I did a thing…

A little while back Cordelia’s Mom posted about Teddy Rosalie wanting some new threads to deck out in.

Myself being a crafty person and knowing enough about knitting to maybe create a few things for them to add to Teddy Rosallie’s wardrobe, I set about trying to do so without letting CM know what I was up to. That didn’t work out on my first attempt, I knew the piece was too small. So I got in touch with CM and asked if she could convince Teddy Rosalie to do a measurement sitting, they sent me the details and I went about trying again.

I got inspired… I picked up needles, sourced some yarn from my stash, brewed up a pattern or two in my head with some minor hints from a pattern meant for someone smaller and went off on a journey that resulted in 4 unique outfits fit for a bear! I can only hope that my guessing for sizing based on the measurements I was given has worked out and they fit Teddy Rosalie ok.

Now back to being a crafty person, I have a stash of finished projects and thought perhaps CM could use a little something in light of her healing from broken ribs, since I would be sending the outfits anyway. A few questions later and I hope I found the perfect healing gift for her as well.

(I shall not be posting pictures yet, as I am hoping to surprise them both!)

It was a joy to create these pieces for them and I can’t wait to see them on….

Thrummed warmth…

Original thrummed set (Mitts and headband)

 

I’ve been on a knitting kick in prep for the holidays and got side tracked by a thrummed set that burst into my head to try for my daughter-in-law (the sweetest young lady EVER!) I dug out a wool roving to make the thrums with and a cool vintage yarn and started building them with the magic sticks and the incantation of a pattern and voila, I had a set of thrummed mitts!

Then SAD, they are too big for her!

Not to worry, I finished a thrummed headband to go with the mitts and set off to make a slightly smaller pair for DiL and offered the first set for sale.

Little did I know that this would set off a flurry requests for pattern links so that others could make their own and one lovely lady showed interest in my set. Alas, she was sad to hear that the thrums are a slightly rougher wool than she felt she could manage without breaking into hives. Solution, make her a new set with softer thrums… perhaps alpaca? That is doable!

So yarn and roving are set aside for a set for her, I will start them as soon as I am done the current set for DiL.

Then a request, if she sends me some roving and handspun yarn, would I knit up sets for her MiL and Mom too..?? Oh gosh, what have I got myself into… I will certainly try!!

So I have yarn and roving on it’s way for two custom sets and I have the materials for the other set here… I’m going to be a busy (and happily knitting) beaver for the next month it seems!

LOL! It never rains, yet it pours….

 

PS!  This set is still looking for a new home.  The yarn is a 70% wool/30 % mohair blend and the thrums are 100% wool.

Let there be warm things…

So I have talked about my knitting… and lately I am working on stuff that I have available for sale.
Finding a decent venue to sell it is another challenge.  I am lucky if I sell one or two items at any sale, fair, festival or bazzar and I usually end up paying as much or more than I sold to attend these events.  Frustrating and disheartening…

In that light, I would like to show off some of the stuff I have available here… just to put it out there in case anyone is looking for a gift idea for themselves or a loved one.  If not, just a place to showcase what I have done wouldn’t hurt either *wink*

Brand new, hand knit beanie hats made out of 100% merino wool yarn.
Basic and slouched styles currently available. ($15 CND each if you are interested)

~ Black slouched style

~ Grey with green and red stripe basic style

~ Dark green with light green and black basic style

~ Dusty rose slouched style

~ Red, dusty rose, grey and natural slouched style (SOLD)

I also have shawls that I have been doing…

This one is wool, nylon and angora with a mystery eyelash yarn for the fuzzy highlights

Son graciously offered to model one for me!

A different style of shawl…

This one is 100% merino wool and that lovely colourful edge is all hand dyed too.  The colour of the main body is a purple and not a blue like the camera shows.

