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Self-stripingesque sock blanks

I finally (with the help of some internet research) have figured out how to make some self-stripingesque sock blanks. Side Hustle Socks kindly hand cranked up a sock blank for me to show you what they are like. I’ve been debating what color to make the heels, and ultimately none of these has won.

I’ll be sharing trunk show space with them at the Weird Sisters Yarn ShopSunday October 13 from 4-7…

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Dyers - Black and Indigenous and People of Color

Dyers – Black and Indigenous and People of Color

I am working on adding a list of my fellow crafters of color. It should appear in the top bar now. This is a great community and has supported me a lot in the past six months, so I feel it’s only right to share back.

This is a great way to use your financial influence to shop responsibly and live your values.

To some extent, we all have to manage our self-care and I can see why you might feel…

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sock recipe resources

If you follow me on instagram, you probably have realized that I knit a lot of pairs of socks. I thought it might be helpful if I provided you with with some of my sock knitting resources. This is.really a franken tutorial. If you’d like an actual pattern, my friend Stariel Knits offers Double Vanilla, which has a variety of toe and heel options.

I like to knit my socks, toe up. This is because I…

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Why my top is dyed the way it is - spinning gradients

Why my top is dyed the way it is – spinning gradients

Recently, I’ve been focusing on dyeing wool top and rovings for Black Sheep Gathering, which takes place June 29-July 1 in Albany, Oregon at the Linn County Fairgrounds. The Tour de Fleece launches the last day of the festival and I thought I’d take the time to explain how the number of repeats in a top effect a finished yarn. (If you want to check out the fiber or buy it before the festival, ho…

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World Wide Knit in Public Day

I’m helping out a friend with the World Wide Knit in Public Day event this year in Salem. We always feature some great speakers and have a lot of fun. The event takes place at the Salem Public Library on Liberty street. Details follow.

(more…)

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How to design a self-striping yarn

This is a rough guide to figuring out how big a skein you need to make self-striping yarn. I will be adding pictures (eventually).

I wind a fingering weight or sport weight yarn base into a cake.

Knit a swatch in the ROUND using a size 0 or 1 needle. This is one case in which I don’t recommend washing your swatch.

Measure the row and stitch gauge. Write it down!!!! I prefer 8-10 stitches to the…

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colorway names

I’ve come up with a lot of great yarn names over the years, but it seemed worth it to do a quick review and see if there was anything that I intentionally or unintentionally referenced that I have come to recognize as in appropriate. And sometimes I think I’m being funny when someone else might not see it this way. In one case, I was honoring a cultural phenomenon, which could be considered…

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How your wool travels

Most customers interested in make an environmentally friendly purchase ask about natural dye versus synthetic dyes. Fewer still might ask about water consumption and packaging. Even fewer ask about how the wool travels, which relates to creating a green supply chain.

I think a lot about sustainability (I actually get paid to do this somehow) and have had some great opportunities in my life to…

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Kickstarter backers

It’s almost time to send the Gotland to the mill and I’m getting ready to ship out some of the early rewards.

I want to acknowledge the following people for backing the Kickstarter project. If you do not find your name here and you think it belongs, please message me and I’ll add it right away.

Bag Level – Mary Nance Marcee Hampton Susan Claudino Ruth Gardner Heather Bassett Jamie Baker Lisa Cisco

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Rainier Tower Pattern Release

Get your size 4 needles ready, because Cory Ellen Boberg aka Indie.Knits is releasing the Rainier Tower pattern in the Three Fates Eos singles this Friday! Both yarn and patterns will be available starting Friday April 27th at the Knot Another Fiber Festival. I’m really excited about this collaboration. About a year ago, I promised myself not to bring out any more new yarns unless I found someone…

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Knot Another Fiber Festival

The Knot Another Fiber Festival is coming up (April 27-29) at the Oregon Garden and to say that I’m excited is an understatement. A special colorway for the Knot Another Fiber Festival This October, Three Fates Yarns turns 10. To celebrate, I’ve been making limited runs of variegated colorways. It started with with the Rose City Yarn Crawl. These yarns are dyed in my classic, no pooling, style…

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Upcoming Events

I am going to be selling yarn and fiber at the Rose City Yarn Crawl on March 2 at Northwest Wools in Multnomah Village. I’ll be there with Favour Valley Buttons from 10-6.

