and new. We drove through a monsoon to get to Abbotsford and throughout the show, there were moments when the whole festival collectively paused to listen to the intense hail coming down around us. But despite the harsh March weather, it’s a wonderful time to reconnect with fibre people… and learn new things.

Two years ago, I attended Interweave’s spinning retreat, SOAR, in Delavan, Wisconsin and watched a classmate (Stetson) in the Margaret Stove Lace workshop spin on a Russian supported spindle. It was the most fascinating thing to watch and I desperately wanted to learn how to do that. So I looked around the SOAR marketplace but couldn’t find anyone who was selling Russian spindles… only tahklis for cotton. It’s been a while, but just this past weekend at FibresWest, I met Caroline Sommerville of Ancient Arts Fibre Crafts who had a huge table FULL of supported spindles.

I managed to escape their booth with just one supported spindle. A bottom-heavy Russian spindle in Jatoba wood, weighing 43g (#1 in the photo). I tried practicing on it with some of our merino bamboo silk fibre, but Caroline says the fibre is not appropriate to the spindle… rather, the spindle is better suited to cashmere and yak and very very short stapled fibres. Excuse me while I paw through my fibre stash for some extra cashmere to practice with?! I’m torn… I want to spin beautiful wonderful fibres with this spindle… but I don’t want to waste said beautiful wonderful fibres as I practice. Teresa was also bitten by the supported spindle bug and ended up going home with a gorgeous blonde wood Tibetan spindle… and then sent me this video:

Carina, the unintentional enabler, bought a larger Turkish spindle on Saturday morning (possibly to do some plying?) and announced that there were only four more Turkish spindles at the Fibres Plus booth. I had to go look and the warm, red Arbutus wood was too seductive to refuse. So I unintentionally ended up with a second tiny Turkish spindle. My parents also have a large Arbutus tree in the front of our family home, so of course, there is a bit of sentimentality thrown in there too. This spindle is lovely and TINY at 21g (0.74 oz) and even smaller than the first one I bought at SOAR in 2010. And it’s a wonder why I always end up spinning fine yarn.

The Arbutus wood has an otherworldly kind of wavy grain to it and very interesting but soft figuring also. It’s small enough to carry around in my purse but so delicate, I’m afraid I’ll crush it. Maybe I should get a little plastic box from the Daiso for the spindles so that I can carry them around in my bag. I did see another spinner carry her series of Tabacheck Russian spindles in a hard wine bottle case. Very smart.

Despite all the hard work to set up, the many hours of driving, and the long hours in a very very cold venue, I’m so happy that I got the chance to be at FibresWest and get inspired by all the other fibre artists and craftspeople around us. From potters to button makers, from dyers to weavers, I’m grateful that everyone made the effort to come out and share their passions too.

I’ve been working through my stash of spinning fibre… methodically and ever so slowly. I’ve been trying to stick to just one spinning project at a time and I don’t know why it took me so long to realize why I’m so slow… it’s because I spin everything so fine! I must have fallen into a dimension where I believe everything needs to start off being spun fine, so that if it gets plied, it will make it knitable. I think of plying fine lace singles into a balanced 2-ply lace yarn, or plying it navajo-style to make a three ply for socks, or even plying three bobbins of lace singles together to make a strong sock yarn. I don’t think fat, floopy yarns wear very well and it just negates making your own yarn… but the way I am just means that everything takes super long.

I’m about 1/4 of the way through spinning this Merino Bamboo Silk fibre… I checked the blog and it’s from way back in August 2010! I’ve taken the pound of fibre, split it vertically and spinning both halves very thinly. At the end, I’ll have two bobbins of lace singles that can be plied together. The colour chunks should roughly line back up and I’ll get broad stripes of colour when I finally knit this up.

Let’s see if I can get to the end… there is much spinning to do. And of course, I spin short-forward draw worsted-style, meaning it takes even longer. I hope good things come to those who wait.

Patience saved me upwards of $350! When “The Principles of Knitting” book was out of print, I was sorely tempted to buy it off E-bay but I just couldn’t afford or justify trying to afford to pay the $350 the book was going for at the time. Miraculously, June Hemmons Hiatt was convinced to come out with a revised edition of her book. Of course, editing the nearly 700-page tome took a long time as the entire book had to be re-typed by hand and all the 900 illustrations had to be re-created by her son. Now, it’s available for $30-something and it will forever live in my library as the most comprehensive book on knitting ever written.

When I heard June Hemmons Hiatt speak about the book at Vogue Knitting Live earlier last year, I had already pre-ordered and was waiting for delivery before Christmas. But she spoke up in her live interview with VK editor, Trisha Malcolm, and said it’s unlikely the book would be ready by Christmas. So, I would have to be patient.

I need to constantly remind myself to be patient, to be persistent. Small things done consistently to produce big results. Just keep at it. Maybe I’ll have all this spun up by next Christmas.

I’ve been looking for a new studio space for at least a year and a half now, and it’s been tremendously difficult because rents in Vancouver are especially high and the spaces are all extremely small or extremely large. I started actively courting our new studio space back in September and worked on the legal stuff all through October (while also juggling the incorporation of our business at the same time), and then the building proposal and drawings were submitted to the city in mid-November. Of course, with the holidays putting a damper on everyone’s workflow, we didn’t see the building permit approved until January 30, six weeks later.

