A theme

Over the last few days, I've been noticing a bit of a color theme in my surroundings...

There is purple and green absolutely everywhere! Various types of lavender in various stages of blooming, clematis erupting in my back garden, extraordinarily tall stalks with bundles of periwinkle blooms at the top. It's very striking and also maybe a bit creepy...is everything purple these days?

Thankfully no. There's pink and yellow and orange and brown and blue and turquoise as well. These photos are for next week's update (Wednesday 27th June at noon, BST).

This is going to be the last update until mid- or late August: we're moving house in the second half of July, so all the fibery bits and pieces will be unavailable for a bit. But the good news is that the new house has bigger dye space (hooray!), so I'll be back to throwing color on wool before you know it.

Happy spinning!
Rachel

Update now live!

Head on over to the shop for some gorgeous new stuff! Fibers include BFL, Corriedale, Dorset Horn, Falkland and Wensleydale. Happy spinning!

Sunny weather = dyeing mania!

What happens when it finally stops raining in London and the sun comes out? Massive piles of enthusiastic dyeing. In the past three days, I've dyed four colorways, and am gearing up for a shop update early next week. I'm aiming for Sunday late afternoon, giving everyone overseas a shot at the lower shipping rate for the new colorways, but it remains to be seen how the photo gods smile on me. Or don't, as the case may be...

The update will include six colorways (two of which are combined together in a mini-colorwork package), and five fibers: BFL, Falkland, Corriedale, Wensleydale and Dorset Horn. Inspirations include George R. R. Martin (again!), Monet, local British fauna, satellite photos of the Mississippi delta and the usual biological dyes. So check back on Sunday for new fibery goodies!

Spun up colourways: Coomasssie Blue

In the comments on my last post that showed one of the colorways spun up, Gigi commented that she has a hard time visualizing how colors will blend, both in the yarn and in the final finished object. So for today, I've got another example of how one of my colorways spins up (with a bonus shot of an FO!) - this time it's one of the semisolid series, Coomassie Blue.

Coomassie Blue on Targhee

Blue is absolutely my favorite color, and I love this combination of tones and shades - light blue, some spots of navy, a dash of turquoise every so often - so I was really looking forward to spinning this up. Targhee is a really sproingy, bouncy fiber, so I spun this up as a 2-ply to use for a scarf for a friend. 

Here's the 2-py finished yarn. Doesn't look like much, does it? The dark and light bits of the dyed top look like they've mostly mixed themselves all up together. Not terribly promising...but take a look at how the yarn looks in the finished scarf.

I used the 2-ply as the warp in this scarf that I wove on a rigid heddle loom. You can see how the yarn that looked like it would work up as a mostly solid fabric has really beautiful, subtle stripes across the width of the scarf.

Here's a close up of the scarf where you can really see the stripes fading in to one another. This is one of my favorite characteristics of semisolid colorways - from a distance this will read as solid blue, but come close and you can start to distinguish the different shadings of color.

I hope everyone has a great weekend, and happy spinning!

Rachel

Shipping changes

As of today, Royal Mail postage went up quite a bit for packages. How does this affect you? In one of two ways:

1. for UK residents, nothing will change (for the moment). I will continue to have free shipping to UK addresses for as long as possible - I'd like to be able to promise it forever (or at least as long as I'm in the UK), but that's not feasible. If anything changes, and I have to start charging UK shipping, I will let you know in advance.
2. for International customers: the postage price (to me) for shipping one bump of fiber has gone up to £3.86/£3.90 for Europe/Rest of World. I'm sorry, but that's not an increase that I can cover, so international shipping charges will increase to £3.90 for non-UK shipments. However, there is some good news.

The good news is that the increased shipping price will not go in to effect until 1 June 2012. That gives you one entire month to buy all you want at the old shipping price (£2.50) - my loss is your gain.

Enjoy!