I really love squishing color through fiber! It’s so much fun to see how the colors interplay, and to end up with some beautiful yarn! Kind of like having babies in a way. And also like babies, there is a great deal of laborious preparation and finishing work that goes with the process. I generally reserve one day a week for dyeing, and the rest of the week for purchasing supplies, winding yarn into skeins, rinsing, drying, untangling, labeling, accounting, scanning and uploading photos, winding skeins into balls, wrapping up packages, and trips to the Post Office. Yikes!
When things get really busy I enlist the help of the rest of the family, particularly with the winding and balling. At first my three children enjoyed winding balls by hand. Eventually I had to stand behind the kids with a bullwhip: “Wind FASTER you FOOLS!” “But Mommy my arms are TIRED!”
I finally got smarter, and purchased two machines which have been absolutely essential to my business: a heavy duty electric ball winder from Nancy’s Knit Knacks, and an electric skein winder from Fricke Enterprises. You can see them both going at once in the little video (I don’t generally recommend having both going at once because of potential tangles, but it made for a more interesting motion picture). Oops- you can also see lots of crud on the carpet, and clutter everywhere. Well, you can’t be good at everything. Maybe I will have to get that bullwhip out and get after the children with the vacuum cleaner!
To purchase hand wool sock yarn from Sara’s Colorwave Yarns, click on the banner below.
No comments:
Post a Comment