Jen here!

This has been a wet week!

This is not a complaint, merely an observation!  After 2 years of drought, with our spring running dry, facing the choice of laundry OR showers, and 75% of our foundation plants dying…I will not complain about what has been falling out of the sky!  But, that clarified, we have had a little bit of everything!  We had ice, rain, fog, sleet, freezing rain, frost, slush, and lots of different snows.  I like to look at snow like I look at popcorn…its all very different!  This week we’ve had icy needles, little syrofoam balls, splaty slushy stuff, powdery stuff, and some big cookie decoration sized flakes that we all stood and admired in some slushy bootprints on our way to lunch!  I know…snow can be a major pain in the butt…’specially when it’s the consistency of mashed potatoes and you can’t walk or drive in it…but it is rather pretty if you take a closer look!  Then you can shovel the crap outta yer way!!!

Cookie Cutter Snowflake

All this moisture makes it hard to get the massive amounts of Yarn and Fiber Babs has been dyeing to DRY before we wind it up pretty!  There is wet stuff hanging everywhere.  There is dry stuff hanging everywhere.  There is wound stuff, and braided stuff and boxes of stuff, and piles of stuff, and…wait till y’all see this stuff!

One of the Piles of Stuff!

We are in Pre-Show Mode so there is less than 2 or 3 feet you can walk in a straight line in the studio, and we hafta move 2 or 3 things to get to anything…the Rubix Cube Effect!  But we laugh and have a great time in the chaos…and dodge the precipitation in its many forms!  We haven’t had raining frogs…but we named some fiber after the phenomenon!  We also have Glacier and Pond and Lake Michigan…It’s been a Wet Week!!!

Blue Lagoon in Merino/Bamboo/Silk

Mariner in Mixed BFL

Glacier in Merino/Bamboo/Silk

Raining Frogs in Merino/Bamboo/Silk

Lake Michigan in BFL

Babs Here!!

You will be seeing more and more of  0 and none available as we continue to pack up for Stitches West.  We have already started to ship and the bulk will be sent in about 10 days.  As we pack it up, we are changing values on the website as digging into a box is not fun, and “musses” up the yarn.  If you have something you want and don’t see it on the website, please feel free to contact us and we’ll see what we can work out for you.

Babs here!

Getting ready for shows is always interesting, and this first show of the year is no different.  We have Stitches West in 3 weeks! So the Power Dyeing Cycle has started. Yesterday was a super-long day.  I woke at 2 a.m. and did emails and sorting and organizing in my office.  Then I was in the studio by 7:30 a.m. and worked mostly non-stop until 5:30.  Not sure how many skeins got all colored up…but quite a few!

Today will be another one of those days, except a guild friend of mine is coming by for me to help out with getting a spinning wheel sorted out.  So that will give me a break in the middle of the day.

Today’s list of colorways includes Mallard, Lake Michigan, and Roasted Pumpkin.  I would love to get to Moss too! But that might be asking too much of my feet, who do start complaining some as the power dyeing cycle goes on. On top of this, more snow and ice, and sleet, and winter precipitation is supposed to be coming in the next few days.  It will be nice to get out to the more temperate weather of the Santa Clara and San Jose area. Oh and the emerald hills!! What a delight they are.  I can see the color in my mind’s eye!!

Jen here!

Here in the studio, on the road, and at the shows, we love our racks!  They hold lots of lovely yarn, and they give us flexibility.  I’m not sure why it took us so long to figure a way to configure the racks to hold braided fiber, but we finally have, and we love it!!!  So many dyers display their fibers this way, and it’s easy to see why…  Sometimes it’s hard to stop working long enough to look and see a solution.  We’ve been braiding our butts off, and we’ll be working to get new pictures up onto the website.  Here are a few lovelies in their new do’s…

Merino/Bamboo/Silk Tops

Blue Face Leicester Tops

The towels were freed from their icy captivity, but we are back in the clutches of winter.  It IS January after all.

Yesterday we were talking about Stitches West and how green the hills surrounding Santa Clara are in late February.  We were lucky to fly in clear weather last year.  We flew over gray and brown and black and all manner of shades of those in between… and then we landed in CA and saw the Spring Green we were craving, and are craving now!  I’ve changed all the color options on my computer over to green, and have even switched my current knitting project over to something green!  Babs will tell ya, me finding something green to wear or knit isn’t a stretch!  I’ve even put some green streaks in my hair!

They say, that snow attracts snow.  We’ve been having a real winter this year with snow and snowdays, wind and frost and ice.  We have more snow in the forecast and that means there won’t be a loaf of bread or a gallon of milk anywhere to be found!  If the predicted snow comes to visit us this weekend….We’ll still be craving the Green while we eat french toast and braid lots of  fiber…What else can we do with all that bread and milk?!?

Really glad the website is back up…It felt weird that I could go check on things, add some colors/yarns, etc.

Snow is coming later today, so we have been hunkering down with the yarn and dyeing even more! so we can all stay warm!

Hi Everyone!

In case you can’t tell, I have a hard time blogging regularly. This is, in part, because I am just so tired at the end of the day, and the other part is that I see that it has been awhile and so it is hard to say something to fill in the space! So…here’s the change that is coming!

Jen has been working with me for over four years and has seen me through the craziness and the growth and has been instrumental to MissBabs Hand-Dyed Yarns and Fibers as it is now. So we are going to let her start doing some of the blogging, which will hopefully encourage me to put my “pen to paper” also. So here goes! Here’s Jen….(and we will say who is writing at the beginning of each blog entry.)