I have a list of shawls and other stuff I’ve got done and just can’t seem to get the best pictures done of them to show to advantage.  Trying to do this all on my own is a challenge, I need a good day when all the stars are aligned to make it work I guess.  It might be a decent fall and winter project to look into doing… I’ll take it under consideration.

I am able to take paypal from all countries and you can email me at: ladyryl[at]gmail.com if you have any questions or are interested in buying one of the items I have posted here.

For now, I hope you enjoy a quick glimpse into what keeps me occupied throughout the year.

A yarn about how kindness pays….

I had something super exciting happen the other day (Sunday) and I really wanted to share.   See, it was all the result of what I saw as a little act of kindness on my part…

This is a bit long, so grab your beverage of choice and bear with me if you want to come along…

To start the story… I got involved in a spinning group several years ago, where you could take fiber from someone who didn’t spin and turn it into yarn for them in exchange for a portion of the fiber for yourself. I agreed to also dye the wool I got sent into two different colours for the lady. As time went by, I managed to get it done, it just took a bit longer than I originally expected and made sure to keep her updated on the status of the projects. When I was finally finished and ready to send her the yarn, I found she had unfriended me and was no longer in the group we originally met in. So I searched for her on FB and sent her a message that her yarn was ready and waited to hear from her. Months passed and while the little icon said she had read my message, I heard nothing back from her. After a year, I figured she wasn’t going to claim her yarns.

Enter some of my dad’s friends from online.   He had been to visit them last summer in person and they had put him and mom up at their home for week while they were there. No money was allowed to be paid for food or lodging, just come and visit us. It was a kindness they hadn’t expected and have tried to do small things to send some of the kindness in return.  The wife of the couple crochets in her down time and I thought it might be nice to send her one of the skeins of unclaimed yarn as a gift, just pay for shipping and I was cool.  She was thrilled at the chance to receive it and was more than willing to cover shipping.  When I checked in to be sure she had gotten her parcel, it turned out she had and both her and her husband were in love with my work. She paid for the shipping and added a little extra for me, a pleasant surprise I was happy to get.  Her next message came back with “Did I happen to have anymore that she could actually buy from me please?”

Well, I had a suitcase full and some extra that I had set aside, that I was willing to sell and offered some group shot pictures to let her know what I had. Pictures were sent and she comes back with “I’ll take all the blue stuff right now please. How much do I owe you?” I was thrilled at the sale of these skeins of yarn all at once and was even willing to give her a deal.  She wouldn’t take the discount and insisted on paying full price. Then her next message stunned me to the absolute limit of my expectations… “So let me know how much the cost is for the rest of the yarns and we can figure out a payment schedule that works for us both”

SAY WHAT!!!!!

I asked her to clarify, just to be sure I had this right.  This lovely lady was serious!!  She absolutely wanted all my available hand-spun yarn, at full price plus whatever the shipping would cost. I was waiting for someone to pop up and yell “April Fools” or inform me that this was all a hoax.   Nope, she was serious about it and wanted the lot… I was on cloud nine at this point, this was every artist’s dream and I was living it at this moment!!

She has set out a payment schedule to ensure I get the full amount over a decent amount of time and in the meanwhile, I will turn skeins into centre-pull balls for her to use without ending up with tangled messes… my way of thanking her for her patronage and major purchase.  She works at a job during the day and feels that now she can come home to spend her off time crocheting with stuff that is better than what she can score at Wal-Mart… I am pleased to be able to fill her stash with my unique, hand-crafted yarns and now have lots of room to move forward with creating more hand-spun yarn to fill its place in *MY* stash for sale.

So from what I saw as a small, personal act of kindness came this blessing that has bloomed into my life and at a time I really needed it. This has not only brought a small and steady income for a few months, it has boosted my self-esteem in a big way too.   I have been battling with several health issues of late and my drive to do things has slipped and as I had an every growing stash of things to sell and not many options to sell them, there was little incentive to change things until now.

This has proved to me once again, that if you can find the right person or audience, you will find someone who appreciates hand-crafted goods and willing to pay what it is worth.

