Winding with BadAmy

Wanna have some fun?  Spend quality time with BadAmy in her fiber arts studio!

I've been winding yarn for her.  Miles and miles and miles of it.  This year she was coaxed/decided to do a stripe-y sock club.  The gist of it is that folks sign up and send in money for three skeins of yarn that are delivered over a 6 month period.  So 75 folks sent her some serious scratch for sock yarn which they then have to knit into socks!  Go figure.

As the Assistant Second Team Winding Lackey, I actually help unwind the yarn.  It comes in undyed hanks that are in loops about 40 inches in diameter.  We have to get them into loops that are nearly 30 feet in diameter. Lemme tell ya, this ain't no easy trick.  So you need a swift, a warping board, and books on tape to get you though.





This gizmo is an umbrella swift.  This is not how you want your yarn to look.  Oops. 





This is a warping board.  You determine how long you want your loops to be, then find a pattern of pegs that will do that for you. And you wind and wind and wind and wind.  I can do a skein in about 20 minutes, if the knot gremlins stay away.  Yeah, that will work.


 From the warping board the loops go to the tried and true back of the chairs for tying for dying, and washing and soaking.

Then the magic happens!  BadAmy dyes the yarn.  As with her ceramic glazes, the exact colors and combos are a tightly held company secret.  I have utterly no idea how she does this.  I do know that she must think in color.  I can look at a blue and a green and say, "Wow, nice blue and green."  She looks at the same colors and says, "This one has yellow tones, and this one has magenta tones, but if I change this to that....." and voila!  An incredible new colorway.  Awesome to watch her work.

To make self-striping yarn, you have to calculate 1) how big an average sock is and 2) how big you want the stripes to be.  Then you have to figure how much yarn gets color A and how much gets color B and so on.   Amy makes special colorway maps to keep track of her designs.


 See how the this yarn, called Kopoho Stripe is black on one end and varigated on the other?  When you knit it up, it makes stripes!  I'm surprised every time it happens!!  Isn't that just freakin' amazing?  This pattern is an exclusive color for BadAmy's current sock club.

These socks were knit by club and Ravelry member Shannonstitches.  Thanks!

After applying the dye, the yarn gets cooked, which can be done in several ways, but I'm not going to divulge BadAmy's secret to super-lustrous color.  Then the yarn air drys, which is where our basement with the radiant in-floor heat comes in perfectly.  Then it has to be wound ::again::, this time back into the 40 inch loops. BadAmy then packages it and ships it out. 

Amy has several other colorways--there are a bunch of Harry Potter things~~something about House colors, but since BadAmy says I'm a Muggle, I don't get it.  There's a Caf-pow, Dr. Seuss, a Halloween Kit series, and much more, but to check all of those out, go to BadAmyKnits on Etsy and find the sold products.

So I hear she needs some Nyphadora or Sytherien or something, so I'd better get back to the winding.

Birding the Blues .. and the Crafty Greens

You can probably tell that my interests are all over the map. Oh well. I have a blogging Ranger Peep who has about 400 blogs, so he can separate all his interests. Too much work. Anywho, here's today's mixed up offering:

Got Yarn? My darling daughter, BadAmy is at it again. This time is green and sparkly. She has this posted on her Etsy store (there's plenty of it, not to worry~~just an Etsy quirk there) and I think it will be available at the Black Swamp Fiber Arts Fair in Bowling Green, March 26. I love that she's found this great niche in life.

Next up: The Bluebird Winds have arrived!

One of the best ornithologists in the country, the late Mr. Lou Campbell, used to tell us to look for the first bluebirds of spring during the first southwestern winds after Valentine's Day. Well, looky here. Those warm, moist southwesterly winds have brought incredibly high temps to our area--a real teaser, since it's only mid-February and we know winter will hammer us again. And more bluebirds, too. But more interestingly, there are hundreds of bluebirds overwintering in our area these days. In past Audubon Society Christmas Bird Counts, we'd have a couple. This year we had literally hundreds, and often in flocks of 15 to 20.

I suck at bird photography (I blames it on lack of great equipment, as opposed to lack of great skill), but I do have one good bluebird pic. Ha! Tricked you! This is BirdGirl Sherrie's pic: Ha! Tricked you again. This is the now famous Western Bluebird that put in an appearance two years ago.

And this is Pat, a local birder who had the chutzpah to say out loud, "I think I saw a Western Bluebird at the Oaks." That whole episode was a blast.

Okay, where was I? Oh, yeah, the Bluebird winds of February. Next up on the bird watch list is Buzzards. I love buzzards. Did I ever mention that we call our place Buzzard Crest? Not to be confused with Falcon Crest? True, dat. And around the same time as the buzzards, the woodcocks will be back. More about them and my hero, Aldo Leopold, in a couple of weeks.

And I shouldn't have mentioned anything yesterday about us all being healthy. I'm not sick yet, but the 'tells' say I soon will be. Now where did I put that vitamin C?