Brown Bag Yarns

Hi! I spin and dye my own yarn and fiber. You can check it out on Etsy, @Brown Bag Yarns.

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New yarns~

All 100% Superwash BFL sock weight, kettle dyed semi-solids

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Anyone remember this yarn? Well it's a shawl now, finally. I am so very happy with how it turned out. And unlike the indoor pictures of the fiber and yarn, the shawl pictures are actually colour accurate! (Rav Link)

The bamboo gives it such a beautiful shine, without being, you know, High Visibility Vest shiny. And I really like the colour. You maybe could guess that I tend towards the really bright, sometimes obnoxious, yellow, green, orange, and nerdy sort of things.

So grey wouldn't be my thing, right? Apparently not! I think it would look nice with most of my hats. Not that I get to wear 2 knitted things at once out and about too often. But maybe one day!

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New stuff up at the shop! All handspun for this batch.

An awesome blue chain ply, the very best green in bulky, an amazingly bright orange (seriously, it's hard not to keep this one).

And finally, a new thing I'm trying - Gradients! The teal is up for sale, but the pink isn't. It was the best go (which is why it's such a basic colour job), and I'm in the process of knitting into a sample hat!

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New fiber up today! Going to be putting a couple handspun up soon too, I just need to actually spin them first! One is the brightest orange that ever oranged, so look forward to that!

Minecraft and Harry Potter are today's general themes.

Hufflepuff Pride, Ravenclaw pride (obvious where I got the ideas from, eh?)

Londinium, Algae at Low Tide, and Candy Bowl (no real specific motivation for these colours other than 'ooh, pretty')

and lastly, Fallen Leaves, and Grass Blocks.

Fallen Leaves was supposed to be a mineshaft theme, but I mixed the colours off memory and of course lava in-game is completely not that red. Not even a little. Whoops. Let's pretend I use a texture pack or something, okay? Okay. Pretty happy with Grass blocks, although we've sort of got ...mixing of biome shades going on in the green tones.

"TUMBLR20130" coupon gets you 10% off :)

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Some new stuff, two new braids, and some handspun

Red Rock Canyon SW BFL Handspun

Regency Romance Novel on SW BFL

Avalon Bay on Merino/Tencel

"TUMBLR2013" gets you 10% off

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Some handspun I'm going to knit!

This was leftover bits of my Merino/Bamboo stash, so only about 100 grams. So it's getting knitted up as a sample/shawl for me to keep and love for ever.

Not for sure set on a pattern, but I'm thinking Holden would be pretty. I need to work on the pickle jar shawl I've had on hold for ages now first, though. Maybe today I'll get back to that....

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New fiber! I didn't mean to dye fall colours, but it is actually fall, so I think that's alright.

We've got Princess Peach, Root Beer Float (my favourite), and Orange Slices.

"TUMBLR2013" code gets you 10% off

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New fiber!

Sutter's Mill on Superwash merino (so green!)

and Everything's Shiny Cap'n, not to fret, on merino/bamboo (and it's actually shiny! awesome!)

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New handspun! Spun this up yesterday. Love working with the merino/bamboo blend. So shiny and pretty. And with a TMBG song name inspiration, yay :)

Coupon code "TUMBLR2013" gets you 10% off

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So I thought it might be kind of fun to show of some of my "first" handspun attempts. (Rav stash page here)

I don't have a picture of the original fiber, but it was about 100g of some wool (probably SW Merino), dyed by the oh-so-talented Bee Mice Elf, who was doing a spinning demo at my LYS. I got a bottom whorl spindle, and some fiber from her, and made the left-most yarn pictured.

I was so proud of that yarn, man. It was CRAZY chunky, (I couldn't do drafting, so I literally just broke the fiber into skinny little sections, pre-drafted that to death, and added twist, omg). So I knit it up on some 15's, flat, and stitched 'em up into tubes. (Rav project page here).

So after I had spun some other things, and then acquired an actual wheel, I wanted to try and re-do this yarn, because I loved the colours, and had limited funds for going out and buying actual new fiber. So I ripped out the mitts, took out as much of the twist as I could from the yarn (pretty easy because it was lolnoob spun), and fluffed it up a bit, then spun it up all proper like.

Resulting yarn was like a sport weight 2ply (the finest I had spun at that point in my spinning adventures). (Rav page for new mitts here)

The end yarn and project definitely lost some of the fluffy softness the original fiber and yarn had, but I was (and still am) very happy with the results, and I feel like I really learned a lot from the whole experience.

Anyone else have interesting first yarn stories? Or even just projects you're really proud of?

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More stuff in the shop, handspun! 

Get 10% off with code "TUMBLR2013"

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The shop's all stocked up with fiber (specifically combed top). Some old stuff, some new stuff. Fiber content includes SW Merino, Falkland, SW BFL, Polwarth, 50/50 Merino/Tencel, and plain Merino.

 Check it out, and use the code "Tumblr2013" for 10% off.

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Working on another sample of how the pickle jar dyed yarn knits up. This time I’m doing a combo… knit a sock, then going to rip it out and make another shawl. This colourway has more contrast than usual, so I wanted to see how it pools.

The sock is SO soft. Like, one of the softest socks I’ve ever made. I don’t want to make a pair and keep them however, because we’re hard on socks in this house, and I know the fluffy 2ply will not stand up to hard use, and I like it too much to sacrifice that way.

Details - 1.5 inch cuff, 72 sts, on US 1’s plain stockinette, with a 2.25 inch heel flap and standard heel turn and gusset. Gauge, unblocked and unwashed, is 8 sts x 11 rows per inch.

38 grams used (based on yards per gram math, that’s about 170 yds) for a women’s large (US shoe size 10, slightly wide) sock. 111g/491yds in full skein.

Only took two full days to knit. Hello sock, goodbye sock!

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More shawls. This time in my own hand dyed yarn. Two examples of the Pickle Jar style. I really love this method of dyeing. It's super fun to do, and it results in the type of variegation that I love knitting with. The subtle blending, and speckling is so perfect for allowing patterns to show through, without being so flat.

First up is my new favourite shawl. I've posted about it before, but it's done now! The yarn was the 3ply 75/25 superwash wool/nylon sock weight, and almost the full 4 oz was used.

Second shawl I didn't make, so no Ravelry page for it, sorry. I can tell you the pattern is Begonia Swirl (minus the leaf edging), and it used about 330yds of the 2ply BFL sock weight.

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More handspun! 

Decided to go with a worsted-ish weight basic end-to-end 2ply. Really happy with how it turned out. 

Helix Nebula on Etsy ("TUMBLR2013 code gives you 10% off")

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Okay people, this is next up to spin, and I'm not sure what it wants to be. Thick, thin, 2 ply, n-ply, singles, the options....are not endless, but there are a lot! 

It's 50/50 Merino/Tencel, which is one of my favourite blends, because it's both soft AND shiny. Best of both worlds, right there. Fiber was kettle dyed by me, so it's got short-ish sections of colour (blue, purple, and pink), with variations in strength of colour, and the name is "Helix Nebula" 

So, anyone have opinions?

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New handspun! Really love both of these. 

First, an infinitely squishable skein that I think would make an awesome shawl (or anything really, my brain just jumps to shawl anytime I've got 300+yds of something) - Hawkguy, SW Merino, 372yds, sport weight. 

Next, for the Potterheads - Gryffindor Pride on Falkland, 118yds, bulky weight.

Coupon "TUMBLR2013" gives you 10% off.