Finding Inspiration

As the days get shorter and the opportunity for color fade into the brown of winter, I find it harder to become inspired. My TN mountains become brown, the flowers are long gone and my local farmer's market closes up. While I'm bursting with colors, ideas during spring and summer, come October, I start to worry about drying up with the leaves.

Day 5

There seems to be something about October that makes me want to pick up my camera. It's surely the trees and leaves and wonderfullness of fall, but I think it's also the threat of winter. More than any other time of year, I need to be diligent in searching out inspiration in the winter.

Day 16

To combat this ennui, I give myself little challenges. In October, I challenged myself (and some Twitter friends joined me)- take a photo every day. Looking for the right shot and trying to capture it compels me to find the beauty and celebrate it.

Day 15

Now that the leaves are coming off the trees and it's almost dark by the time I get home from work, I'm finding it harder to find the shot. This forces me to look inward - to my cozy home, my cute pet and even my office.

Day 20

How do you find inspiration during the ever-shortening-days? Any colorful movies or shows the light the fire?

Autumnal To Do

Photo from Nov 2006

Each season, I like to set an intention for how I will enjoy it. It's a pleasant To Do list celebrating the crunchy leaves and crisp apples. This year, I want to:

• Bake an apple pie
• Finish knitting a sweater (probably Twist & Shout) by the end of November
• Find my favorite flavor of tea (this group has been helpful)
• Spin fall-inspired yarns (my favorite suggestion to the contest, so far, is "Hayride")
• Make the perfect cup of hot chocolate (cocoa, honey, homemade whipped cream)
• Eat lots of roasted fall vegetable (turnips, butternut squash, onions, garlic, sweet potatoes, yum!)
• Go on one last picnic, before the weather is too cold.
  
• Finish dyeing, carding and spinning my Coopworth fleece
• Take a photograph every day until the end of the year

What's on your Autumn To Do List?

Autumnal Inspiration

Happy Autumn!

To celebrate the first day of this lovely season, I threw open the window to my office and opened up the Fall Color Report by Pantone. This report is designed for fashion and home designers, but everyone in any industry that sells color uses it (or other trend-forcasting tools), so you'll see these colors in clothes, furniture, even new yarn lines!
You don't have to be a designer to enjoy perusing it. I find it fascinating to read the profiles of designers in the report. It's also interesting to be aware of the "in" colors, because once concious, it seems I see them everywhere! The new knitting magazine, Knotions, has an article about applying the Color Report to your choice of yarns and knitting projects.
In the past, I've given it a quick once over and moved on, but this season I've decided to challenge myself (ya'll know I love a challenge). This fall I'd like to create a line of yarns, inspired by the colors of the season. This is a little different than I normally work, dying fiber as inspired and naming it after the inspiration, so I'm going to need some help putting the colors together and then naming the yarns.

*CONTEST INFO*

After looking through the color report, what's the first color combo you think I should try? What should I title it? Include BOTH color combo AND title in the comments below and you could win a little contest!
Every commenter whose suggestion turns into a finished yarn (in the next 3 months) will get 10% off their next purchase of any eco-friendly yarn in the shop!

The Life of Yarn - on the tree

Hanging freshly dyed wool out to dry, I was struck by the ridiculousness of the sight: huge swaths of brightly colored fiber, adorning a unassuming tree.

From the parking lot, my tree seems harmless, the dogwood of any normal resident:On closer inspection, it becomes obvious these residents are a bit more colorful.

And by the time you get to my door, it becomes clear that this is a house of those possessed;

possessed by a need to drape everything in color, to soak up the bright summer, to imbue the yarn-world with sunny goodness.

This weekend I dyed pounds of wool, all in bright, happy colors, mostly in semi-solids, as seen above. While I stood outside, hanging dripping wool, I thought about the path these fibers take on their way to becoming yarn. I have, through this blog, tried to delineate this path. I shared the path from inspiration to finished yarn, and I've shared moments from visits to the original source - sheep and alpacas. But I still find that an incomplete picture of the real process.
Most knitters and crocheters know that yarn starts on an animal's back and through some magic alchemy becomes the yarn they hold in their hands. This path can take so many forms that it in sharing one path, I am necessarily omitting the other possible paths. Obviously commercial yarn - sold from farmer to wool pool, processed (usually with chemicals), cleaned, combed, dyed and spun by huge machines - has path so different from handspun yarn that they are barely the same product.
Even the yarns I create take different paths - some from mill-ends, some from local farms, some recycled from Nepalese women's co-ops! I either handdye it in many shades, making the color decisions at the dye pot, or I kettle dye it in bright solids and decide on the color combinations at the wheel. The fiber above will be the latter - many times throughout the next few weeks I'll grab a handful of various colors and combine them in new and inspiring ways.
The time in the sun is just a moment in the fibers life, next stop: the wheel!