It has also reminded me that random acts of kindness, given in the spirit of receiving nothing in return, can sometimes yield large and unexpected returns!!!

Be kind to each other folks…

To bead or not to bead…

 

So I have been cutting back on going to in-person sales, festivals and other events where I could sell my hand crafted pretties.  My one friend that was my major helper in getting things moved in and out and doing the set-ups and breakdowns, had her shifts changed and was not available for the typically Saturday events and I am not able to manage in my own anymore.  So I am trying to decide where best to go for online selling of things like my handpun yarns, hand knitted wearables, and my beaded jewelry and charms.  It’s hard enough to find a decent and affordable online venue, where I might actually make sales and I come up with a new product idea!

I was talking to a friend on the phone one day and we were discussing the aromatherapy bracelets and how the idea was neat, except she wasn’t a jewelry person, so a bracelet wouldn’t work for her.  In a few minutes my brain came up with these… A single lava bead will hold your drop of essential oil and then you can attach it to a key chain, zipper, cell phone case, or they can be converted to a pendant to wear as a necklace if you *are* a jewelry person.  She suffers from stress and anxiety and does find aromatherapy helps, I wanted to find a way to make it work for her and the rest as they say, is history….

So I pulled out my inventory of beads and findings and started creating. Next came the challenge of trying to photograph them, one of my crystal clusters turned out to be perfect for getting the right angle to show them off.  For now I have a sales page on Facebook that I have listed them on.  (https://www.facebook.com/frogpondcollective)

I am going to have to work on pictures of my other stuff so I can get things online, although I find it challenging really… Finding that balance between setting my stuff up just right, then getting just the right shot(s) and then spending all the time to list is and then not have any traffic looking at your work.  Honestly there are days I am wondering if I shouldn’t just make it a big discount sale for charity and give up doing sales of any kind all together.  Sorry, my frustration is showing…  Let me tuck that back in the corner for now.

I’ve posted a couple of pictures of the new product here as a sample, if you have a Facebook account, please stop by my page, take a look at the rest of them and maybe leave a like.

Long time, no see…

It’s been awhile since I have posted, so I thought I would try and drop by fix that… lol

I have been knitting up a small storm of projects in the last year….  Sweaters, shawls, hats, mitts, scarves, cowls… I have been keeping the knitting needles pretty busy.  Occasionally, I have pulled out the spinning wheel and done some work with it, not much though.

This shawl was made entirely from my handspun yarn!

Sweater for my son

Sweater for me

Mitts in Handspun yarn for my daughter-in-law

Hat in handspun yarn for my daughter-in-law

Gift for a Dear Friend

Shawl for sale

Shawl for sale

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is just a sample of what I have been doing…

So lately the urge to spin has returned and it has been nice to finally get back into the treadle of all things spinning.  I finally finished off a roving I had started spinning up during 2018 (a lovely pink toned batch called “English Garden”) and started up a new roving (a multi-coloured batch called “Archangel”).

Finished this batch of roving

 

Started this lovely roving

These are both 100% merino wool that I picked up when a local store was having a really good sale.  They are being spun up very fine and then I will spin another single in a white merino wool & silk blend to ply with so the colours really have a chance to pop.  This will take time, as I am only able to do around 30-60 minutes of spinning per day right now (due to the pain I am also dealing with) and the fact I am spinning it so fine… It will get done though!

I do have a big project on the needles, a circular throw in a lovely chennille yarn called Velvet.  Plus my time filling dishclothes for when I am waiting in a doctor’s office, travelling on the bus or or on the rare occasion I am sitting watching TV… so I have not totally abandoned my knitting – LOL

All things crafty are limited more than usual by health issues this winter.  I have been on a new medication that has helped keep me from being totally blind-sided by the pain portion, so I am happy to take what I can grab in crafting time and do my best to fill as much of my day with it as I am able.

