love, late

our household for the past week and two days has been hit simultaneously by an adult incidence of illness, with requisite puny days and schoolfree week. bless those year round schools. a week's a nice long time, and we could have done so much more. in my ideal freelance future, i can visualize a three day field trip (and i mean really, like a field with a trail and some trees in it or a field with some sheep in it) but reality intruded, unpleasantly, but was treated to many cups of hot tea.

therefore with these protestations, i must submit my second shared love installment a little late but with no less love. i don't give myself a break on anything else- i was still working (on things that will be felted and thus washed in really hot water) and cooking, etc, so i cheesed out on uptalking another something cool. but here it is.

song for today: yael naim's "new soul" - really too cute.
which fits in nicely with this week's very cute new friend: gossamer, of portland
i cast the net wide on a day when i felt a little puny and the smallest person in the house needed some out time. we managed to catch a beautiful sunny day in the 50s. i made a list from google maps of several yarn/fiber places i'd yet to visit; needing fiber, a needlefelting pad and a good shove towards just getting started on that already.

gossamer was our first stop, and i'm so glad it was. the window beckoned with fairies and skeins of lamb's pride in shades of green (and i'm a sucker for lamb's pride/lanaloft. confronted with a rainbow of them, i'm apt to grab a skein or two of some unlikely shade partly because it's just so darn useful. even more so now, but i'm getting ahead of myself) and once inside we were greeted with natural/ambient light and the warm sweet scent of beeswax. jewelry afore us, lamb's pride to my left, felting supplies aplenty, not to mention work on the walls and lots of books. and a cheery, chatty, knowledgeable proprietress busy at some work on a central table. cozy, without feeling small and homey without being run-down. all questions were answered amiably as i fumbled through wool fibers of several colors and flipped through sheets of all-wool felt, in fabulous shades. (and made in europe to their stringent children's safety standards!!)
sweater scraps, organized by color, and the lamb's pride too. i adore places that organize by color, my thriftshop trained eye is pleased and enjoys browsing that way. the (local) beeswax was the source of the gorgeous scent and many bars stood proudly on the shelves.
i also got to touch a piece of nuno felt/scarf and touching it immediately made thirty or forty new ideas scan across my brain.
needless to say, this was an enjoyable shop that will no doubt become one of my favorites. i like the neighborhood (e burnside) but don't make it that way very often. as i'll be out and about more due to upcoming employment, i will certainly make a stop to visit. and i see on the gossamer website that there is an open crafting time, which if i ever have a tuesday evening to myself, i would like to visit.
gossamer
also has an etsy outpost, on which she sells her beautiful and colorful dutch merino felt. i love how she's got the color groups assembled, and i do believe that she's one of those darling shop owners that would put together a custom set for a buyer.
however, should one make it to portland, her shop is worth the visit- it's part craft/education supply shop, part boutique, part gallery. beautiful felted paintings line the walls- the shading is incredible.

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and of course my visit finally precipitated a felting flood, which is kind of closing in on the finish to my mad de-stash. i didn't realize de-stashing takes so long, but it's okay. the new stash does call, but this needlefelting thing is so awesome that it's a huge distraction. at this point, i'd rather felt, but there's no more felting to do. only buttons. which don't thrill me, but i have to be very serious about as it's such an important part of the piece. i have some new pouches and purses which will appear in my etsy shop as a trickle over the next several days (after buttons and photos, that is).

re-stash

i have been destashing for a while now; i'd stockpiled yarn for a little while, squirreling it away and have gradually worked through it over the course of the last couple of weeks. well, we were interrupted by the noro niji for a minute or 20 but i have otherwise not gotten new yarn recently.
until today.
in a huge leap of getting out and actually driving, i visited yarn garden. (i was going to put a link in there but the blogger and i are not getting along at the moment. it wants to continue the link, indefinitely and i'm not fighting with it at the moment. www.yarngarden.net. there.)
and i was hemming and hawing on several things, trying to decide if i really want to work with little bitty thin yarn right now. i think soon, but not just yet. i blanked everything else out and just followed my color eyes and found an intense red pink purple. it's called orchid, but it makes me think of retina-searing azaleas down in texas. i have some gorgeous roving that i got in alaska over the holidays, in a teal (color i'm loving right now) and a nice orange/brown that has some little azalea pink flecks in it and the teal too. it may sound funky but when i just wrote that, i saw the idea i'm going for and it will not be easy for me to put that one up for sale, if indeed i do.


and then other errands intervened, and finding myself on the northeast (kind of) side of town, i went to (see it's doing it again and i am annoyed and unable to fix it) grr.
so i went to close knit. i haven't been there as many times as i've been to yarn garden, as yg is walking distance from where i live.
and lo and behold, they had their big worktable in the back, covered in yarn. all 40% off. their destash = my restash. it's a great shop, though a little more compact than yg and they have a lot of wool. i talked myself out of a couple of things, namely this hotpink wool silk blend with little light pink slubs(?) in it. it felt incredible and was nice, and on sale. but reason prevailed. i don't think it'd be useful until next winter and it was awful loud to keep around until then.
i touched some cashcotton that i liked a lot, but it seemed to have a lot of acrylic in it. that actually happened with several yarns- they looked great and felt wonderful, but were over 10% or so synthetic. and i've fixed this as kind of being a guidepost, for some reason. and there's so much lovely looking and fanciful yarn out there, but most of the animals that make the yarn i use, well, their poop is pretty good for the soil. not so much, chemical plants.
and i know cotton's pretty intensively fertilized and herbicided- i'm trying to get more and more organic as i go.

today was pretty much the first time that ever felt like a sacrifice, like i wasn't working with something that aesthetically, shallowly, i'd like to work with. some of the louisa hardings, oh my goodness, there was a two-dollar bin with this awesome sequined yarn, but it was polyester. but TWO DOLLARS?!? unheard of for this stuff. but i was unable to give in, and left with some cotton/silk, some wool/mohair, a stray almost lilac superwash fuzzy merino (for a baby something, i think) and some gorgeous golden buff color bamboo.
okay. nevermind, seeing it written like that, i realize, it was no sacrifice at all.

commentary on these yarns upcoming, to be sure.