Farmer's Market 7.12.08

Taken by little brother T, at the Johnson City Farmer's Market...purple bell peppers?

It reminded me of this yarn:Irises

So now I need it to inspire a new yarn!

Farmer's Market 7.5.08

Cherokee Tomatoes - also known as black or purple tomatoes, fully ripe their skin becomes a blackish purple. (I bought two - very mild in taste, not tomatoe-y)

Farmer's Market Project #4

Inspired by these peaches, the seasons' first, I handdyed some local fiber 3 shades of peach.



The three shades in this 2 ply yarn create a self-striping yarn that starts with darker peach at one end and moves towards the lightest, peachiest color at the other end of the skein. Knitted (or crocheted), this skein will create one long color repeat that moves from darkest to lightest along the length of the project.

I was/am very tempted to keep this yarn for myself and knit a scarf out of it! It took all my moral fortitude to stick with the Project and list the yarn in the shop!

PS. This is a super busy week with out-of-town family (and pets) staying in my guest room/studio/office and dyeing lessons in my kitchen and knitting night at Jill's. I might not be around too much!

Farmer's Market - 6.28.08

Fresh peaches, Johnson City Farmer's Market

Farmer's Market Project #2

I had to skip the Farmer's Market last week, since I was IN my best friend's wedding, but the week before that I actually went to 2 local farmer's markets. The new Jonesborough market is still small, but all of the produce (of which there was very little by 10:30 am) was local. My favorite local chocolatier was there (Earth and Sky Creations)- and we bought a chocolate for each of us. On the car ride home they both got melty and so we were at a rush when we stopped by the JC market. So rushed, in fact, that I left my camera in the car and it wasn't until the last minute that I grabbed it and shot the brightest thing I found:

While I was out of town for the wedding, I thought about these flowers, so bright amongst the green leaves. I decide to finally break out the banana fiber I've been too nervous to spin and I dyed it a few shades of green. I found some brilliant impatient-orange recycled silk that are the perfect shade of orange. The banana fiber and recycled silk are recycled in the same way: a Nepalese woman's co-op collects the scraps from sari weaving; apparently banana fiber is a very common fiber in India! While the silk is smooth, with all the fibers parallel, the banana fiber is very crimpy and clustered up, tied together is some places. Making it spinable is a time-consuming task and involves "fluffing" it, pulling apart the fibers, cutting or untying the knots, getting it as parallel as possible (I tried handcarding to no avail!). Because the banana fiber is so uneven and I wanted to ensure a sturdy yarn, I chose to use a commercially spun 100% hemp yarn as the base and spun the banana and silk around the hemp yarn (like corespinning).Impatient Orange - available in the shop

The resulting yarn is fluffy and soft and scrappy, while extremely sturdy and strong.

and funky!

PS. The chocolate got melty, but we popped it in the fridge when we got home (just a few minutes) and it ended up tasting SO amazing - PB for Jay, Chili Powder for me.

Farmer's Market - 6.14.08

Bright orange impatients, cheering me up after my chocolates melted!

*I'll be out of town this weekend, so I'm skipping next Saturday & this week's project will be completed next week.

Farmer's Market Project #2

Last week, at the Johnson City Farmer's Market, I was struggling to find some yarn-worthy inspiration. We had slept late and most of the fresh veggies were gone. While the goat cheese was delicious, I didn't think white slabs of creamy goodness were going to translate into an interesting yarn. Just as we were leaving, I caught site of these white stalks, which reminded me of Soy fiber (I don't know why; everything reminds me of some fiber!)

I was thinking of that pale green when I dyed the fiber and those spiky stalks on the round one (what is that?) inspired the way I spun it.

I'm not entirely happy with how the color came out, I was going for something a bit more green, but this ended up in the blue-green range. A little of the natural cream of the soy fiber still shows through, like the barely green of the stalks.
This yarn was definitely a lesson in dyeing soy and in trying to match the inspiration photo!

Farmer's Market Project #1

Last week,while strolling through the very lively Abingdon Farmer's Market, I slyly snapped this photo of a pepper plants and begonias, while my husband bought some peppers.