Jen here!

Well, we found the towels!  Here they are frozen inside a block of ice that until recently was covered in snow!   We have been in a deep freeze with record breaking temps for a record breaking number of consecutive days…and we are all tired of it.

See the towel!!??

With the rain and drizzle of the last few days has come a wonderful sight…the Bare ground! Our new favorite outside color is DIRT! Its not the dull green and tired beige and sickly brown that we like, no! It’s the fact that soon…sooner than later…Spring will come out of that Dirt! And we like that!

Since Spring is not here yet, Babs has been making some Spring inside the studio. Stitches West is approaching, and as she put ideas onto yarn and fiber, here are a few Spring Wishes.

Looks like Daylilies!

Our New Blue Monochrome aka "Bahama Blue"

Wait until you see the fiber fun we are working on! Rapunzel would be proud!

Think Spring!

SAFF was a great show and I want to thank everyone for their continued support of me and my yarns and fibers. I always leave SAFF a very grateful and humbled person – amazed by the customers, the vendors, and just the general affection.

I came home to having to face putting one of our beloved dogs down. Miss JJ came to us about 6 years ago. My husband picked her up from the side of the road where she had been abandoned. She was terribly frightened of storms and loud noises. She was a Vizsla, we believe purebred…a beautiful dog. She was my original monochrome. Here coat, nails, eyes, nose were all one of a similar red-brown color. She was incredibly soft and had a bay that would knock your socks off if you weren’t ready to hear it. She didn’t bark…she bayed. She also had a “special” way of complaining about not getting a bite of food soon enough when we were eating (yes, my husband is a feed at the table sort). She would “do her o’s”. Her lips formed an o in front and she would do short bays that kept her lips in that o.

Vizsla’s are active, and we always called her “Miss Busy”. She had to go see what was going on everywhere, she could run like crazy – all stretched out, she would tattle on the other dogs when they were doing something she deemed was out of line, she was ever aware of activity on our property. It has been quiet. We have all been quiet. Missing here presence. She was my morning greeter. She would come to get a morning hug and see what was going on before going back to lay down, or needing to go out.

When she first came to us, she was frightened of everyone. Over time and with lots of love, she warmed up to many people. The first visitor I saw her warm up to was Sandi from my fiber guild. Since then, many other people were rewarded with willingness to check them out and trust them with a chance to pet her.

My husband called her the Duchess, and would say she was a Romanov, but that she wouldn’t tell us where the eggs were hidden. She was a lady. She was tough AND sweet AND polite.

We will miss you….

Today is the last day before we leave for Asheville. Today, I am listing to one side again with vertigo or more ear infection that didn’t quite go away. This has been going on for just a bit too long! Ron had his knee drilled and drained yesterday. What the h…? So I will run to the doctor’s again today and get some more medicine so I can do what needs to be done!

We have LOTS of sock yarn….LOTS of Yowza…..LOTS of fiber and LOTS of other things. (See pictures in previous post.)

We look forward to seeing everyone again this year and making new friends.

See you there!

Well, I promised a few pictures of what we have been doing out in the studio. This doesn’t show everything, by any means….but here we go!

Piles and stacks of yarn and fiber that haven’t been hung up yet on racks. Hanging will start in earnest today. We have to move some stuff out of the studio before we can do that though and iit was just too cold yesterday to open the doors of the studio and let the outside come in and the inside go out. Hopefully today will be better, that is warmer!

The sun came out yesterday! It has been so rainy that the yarn has been slow to dry. We’ve been having to take it in and hang some of it by the wood stove so it can dry in the dry heat.

Here’s a some new colorways….

The top picture has Journey and Lake Michigan Colorways. The bottom picture is a Crazy Sock – and there’s only a few of them. I dye these with leftovers at the end of a day or two of dyeing. This is how I came up with Jazz Club and also Frog Princess.

Can’t wait to see everyone.

My sister Jeannie is also coming again this year. She will be doing demonstrations of sock cast ons, ball winding and kitchener stitch help. So bring your socks that need kitchener stitching and she will help you!

The schedule of her demonstrations will be listed later today or tomorrow!

I am a bad blogger! I keep saying I’ll get better and I’ll put more pictures up and I’ll write more and more frequently. But frankly, at the end of the day, the only thing I have been able to do is get my shoes off and put my feet up for a few, then make supper or eat supper that my sweet husband has put together. Then it is actually not too long before I am “done” for the day.

I have a hard time stopping during the day and taking pictures that would be appropriate or interesting or thoughtful. But I am considering getting a better camera to take pictures with as they are what people base their buying decisions on, and I love being able to present the best color that I can. Did you know that red yarn is incredibly hard to take good pictures of? Red in general is hard to take pictures of, I think.

The last couple of weeks I have been dyeing in preparation for SAFF. But I have also during this time been having a bad bout with vertigo resulting from ear infections. I felt like I was visually in a tunnel for about 2 weeks…so weird. But am feeling much better now. I think the ear infections may have come from the swimming I did this past summer? Or they just happened. It doesn’t really matter, does it?

I will try and do a SAFF prep report in the next day with pictures of piles of yarn and fiber. We actually are going to start doing some serious packing today into Big Orange, the Harley trailer (it has Harley colors on it). It is always a kick that people think we are loaded with Harleys, but no we’re loaded with yarn!