Can't Live With Them, Can't Live Without Them

I bet you think I am going to write about men, right? Well in my life it is a computer. I am sitting here typing on a compouter with no "u", a "j" that is about ready to fall off and an "o" that only works when you hit it hard. I sent a whole message to my sister without any "o's" before I realized I had a problem. Believe it or not it isn't this computer I have had the problem with. Just about one month ago my main point of sale computer stopped working in the middle of running a report. Like all of us have done a million times when the computer locked up I turned it off, waited, and turned it back on. Little did I know I would never again see the information on that computer. After countless numbers of hours trying to retrieve all of the 6 years of information it was decided to send the computer to computer heaven. I know everyone is asking how could I not have all of my data backed up? Well my external hard drive stopped working. I bought a new one at the same time as the dyeing disaster. It came with its own software and I never took the time to learn how to use it. Now the computer was also a fancy computer which was supposed to create it's own backup with a mirrored drive system but as luck would have it this also failed. I may not have helped myself but I can't begin to tell you the number of friends, family, and customers that now are backing up their system that didn't a month a ago. Oh yea ours also backs up every file that was changed the day before at midnight. Lesson learned and thank goodness for good old fashioned hard copies.

Join us for Super Scarf Knitting!

We'll be at the Creation Cafe on Wednesday, November 17th from 6-9pm

Address is 337 West 11th Street, Indianapolis IN 46202

Yarn and needles available for $15, knitters handy to get you started! Free wine tasting for those knitting and giveaways and prizes from Creation Cafe and Euphoria. Should be a great time!

Crunch the 3-legged cat has been extra chatty today. She's either telling me that she would like some Gravy Lover's Fancy Feast or that she would like to wish all of our readers a HAPPY HALLOWEEN!

quiet...too quiet

So one of the things we are working on is really connecting with the knitters instead of only yarn store owners. We still love our LYS owners, but we love to talk to EVERYONE. Me especially- I'm quite the chatterbox.

So if you're on Ravelry, we'd love to hear from you. We're got our own group (Alpaca With A Twist) and you can see all sorts of fun things like news, new colors, and now there's a thread of people's projects (mostly just mine so far, but I would really love to see yours!). To make it a little more interesting over there on Ravelry, Jennifer and I have decided to put together a little goodybag for our winners every month. "But Paige!" you say, "how can I win said goodybags?"

It's easy! Go to the "What are you making?" thread and post a picture of your projects with Alpaca With A Twist yarn or fiber. If you're working with our roving, we totally count handspun as a project. Then talk about your project a little bit. Say something along the lines of Hi, I'm blergety-blerg, and I'm making a sweater for my blerg with some Highlander. And then at the end of the month, I'll go through and put all of the people who submitted pictures into a drawing (multiple projects count for multiple chances!) and then I'll pick one name totally at random and then send you a goodybag.

"But Paige!" you ask, "what's in the goodybag?".

I don't know yet, but it will be awesome. Go get your chat on over there at the Alpaca With A Twist group, and let's see what sort of awesome we can dish out. Can't wait to hear from you!

oops

So remember that neon yarn from the last post? We've been slowly rehanking and tidying it up for a while now and you know what- it's not bad. It's actually kinda cool. There are some really awesome skeins in there (one of which may or may not have "Paige Is Awesome" written in to it with blue dye) so we're going to let you guys get some of our new limited-edition colorway called "oops". There's absolutely nothing wrong with it- it just didn't quite match the color we needed it to. Jennifer took it out West last week to a show and a few people got a bunch to sell for October/Breast Cancer Awareness month since it's a little on the pinky side.

So here's our color- which you can buy at the cost of normal, non-handpainted Socrates. But you might want to call quickly- I don't think it will be hanging around very long.

Our Beautiful Mess

So a few of you might know about Yarns on Stage, a cool event where shops can buy this package that consists of 5 or 10 skeins of a limited-edition handpainted colorway from 10 different shops. The people that are running this asked us to come up with such a color, and we jumped at the chance.

It wasn't until after we had committed to this project, we remembered....we don't actually do any of our own hand-dyeing.

But "problem" is just another word for "opportunity", right?

We checked out some local dyers and finally settled on one whose subtle colors had us buying half of her etsy shop stock. Over a couple weeks she came up with several colors for us and we all agreed on a pastel pinky-orange with greeny bits. Great description, huh? Anyhoo, she cranked out a few sample skeins, they got sent to designers, patterns were made and the colors were shown off at TNNA, yarn store committed to purchasing packages of yarn and when we got our final number, we were ready to start dyeing. At the end of day one, our dyer brought us 2 garbage bags of soaking wet, tangled yarn that was...well...NEON. And it bled all over the place. Jennifer and I nearly double our work hours over the next 2 days to clean up and untangle the 100 skeins that had been neoned. There were tears shed, regrets voiced, and then the dyer quit. Mind you, we've got 1200 skeins to dye, dry, hank and label within a 2 week window, and we have no idea how to recreate the original pastel pinky-orange-with-greeny-bits that we need. The dyer agreed to give us her "recipe" which we followed to a T but somehow ended up with a beautiful aubergine color. I actually prefer the aubergine color, but we were committed to the pastel pinks.

Jennifer spent the weekend dyeing little tester skeins and then calling to ask my opinion. Eventually we came up with a color and then quickly realized we were going to need some serious help if we were going to prepare these hank, dye, hank and label and get it done quickly. We bought stoves, we bought steamers, we had electricity and plumbing installed in the warehouse basement and we had people come in to help. We were ready to go.

So we soaked the skeins 15 at a time before dyeing them, also 15 at a time over 3 burners. They went for an hour. Then they cooled, then were soaked in vinegar for a while and then moved to the next station to be painted, one at a time and very slowly. After that, we wrapped them all up in cling-film and stuck them in the vegetable steamers for half an hour, where they turned in to yarn-sausages. Piping hot, we stuck them in more clean water to cool and get the vinegar smell out as we ripped open the little sausages and dug for yarn. After that came the hanging of the skeins, and after we had about 300 on the lines we had to get a little creative with spacing. On sunny days we were able to move some of the nearly-dry ones outside for a blast of sunshine. On windy days, we swore under our breaths while we picked them up off the ground and lost a few to dirty spots and vegetable matter from their trips to the ground. I started with the hanking and finished about half before we collectively decided that since I had twisted the skin off my hands, I was too becoming too slow. After the dyeing was over (and we have a few to spare, even!) all efforts went in to hanking and then labeling, and just as the crazed-twitches and nervous breakdowns were starting, we began packing them up and sending them out. After two days of 4 people hanking and labeling, we were able to call it quits.

And I will never complain about the price of handpainted yarn EVER AGAIN.

When you find yourself unexpectedly needing to dye 1200 skeins of yarn in a very short time period (more details to follow) thanks for friends and friends of friends who I now call friends. A huge thank you goes out to Rita Polen and Jo Basey who pretty much double handily have helped us get out of a tough spot. Thanks to both of these ladies we would like to introduce to you our Yarns On Stage yarn called "Fruit Smoothie" (thanks for the name Jo).