Throughout the week, I thought about the photo and what aspects I wanted to caputure in the yarn. I was most struck by the variety of greens and the interplay between the shot of red with the rest of the photo. It took me a few days, but on Thursday I pulled out some gray streaked mill-ends wool and a local wool/alpaca/mohair blend from Hobby Knob Farm. I put both fibers into a dyepot with a medium green. As the temperature rose, I sprinkled in a few more greens (dye will "strike" the fiber quicker when it's already heated, so you can get patches of distinct colors while kettle dyeing).


The resulting fiber was dried outside in the sunshine and spun into a bulky single, shot through with begonia red recycled silk. The scrappy silk offers both a contrast of color and texture, the same contrast provided by the begonia in the picture.

I would love some company for the Farmer's Market Project! Read this to learn more and then leave a comment if you'd like to join me. I welcome anyone who does any craft; I'll make a blogroll of those involved, so make sure you leave your blog address!

Farmer's Market Project - 6.7.08

Romaine Lettuce, taken at the Johnson City Farmer's Market

The Farmer's Market Project is a self-challenge: each week I'll take one picture at the Farmer's Market and will post it here. During the next week I'll dye and/or spin a yarn inspired by that picture and will list the yarn the very next weekend.

Tomorrow I'll be posting the yarn inspired by last week's photo.

New Project - Farmer's Market

Every Saturday, if the sun is shining, my husband and I (and sometimes the pup) visit a Farmer's Market. We get most of our vegetables, bread and eggs from the local farmers. I also recieve something a little less tangible - inspiration, a sense of community and deep gratitude for this excellent resource. In the past, I've created yarns inspired by nature, but I wanted to work on something a bit more immediate, more grounded in the present.
Thus, my Farmer's Market Project: each week I'll take one picture at the Farmer's Market and will post it. During the next week I'll dye and/or spin a yarn inspired by that picture and will list the yarn the very next weekend. This will force me to execute my plan quickly and spontaneously and I hope to photograph the yarn in it's "natural habitat", at the next week's market!

This week's picture was taken at the Abingdon Farmer's Market; a tray of pepper plants and begonias.

Inspiration Monday #10: Quilty Goodness

As I've been spending most of my weekends with quilt in hand, making tiny, tiny handquilting stitches, I'm a little woozy with the quilting bug. Here's a bit of the inspiration that led me down this rabbit hole:

• I've seen a lot of quilts made from blue jeans (in fact Crafting a Green World just posted about them), but this is my very favorite.
• Amanda makes excellent use of some old sheets.
• Jane is the reason I believed I could handquilt my very first quilt, and this post is the reason I wanted to.
• Alicia's quilt is really the first that struck me as something I both wanted to make and wanted to own.
• The insight into Lisa's quiltmaking (art making!) is remarkable.
• Malka's post on quiltiness convinced me (before I even started) to make this quilt as "quilty" as possible.

I'm 7 out of 12 blocks, and then I'll do a few rows around the border, and then it's time for the bias tape (which I hear is pretty fun).

Inspiration Monday- Inspiration in a box

I admit it: I love TV. Not all of it, but the shows I watch...well, I can be a bit obsessive about them.
Obsessive enough that I memorialize my love in the form of yarn.
One of my favorite shows is LOST. I like the intrigue, the mysteries and the way a viewer is rewarded for paying attention. I also love the scenery. The lush greens and sinister black were the inspiration for my LOST yarn:
I started with jungle green and ocean blue local wool and swirled organic, undyed cotton, local naturally brown alpaca and a shot of mill-ends black wool. The black (like the Black Cloud on the island), shows up very little, but when it does it surrounds the other color in an immediate hive of noir. In other words, I let it wrap around the other ply, making scary little clouds of black! Despite my best efforts of making a sinister yarn, LOST is squishy and soft!

Another in the vein of dark and mysterious is Battlestar Gallactica:
Jay and I started watching it this winter, on DVD. We then anxiously awaited the release of Season 3 on DVD, and the return of it this March and it might just be the most exciting thing we do on Friday nights (yes, we are geeks - if you're not a fan of the show, you might just want to skip to the pretty pictures)! I had been mulling over the BSG yarn for quite a while before I started it, trying to figure out the overall "color" of the show. Jay really gave me the idea, when we started talking about the overall "gray" tone of the show. The overarching theme of life on the Battlestar, is that life has a lot of gray areas: not all Cylons are bad, not all humans are good, even the good/bad people act out of character, sometimes the "right" thing involves leaving others behind, letting them die or letting the guilty go free. This 'gray area' that permeates the daily life on the Battlestar is symbolized with natural gray alpaca (from the small farm, North Star Alpacas). The stark white bamboo represents the Cylon's coldness and the organic, naturally white Merino wool symbolizes Six's unwavering religious fervor. Her striking red dress makes a small appearance in the form of a blood red recycled silk. The black of the ship and the vastness of space is represented by pitch black mill-end wool.