*on an unrelated side note, a person for whom i write has requested a head-shot type picture of me. turns out, i don't have one of those. i use my camera a million kittens a week and have a billion pictures of myself, but they're all uninhibited or very posed myspace type pictures. there's probably a whole generation of us, with this easy advent of digital cameras. cameras have generally always encouraged the shy to retreat and the hams among us to be ridiculous (think bunny ears, tongue sticking out, wacky off center poses) but i would think that the digital photo era, combined with the internet has really layered the ridiculous onto the sublime.

whew...that week's over

and last week sure did feel like a busy one.
i did two events last week, and wanted to make sure i had plenty of lovelies available. i'm glad i got all that work done, it was a nice boost to my inventory, but it was a week of late night coffee brewings and plenty of new pattern devisement.
i got to work with some new yarn (that addictive noro niji!) and use up some old- i'm now officially out of crayon green wool. i can think of no other word to appropriately describe the color; if one were to pull the color marked "green" out of a crayon box, this is that color. the new bangles turned out beautifully (of course i'm biased) and i love the spring scarves i made. now just to find them all homes.
i was joking with someone at hip happening on saturday about how it's like having kittens or any other sweet and fuzzy thing that needs a home. it's less like selling than it is having a part of yourself go out into the world. i'm not able to separate myself at this point, i still hope that the things that i make will be used, enjoyed, appreciated. of course i also want them to be useful, enjoyable and durable- thus the ridiculous insistence upon details.
so yes,
there was art walk hillsboro and hip happening here in town.
i think the first event is more popular when it's just a little warmer, which is a bit of a cruel paradox for me. last year, i discovered how hard it is to sell scarves in the summer, in southern california. it just wasn't happening. so i improvised. this year will be the same; i'm really excited about some of the ideas that i'm incubating at the moment (coming attractions!). i had a great time hanging out at styledbaby, and i'm going to be sharing more about that shop soon. voodoo child found a home (after probably being my most-hearted item over at etsy) and i was glad to see it go. the woman who bought it was wearing a coat that had the same exact red- it just fit with her. i think also that she and her husband found it funny that i had a series of classic rock scarves. who doesn't like a theme?
hip happening was this weekend- and i think many of us primarily made sales to other vendors. i would have liked to have been in the upstairs area (the show was in a historic masonic lodge, so the upstairs/main floor had this amazing old theater/stage thing going on, with flats from a play currently in rehearsals onstage) as the atmosphere up there was awesome. beautiful hazy natural light pouring in big old windows. however, those of us in the basement bonded and i met some really cool people. (who i'll also be sharing later.)
but, well, what? the economy? it was slow.
but that wasn't the part that wore me out.
i need do develop some duck's back feathers and protective oily coating so the multitude of offhand comments doesn't start accumulating. shows are great because they allow you to have face to face time with the people who look at your work, and they allow you as a shopper to interface with the person who made the things you're looking at.
but, may i say, there's a lot of comments made. and it's not that they're all negative, not by any stretch. some are constructive, some are interesting. but there's a lot of them.
some of the behavior i see at shows simply wouldn't be allowed in a more formal store. and that's okay, in some cases, but i quite seriously saw a person looking up a booth's skirt- lifting the table cloth up to inspect the table underneath. which was not for sale.
other behaviors just add up. there is the classic gap girl frustration with those who re-merchandise the merchandise- leaving it as thrashed as any teen girl's bedroom. or dorm room. which is okay, i like to arrange and re-arrange, i feel like it keeps the table from looking stale. but it's those who do it after i've seen them eating from their hands. or those who put their super-tall starbux down on my table in the middle of my work, and then start digging. the coffee on the table did annoy me, perhaps if this continues, i'll get a tv dinner tray and request that drinks be placed there, instead.
and there are a lot of picky little comments- "this yarn, but a hat" (well, that yarn doesn't have much in the way of what we call memory, so it would make a pretty unsatisfactory hat, trust me i've made that mistake before), "this yarn, but that color" (i like it too, but that yarn doesn't come in that color), "this stuff is expensive" (i'm sorry but i don't like to use petroleum yarn and the costs for that stuff are subsidized by the future generations, symbolized by the cute kids you've got with you), and so on and so on. i don't answer back to everything, but my argumentative brain thinks the responses, and so i get a little tired.
i think with the closer interface, people feel more defensive about not purchasing. they feel the need to make justifications, and i can see that. there's a ton of verbal tipping, too, those that aren't going to make purchases but give compliments. i got a couple of "keep it up" encouragements from women i'd just had good conversations about yarn with, and that felt nice. i also didn't realize that i've absorbed all of this knowledge about yarn, which i suppose is cool. there's a lot more to learn though.

i've set a limit on what i'll spend on a table though. i read somewhere once, that it's good to keep in mind how much the rental fees are and how many sales it would take of different kinds to make it back. i've learned this weekend to estimate on the low side; perhaps i'll think of it the way i think of gambling- don't pay a table fee that you can't afford to lose, whether it's six bucks or sixty or six hundred.

lessons, all. and the time can't be considered wasted if i apply what i learned.