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Knitting and the Natural World

The kickstarter project is going really really well. I modified some of the rewards to allow for easier shopping for multiple rewards. In support of my own project, and of Theresa Silver’s, I wrote a couple of posts about knitting and the natural world that you might enjoy checking out. You can read my post, Knitting and a Regional Textile Economy on my kickstarter project and Yarn Inspired by…

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Kickstarter

Hi. I'm launching a kickstarter project. Come check it out!

I launched the kickstarter for the three fates yarns Valley Made Gotland yarn project this morning. Click on the link below to go to my own kickstarter project. This project is not endorsed by the Kickstarter company. I thought you would like to hear about a few of the rewards I have lined up. I’m doing my best to keep things local and real. Things like the thank you cards, the stitch markers…

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A local yarn for you

Every so often, I make a locally sourced project. There was a pencil roving that I got from Hubbard Ranch. It was already processed. There was a Corriedale Fleece I obtained from Hubbard Ranch. Snow peak fibers blended it with a little silk and it’s still pretty much in the house. I got some merino from northern California from the Mendenhall Wool Ranch in Northern California. Snow Peak Fibers…

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This year I’m doing my my absolute best not to overproduce anything. I can get pretty carried away by new ideas. For example, I have a red gradient set in my head that will include center stage, derby girls, a very cherry fluevog and some lighter shades of red. I bet you didn’t know the three were related.

I had a pile of aquae singles lying around though, so I thought I’d try out something totally old. I haven’t made variegated yarns in a few years.

I always find the process of making them repeatable rather tedious. These days I save the non-repeatable colors for fiber and for sock blanks.

When I first started dyeing yarn, I’d pour in dye solution over the top of a damp yarn – I’d kind of let it swim, strike and stir. Then I started wrapping and steaming the yarns in saran wrap, something I really don’t like very much, but put up with sometimes in dyeing fiber.

My last round of handpaints was done by pouring dye into yarn laid out in a square tub. This prevented pooling, but got pretty messy as it was hard to calculate the right amount of solution to use.

Last year sick of rusty crockpots and broken enamel, I started switching over to commercial grade food warmers.

I have repeatable colorways and I have a good idea of what base dyes are required to get the shade I want. I wanted to try deconstructing my colorways and applying dry dye in layers. But instead, I got distracted and decided to use up some dyes that aren’t part of my repeatable color sets.

If I were to do it again, I’d apply a pale base color first. Anyway, there less than 20 skeins in all and each is unique. Grab ’em while you can. I’m planning to use the one with a skein of fremont to make High Priest of Rhythmic Noise by OrangeFishJelly Dram (Sarah Raasch).

From left to right: degas, limited edition, renoir, monet.

Here’s a an up close shot of renoir.

Swatches to be posted soon. Stay tuned.

I Digress This year I'm doing my my absolute best not to overproduce anything. I can get pretty carried away by new ideas.

The blog is about 10 years old. I know this because the age of the pages is showing up while I’ve been working on them for the last few hours.

2001-2007 involved following my spouse around the country and trying to figure out what to do with myself and how to hold myself together until we settled down. I did have some great career related experiences, which has led to my current day job, but there was A LOT of down time. Enough so that in one of these rural towns we ended up in, I speculated on opening my own business in the event that we settled there. I thought a yarn shop would be nice, so I named it in three fates knitting in my head, dreamed of what I’d carry and tried to work out what new textile skills I might need to pick up. (I even spent a day or two digging around in the library trying to come up with a cool name for a shop.)