I have items that I am hoping to put up for sale and would like to know if you are interested in my posting them here?  Let me know in the comments if you are…

Bye for now!

These days of mine…

Are filled with crafting and creating, when I’m not futzing around online, reading or watching Netflix, but I haven’t always been a crafty soul…

In my youth I was more concerned with other things and trying to sort out yarn and needles, hooks and string or anything other than my mildly artistic doodling was overwhelming.  I groused for years that I lacked the skills to save my life if crochet or knitting were involved.  Reading, music, life in general took front stage and the attempts to craft were put in the closet of my mind.

Fast forward to my mid 20’s.  I found myself pregnant and desiring to make items for my soon to be child.  Knitting was still too complex to fuddle through, yet crochet seemed more approachable.  Success happened, soon I was creating gifts for cousins also expecting, toys, blankets and clothes for my son… Crafting was happening!  That once complex means of creating things by hand wasn’t quite so complex and distant in my life, I was thrilled and began learning as much as I could about it.  New stitches, reading patterns and charts, collecting hooks and patterns soon paved the way to my creating patterns to share with others.  I could do this, finally I was a crafty person that could make items that even my very skilled great aunt approved of!

Time slid away with crochet being my only crafting outlet until by my early 30’s I was interested in the skill of hand-spinning.  Taking a spindle or a spinning wheel and fiber and creating hand crafted yarn.  A friend of mine had learned how to do this in an art program in university, she did it often while we sat over coffee and chatted, I was enthralled by the craft and desperately wanted a spinning wheel of my own.  Another friend happened upon a spinning wheel at a local yard sale and called me about it, arranged for them to hold it until I could get there and for approximately a 1/4 of the price brand new, I had my own spinning wheel.  Within a week I was spinning as if I had been doing it for years, producing my own yarns from fiber I acquired from online groups and sources that introduced me everything from raw fleece to clean and processed fiber.  Over the years I have tried so many of them… different kinds of wool, mohair, silk, cashmere, angora, dog fur and so much more.  Thick, medium and fine yarns accumulated in my baskets, they didn’t translate to crochet as well as I hoped, so they languished, waiting for a purpose.

Within 6 months of starting my journey as a spinner, I found a particularly large set of needles and took a chance in buying them as a gift for my friend.  Instead, she used them to teach me how to knit.  These large needles and a couple of strands of thick yarn, her patience, a little trial and error and some practice doing just the knit stitch and there I was knitting!  I could do it, I could process it, it wasn’t nearly as hard as my young self had convinced me it was…  There went I with much practice, learning new stitches and new things about this craft, deciphering patterns, collecting the various types and sizes of needles.  I could now knit.  The joke was on me and I was teased about how I could now knit to save my life – LOL.  I didn’t care, I was having fun, I was exploring this new field in my skill set and having a grand time.

 

Now all these years later,  I don’t crochet as much as I once did, knitting has taken over as my craft of choice… Slippers, socks hats, mitts, scarves, cowls, shawls and even a sweater among the things I crafted on my needles in the intervening years. There is a fairly large stash of yarns hidden and tucked away in odd spots of the house to feed the habit with, sometimes I go on the odd foray to the store to buy something for a specific project, otherwise I try to stick to what already lives here.  As well, I have a fair stash of hand-spun yarns, in spite of how much I have sold or gifted to other knitters. Years of spinning have produced a lot of finished skeins of my hand-crafted yarns and I have even taken to knitting things in it for myself and others, instead of holding on to it for “something special in the future”… My future is now and the yarns are finding a use in my knitting finally.  

I have a half dozen items for myself, I’ve done several items for my daughter-in-law, a couple for my son, an item or three for friends as gifts.  Creating things by hand, even as far as creating the basic components from scratch is like therapy for me, the joy and accomplishment that comes from it is so much greater than I could have imagined all those years ago when I bemoaned my lack of skills.  Sometime it takes time, maturity and the right teachers to make it happen.  I have to say, I am plenty glad that all that and more have been a part of my life.