For lighter fair, I'm a fan of The Office, Friends, I love Lucy, The Cosby Show, Spongebob, Saved by the Bell; all of which inspired yarns for my Month Of Love Series:

Jim & Pam


Dwight & Angela

Carrie & Big

Ross & Rachel

Lucy & Ricky

I'd love to do some more... are there any TV shows you think should be memorialized in yarny glory?

Inspiration Monday #10: Alpacas

This week, all my thoughts and daydreams have centered on one thing: Alpacas.
I spent Saturday morning at a Shearing Day, at Silver Thunder Farm. It was fun and amazing and educational and so so memorable and encouraging.
The way the farmers handled their (and their neighbor's) alpacas.
The way the shearers were efficient and kind.
The way the alpacas bleated through the whole ordeal - only to jump up, shake it off and prance around with their friends.

More than anything, it cemented some dreams as I realized: I can do this.

Spinning Nature into Yarn

I realized recently that I post a lot about the things that inspire me (every Monday, in fact), but I rarely describe what happens with that inspiration. So I'm making a concerted effort to change that and to show a little more of the process behind the yarn (the myth behind the man woman).

Natural Inspiration
Lately, surrounded by blooming things, I've been inspired by nature. I think I've particularly attuned to it since this month's Project Spectrum Element is Earth and that the earth is really providing a beautiful palette. The first step in being inspired is to capture the inspiration. To this end, I carry my camera obsessively and take pictures whenever I see anything.

These daffodils were in a no-man's-land near my apartment, so I picked as much as my vases could hold (while still leaving enough outside to inspire others!)

I particularly love their ruffly edge.

This tree is right at my back door and I love to watch (and document) the change from tiny green bud to barely open flower, to full fledge cloud of flowers:

Translating Inspiration:
The trickiest part in translating inspiration to fiber is getting the color just right. My dyeing process is extremely serendipitous, so it's a happy surprise when I get the colors just right:

Once the fibers are dyed, I have to decide how I want them to appear in the finished yarn. For Dogwood Blossoms, I wanted to highlight the three separate colors to symbolize the stages of a dogwood blossoms life, so I spun it long repeats (each 5-15 yards long)

Winding the yarn off the bobbin and into a skein is probably my favorite part, as it's the first time I feel the yarn and see the colors play against each other in the skein

After the yarn is spun, there's still the issue of "styling" and photographing, which I think is vital to conveying my original intent.

I love to read about how others work with their inspiration and how it impacts their work, whether it's in fiber or another media! Let me know what inspires you and how it shows itself in your work, in the comments!

Inspiration Monday #9: Surface Design

I fell into a craft vortex today. I'm suddenly obsessed with surface design, specifically stenciling and stamping. It happened innocently enough:

• Hanna's post on stenciling,
• led me to Michelle's Green Paper Press Street Team and her Cut it Out Crusade.
• Which referenced Michelle's tutorial for designing a stamp.
• I then found this great little tutorial on stamping. Before I knew it, I had the stamping kit, from Dharma Trading Company, in my cart and ready to go
  

I've managed to resist this far, but I'm dreaming of carving my own stamp for my business cards and notepads....
As soon as I figure out which color ink to order...

Inspiration Monday #8: Creativity

I just started reading Twyla Tharp's The Creative Habit last night and stayed up much later than I should have, enthralled by the concept of a creative habit and preparation for creativity. More on this as I get through the book and have some time to process it all.
Creativity keeps popping up:

• CopyBlogger took a survey of what creativity is
• A Creative Journal: just discovered this site dedicated to journaling, just in time for my new journal!

I'm also thinking a lot about knitting with my own handspun. I can't seem to get up the courage to dye and spin the 24 oz of Merino I received as a gift over 2 years ago! I've yet to settle on a project that would meet my demands that 1. It be a project that I can see/use a LOT, not just during the (short) winter months and not so bright and "homemade" that I just wear it around the house. Nothing sloppy 2. It be doable and finishable - no intricate lace shawl with cobweb weight 3-ply! I've been perusing the following links, in hope of inspiration:

• Jane, a newish spinner, well, her bravery is just amazing me!
• Here's an article on the subject of knitting with handspun
• And of course, Knittyspin!
  

After seeing see this sweater, it all clicked: I need to knit a comfy, wear-everywhere hoodie out of my handspun! Nothing too bright, just muted, slightly stripey handdyed, handspun hoodie!