I learned how to knit over thirty years ago, but I hadn’t become obsessed until around the start of this blog. Ten years ago I was living in Colorado. I had made ONE pair of rather boring plain socks in sort of okay yarn, but they weren’t anything I wanted to wear. I had messed very unsuccessfully with Nancy Bush’s Folk Socks, when the Yarn Harlot crashed into my life.

This post of Yarn Harlot’s shows two friends holding up socks they made. I didn’t even know that they knit. The next post of hers mentions these beautiful Potmatomus socks and then knitty and the rest of the internet that involved knitting crashed into my life. Within weeks I had found Lorna’s Laces sock yarn and with new determination set about making a pair of socks. If you don’t already know from my recent instagram post, an obsession with sock yarn soon followed.

I moved to Minnesota with my spouse who had a one-year renewable teaching post at St. Olaf. I had a high-quality volunteer job and fun retail job during our last two years in Colorado Springs. (The first two I was a decently paid environmental consultant.) It was such a great volunteer job that I was rather unwilling to fling myself at just anyone. I got a holiday season yarn-shop job and took on a series of baffling temp jobs. These involved working with a marketing group, packing dog bones, stamping gift bags and scheduling education testing. For some reason, as a person with a masters degree in environmental law I was unemployable in a two-college town.

We were there about nine months, just long enough for other knitters to sink their needles in and for me to get a ravelry account. I spent the days between jobs reading knitting blogs, trying new patterns, listening to knitting pod-casts, meeting Minnesota knitters, competed in sock madness, wrote about yarn shops I visited, entered new patterns into ravelry and applied for jobs. I also lamented my inability to focus on learning more about my chosen field, or trying to pick a new one, entering an online Ph.D. program, or writing a novel. There was a lot of down time. I played computer games for several hours a day.

When we got to Oregon, I got a one year AmeriCorps position through the University of Oregon, in which I ran a Farmers’ Market, took leadership classes and conducted a Community Facilities Assessment. When my contract ended, the economy was plumetting and the job prospects invisible. Our life stable, so we thought about having a child and I opened a dye kit.

I made my first etsy sale on October 4, 2008 (see picture at the top of the post) and I was pregnant probably about two or three weeks after that. My daughter was born during the first sock summit in August of 2009. I thought I’d never hold a paid job again that didn’t involve a cash register or a clipboard. I spent two and half years trying to be the absolute best stay at home parent/small business owner I could.

Given that I wasn’t offered a half-time job until December of 2011, I think I made a good call. I had a tough time even applying for it because I thought it might kill my business. I was wrong. I even work there a little more now.

I like my life this way. I cook for our family, snuggling my daughter for a few minutes in the evening between dinner and bedtime. I wind yarn and grade papers or pay bills. I lug around equipment and talk about knitting all day. I dig through the recycling, pulling out trash. I set up meetings and try to work out how to put in new bicycle racks. I go to the dentist and get my hair cut. I order take out. I calculate the kilowatt-hours needed to run a college in a year. I meet students to plant trees and herbs. I plan faculty workshops. I take pictures for Instagram. I attend music concerts and swim lessons. I contemplate the best way to teach climate change. I shop for clothes and toys. I plan community events with environmentally minded friends and colleagues. We go to the farmers’ market, garden, meet with friends and play board games. We go hiking and try snowboarding and skiing. Visitors come by. We attend weddings and funerals. I balance the checkbook and plan for the future. I try to figure out how I can lessen the environmental impact of the textile industry – a subject for another time.

Some days, I paint. All of the noise disappears as do the nagging self-doubts and concerns about the future and disappointments about the past. I stop thinking about the taxes and nutrition and all of the ifs, ands, buts and maybes vanish. Even the sadness I feel about the plight of lemurs, the loss of the black rhinoceros, concern for coral reefs and oregon seastars and quiet down for a time.

The only thing in front of me is color, one after another, after another.

Here is the thing. If you lose a sense of awe and of beauty in the world, you will diminish your ability to love and care for the world around you.

Thank you.

ten years of blogging The blog is about 10 years old. I know this because the age of the pages is showing up while I've been working on them for the last few hours.

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