But I’m so happy to say that I’ve been visiting the new studio space every couple days and things are progressing as far as I can see. The landlord is building out our shell space to include a second floor for our offices and a proper place to have lunch (the $5 Canadian Tire stool perched between bins of twisted yarns is not really my dream for how our girls have lunch every day). And on the main floor, we’ll be setting up the production dyeing area as well as a very small retail area for our on-hand yarns. There will be a separation too between the two areas so that I don’t have to worry about customers slipping on the wet floor and cracking their skulls open (something I worry about every time someone comes to visit right now… mainly, because I’ve slipped and fallen in the studio before myself). Last week, I saw that the main floor had been framed. And this week, the stairs and the upstairs offices have also been framed. I see electrical going in and hopefully this means we’re getting close.

The new studio is located at the opposite end of Main street from where we are now. Basically on East Kent Avenue South between Main and Fraser. Unfortunately, it’s not really a transit or pedestrian-friendly area… but if you drive, you’ll be happy to hear that there is TONS of free parking out front. No more having to fight to find street parking. Yay! (I think Carina will be happy about that one too).

The aim is to move immediately after FibresWest (March 16 and 17). So if I am a bit nutty at FW, please forgive me. We’ll be bringing basically everything we have in the studio for FibresWest… much of it will be on sale too. With all our TNNA order production in full swing right now, there is literally no space for more bodies at the current studio so it looks like FibresWest will be as close to a pre-moving sale as we can get! Hope to see you there… and then at the new studio.

With all the excitement around publishing the winners of the KAL, I nearly forgot to post about this! I’m very excited to be taking over the teaching of both of Irene Weisner’s workshops this Spring at Place des Arts. Irene was my instructor for a couple years at Place des Arts and I am half-thrilled, half-paralyzed by fear about stepping into her very big shoes. But spinning and dyeing have long been passions of mine and I’m looking forward to sharing this with more people.

Place des Arts will be offering one spinning workshop at the end of April and a dyeing workshop at the end of May.

Dyeing to Get Some Colour? (18+ years)

• Learn simple and creative methods to get the colours you want into your work such as immersion, hot pour, painting, top dye and batching. Bring some natural fibres (commercially spun or handspun yarn).
• 9053 • SA • May 26 • 12:30-4:30 PM • $55 + tax

Spinning Clinic (18+ years)

• Are you an inch-worm spinner? Do you need to improve your spinning technique? Or maybe you want to learn how to make funky art yarn. Our well-equipped fibre studio has many of the newer spinning wheels as well as three drum carders to blend creative mixes of fibres and colour.
• 9054 • SU • Apr 29 • 1:00 – 5:00 PM • $50 + tax

When we first opened the studio, I offered classes in spinning, weaving and dyeing, but gradually as our production dyeing work grew, it squeezed out the ability for us to hold classes in our little space. So this is wonderful to be able to return to teaching! Please feel free to ask me if you have questions about the workshops. Hope you might join us!

Andrea (arian624 on Ravelry) from Victoria is our Grand Prize winner who will received a skein each of Tough Love Sock, BFL Sock and Silk Crush sock in colours she’s picked (Summer Skin, Coastal and Riptide) as well as a set of all our patterns. Stella is a pretty strongly variegated colourway, but I’m so happy to see how the stitch pattern in the socks breaks up the colourway a bit and makes it so fun to look at.

Kate (Aelia on Ravelry) from Australia is our Second Place Prize winner who will received a skein of Tough Love Sock as well as a set of all our patterns. This Shaelyn shawl is so stunning! I’ve just downloaded a copy of the pattern to play with too.

Our third place winner is Grace (sprouts on Ravelry, who spins and knits the most lovely handspun). Grace receives a copy of all our patterns. I’m so happy her prize-winning shawl was knit up in our October 2011 Sock Club colourway, Rockwater! I love seeing this knit up.

And finally, Maya (mayapof on Ravelry) knit a beautiful North Wind hat that won her a fourth place prize… a gift from the lovely Julia at mindofwinter. CashLuxe Fine held double… so yum.

There were so many really exquisite projects, I wish I could link them all!

• iliketobike’s socks (beautiful texture)
• misocrafty’s Neither Here and There hat (such cool use of two contrasting colours)
• mayapof’s Plain and Simple pullover in Tough Love (Blackberry)
• luvinthemommyhood’s North Wind hat in my favourite colour, Raspberry
• pretty much all of sprout’s sock club projects… the Indian Wedding Jaywalkers, Sitka Dragonfly socks, Vampire Christmas Dragonfly socks… and you must see Cameron’s Winter Hose.

Thank you so much to Susan for her constant encouragement to all the participants and her hard work in putting this KAL together! Thank you to all the participants… I hope you enjoy all your finished objects! And of course, congratulations to the winners!

ALL TEXTILE ENTHUSIASTS ARE INVITED TO THIS FREE LECTURE

Guest Speaker Judith MacKenzie presents “The Tinkuy Conference in the Sacred Valley of Peru”

Judith MacKenzie, has been a textile artist for the last 30 years. Her work appears in private and public collections. Judith teaches throughout North America, is a published author and regularly featured in Spin-Off Magazine.

In 2010, Judith was present when four hundred weavers of the Americas gathered in Urubamba, Peru, in the Sacred Valley near Cusco for Tinkuy de Tejedores. Participants travelled from the Navajo Nation, Mexico, Guatemala, Ecuador, Bolivia, Argentina, and Peru for this unique textile conference. Judith will transport us to Tinkuy de Tejedores both visually and through her experiences to this ground breaking event.

The lecture will be held at: Kanata Co-operative Community Building, 7155 Blake Street, Vancouver, BC.