 

I look forward to sharing some of what I do in the future…  Hope you will enjoy taking that journey with me.

Handmade gifts for 2013 Holidays

Just a quick post to share…

I had a very good year for making handmade gifts in 2013.

A friend has opened up her studio one day a week and I have been doing some neat stuff there that ended up being good enough to offer up as gifts.  In fact I had at least two people as for certain pieces if I was in a mood to give them up.  So after hunting down some nice frames and spending an afternoon doing the work, they were added to my pile of gifts that were ready to go.

For mom

For Son

For BFF #1

For BFF #2

I found a sweet set of figurines that seemed to be perfect for my brother, except for the ghastly colour they were painted.  Kind of a crap brown with a few badly placed spots of cream that were meant to be highlights.  I spent the money [it was through a hospital gift shop, the money goes to fund the hospital] and decided to do a new paint job on them.  I forgot to take a before photo, but here is how they turned out.

bro’s Buddha’s

Next came the knitted goods…  I meant to try and get it all done, but I was down to the wire on Son’s socks to the point were I forgot to snap a photo, but they got wrapped and packed in time for gift giving on the big day.  Here are some of the other things I did get done, a cowl and a pair of hand-spun, hand-knit, lined mitts for d-i-l.  You will just have to imagine the socks in your head… tube style, green cuffs, purple foot… what can I say, the kids love funky socks!

k’s cowl

k’s mitts

[EDIT – Son stopped by for a few minutes to grab some stuff before heading back out and happened to be wearing his hand-knit socks so I grabbed a quick photo of them in situ to add here]

So that left the items in which only some of the parts were done and some were still in progress, the house vest for my mom [which BFF #1 was helping with] and a hand-spun, hand-knit mobious cowl for BFF #1.   The Vest for mom still needs to be seamed and finished, but the cowl is done except for the sewing in of the yarn ends… looks pretty nice though, the trim has fur from her poodle who died a couple of years back spun into the yarn, so it’s a lovely memory piece for her too.

BFF #1’s cowl

I will have to take a photo and share the vest when it is finally done, but I hope you have enjoyed my handmade gift gallery from  the 2013 holidays.

Such a simple idea…

For anyone that isn’t a spinner that needs to wash out skeins after they are finished being spun, who like me, waits until I have a bunch [or a couple dozen] of them to do all together and make the effort worth the time, you can take a pass on this blog if you want…

For anyone who is, please read on…  I got a brilliant light bulb moment back about 6 months ago and finally tested my theory out the whole way and I have to say it saved me a ton of stress and angst.  I use the washing machine, fill it with hot soapy water, soak them awhile, spin them out, add a bit of vinegar to the rinse water, soak again, spin out again and then hang them to dry.  While they are all going through that washing, rinsing, being all wet cycle, my paper tags can’t stay with each skein and then I lose track of what each one is and yardages on each, etc.  Memory like a sieve most days, some of you have to hear me on this…

anyway, brilliant idea came about when I realized there were a pile of bread tags in a dish that we had been saving for some reason no one could remember and I was going to toss them out when I happened upon the idea of using them as ID tags for my skeins.

I picked out the white tags with no printing on them and with a sharpie marker I started labelling them “A, B, C, D, …” and so on until I got to R [ran out of tags at that point], then I grabbed hinged ring to keep them all together and neat while not in use.  All I needed was a notebook and I started ID’ing my skeins and listing all the pertinent information on that skein under the letter on the bread tag.

Finally got to a point where I really needed wash the skeins I had finished, or make up more bread tags and tossed all my skeins into a wash & rinse cycle… Lo & behold!  There are all my skeins, clearly tagged and now I just have to refer to my notebook to create paper labels for each one once they are dry and ready for sale or storage.

How easy [and cool] is that!

All in a creative day’s work…

I have a standing invite every Monday [that isn’t a holiday] to go to a friend’s Open Art Studio day.  It runs from 3 pm to 9 pm and typically I take advantage of the full 6 hour stretch.  She encourages me to do painting while I am there to get my head into a whole different artistic space for awhile, it’s genuinely fun, all the folk who show up end up spending time talking, laughing and sharing stories over a coffee or tea and I have come home with some fantastic work that is actually worth framing and hanging on my wall.

So today I was not feeling so great, my head and body are all achy, head and nose are feeling like they are full of cotton and my nose won’t stop yelling for tissues – STAT! –  It’s the fall allergy season; I’m used to this after years of suffering…  I know it is going to be a stretch to haul my aching self there on the bus and then the congestion & cotton brain is just not the kind of thing that makes creativity spring up happy and free, so I opted to stay home and try to do something even mildly creative here.

Today’s creative project was photography…  No matter if you are a hobby crafter, an artisan, a cottage industry seller, or a whole sale Ebay master, you need pictures of your product if you are going to sell your product.

Since I am a crafter of various crafts and try to sell what I can to help pay for the multiple hobbies I partake in [and for the simple fact I like the feeling when my stuff goes to people who are just keen for the handmade stuff], I needed to do the photo shoot thing to give my prospective buyers a decent idea of what I am selling.  You see, while there is a huge truth in the saying that a picture is worth a thousand words, but there is also the codicil that says the wrong kind of picture can kill your story before it starts!

I had taken a bunch of photos of my hand-spun yarns awhile back, but I needed GOOD shots of the yarns if I was to post them for sale.  Starting with the brighter yarns in the small case I usually take to markets, sales and festivals, I set up my mini studio on the trunk in front of the living room window to take advantage of the natural light as much as I could.  I will tell you this little fact, natural light can go from fantastic to shitty in the time it takes to shift one skein of yarn off and the next one on, but I digress…

The pictures I took back in February were only intended to be a visual inventory of what I had on hand and ready to sell, the pictures I was trying to get today are intended to interest buyers in these skeins of hand-crafted yarns; they have to make the product look good and that can be hard.  There is a lot that goes into taking product shots; first you have to get it to look appealing, then you have to get the lighting right so the colours stay as true as possible, you can’t forget to keep them clear and focused so they can make out details you are trying to highlight.

For example, the inventory shot of a pair of skeins

vs. the for sale shot

You can see the presentation is different…

So my afternoon has been filled with controlled chaos and my already aching body has now added tired to the list of complaints, but I am a stubborn and move on… I need to try to keep track of what I have already done, don’t forget to work the presentation, lighting is important [keep an eye on it!], details & keep it in focus, get multiple shots to cover all the bases – then times all that by a couple dozen skeins – it is very time consuming and a great deal of work, but in the end you look them over with fingers crossed that they look as good on the screen as they did in the camera – all that work for a bunch of crappy shots can break your heart and make all that work a futile effort.

If they have all turned out as you hoped, then comes then next hurdle in selling online. You see posting and/or uploading them is the easy part, it is adding all the right details along side the right photo that can consume an afternoon or evening before you know it… so I cheated a little bit and made sure to take photos of the labels as well so that I can refer to the photo itself for the information, saving me the hassle of needing a written inventory and making posting them for sale soooooooo much easier!

Then there is dealing with the clean-up afterwards, because you know you wanted to get the light while you could, so you just draped the skeins in a pile so you could move fast.  A couple dozen rounds of twist and tuck gets them looking neat and tidy and so they don’t get messed up and/or tangled while in transit.  In the end they are all tucked back into their travel case and stacked back with the other cases of items for sale.

This is the tip of my iceberg, but it was all I could handle today and it is better than nothing at all…

Now I can relax with a mug of tea and peruse a bit of this and that, a few hours of work to produce not so many pictures as one might think, but I have to say I am so very grateful for the digital age, this would have cost me a freaking fortune if I had to do all this on actual film!!