Life is a picnic, and most poor suckers don’t have any yarn.
When life hands me lemons, I give you free shipping! From today until May 10th everything in my etsy shop qualifies for free shipping. So the price you see is the price you pay. No hidden charges, no shipping, no extra nothing. So…. come and buy stuff! Free shipping is good! Now is the time!
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Famous last words aren’t they? Why, oh why does the city of Jacksonville schedule the majority of their fun events when it is hotter than Hades? Today I visited the World of Nations (lovely festival btw) and seriously thought I was gonna pass out. The heat and the people and the sun beating down on me… oy with the poodles already. I mean it was ridiculous. And of course the water racket – your only option was Dasani at $3 a bottle so it was $12 everytime we needed to hydrate the family. Ridiculous I tell you.
It was a busy weekend. Lots of fun, but lots of running. We started Friday with a concert for the big dude at the Landing. Again with the outdoor events in the no-shade, back-breaking heat. But he had a good time – here he is taking a bow after the concert (he’s the trumpet player with the white polo and long pants):
And then on Saturday I spent the day with Sugarbee and the boys hit up the local comic book stores for free comic book day!
The ghostbuster chickie loved little dude’s Chuck Norris shirt.
And I finished up the weekend by listing a few yarns on etsy. One of these days I will be able to take better photographs. These colors turned out lovely and true but I still have that fragging turquoise that I cannot for the life of me capture in photo. Anyone want a skein of Turquoise Semi-Precious sight unseen? I’ll cut you a great deal!
I love being finished with things. I do not love the feeling that I have where I kind of flounder deciding exactly what I should do next. It’s unnerving. Although I want to be a planner, I am not. I am a fly by the seat of my pants kind of gal. I have shiny object syndrome and all the other annoying personality traits that make it extremely hard for me to focus.
So today I will plan, and I will organize, and I will prepare. I will tidy my house and my office and I will get ready for the next big thing. Like actually getting published somewhere.
Summer is coming. The boys have five weeks of school – maybe less. I need to figure out my plan for this summer so that I don’t pitter it all away. Last summer I was relatively successful at the designing business. This summer I plan to dye and design. I just need to raise a bit of capital to make some investments for the dyeing and designing. Wholesale base yarns…. Knit Visualizer… these are on my dream list.
And oh my goodness I want to kill this yarn. I love it so, but I have taken hundreds of pictures of it and I can’t still can’t get the color right. Honestly. The pictures aren’t right and I don’t have the skills to adjust the color to what it really should be. Stupid, beautiful turquoise.
My husband makes fun of me – rather mercilessly actually – but I love my cheesy 70′s music. I know all the words and I sing along (badly) as I do my housework. I was born in the early 70′s so I guess I heard a lot of it from my mom, but there is really no great explanation for why I love it so. I might just be a big goober. Ok, so I’m definitely a goober. Give me some Cat Stevens and I’m a stupidly happy girl. Peace Train, Moonshadow…
Ok, so I didn’t really name it Moonshadow. I should do a cheesy 70′s song title yarn or fiber line though. Although there might be rules against that. But I digress. This is Moonstone. And it’s my new favorite of my Semi Precious Line.
Speaking of favorites I have a new favorite thing on the internet. It’s not social if you can believe that. No it’s 100% practical. Boring, you say? Actually it’s really helping. It’s Toodledo - and it’s an online to-do list that will actually send you e-mail reminders if you so desire. And it’s free!!! I haven’t been getting enough done lately and today I’ve done nearly all of my to-do list. In fact I’m drinking some diet pepsi right now so that I can stay up long enough to check one more thing off the list.
Who knows how long the Toodledo motivation will last. But I am the Supreme Empress of Procrastination, so if it’s helping me…
When it comes to business stuff I need a plan. A theme, a uniting idea. If I had it my way everything I own would match – even if it only matched in my crazy noggin. I try to do un-matchy things and I’m always sorry. So when I decided to do rovings, I needed a theme. A way and a reason and a rhyme to choose colorways. And so I present (officially even) the Butterfly Rovings Line. I definitely took artistic license with the colorways, but there is only so much black you can use before your retinas pop out of your head and run away. So on a lot of them I skipped the black. I’m rather proud of them, and I made a friend who owns a wheel (and not just a drop spindle like me) test them out. She proclaimed them good, and soft, and pretty, so here they are:
Visit my etsy shop to take a better look!
I’m looking for my motivation, my oomph, my gumption. It seems to be on an extended vacation to Europe. Which is so not fair, because I have *never* been to Europe. I have patterns to finish writing, I have fiber to photograph. I have newly dyed yarns to reskein. I have swatches and sketches and submissions to decide upon. And I have an enormous amount of Calc3 homework to do.
So if you’re in Europe and you see my gumption, could you please ship it back to me post-haste? I’ll pay shipping. Shoot, I’ll even send you free yarn.
The Lumina is gone. There is a wad of bills on my desk that I received in exchange for her. They took her away on a trailer. I would be really, really sad were it not for this:
This is the man applying my new bumper sticker (same as the old one of course) to my new (to me) minivan!
It’s crazy roomy.
And rather pretty.
And we’re calling her Velma. And I really, really love her! Speaking of pretty and love…
And…
Yeah. I dyed those. Me. I did it. And there’s more to come.
I’m working on these photographs. I can get some of them to take true, but not all of them. Not surprisingly I have the most trouble with reds and pinks – which are my absolute favorite colors to dye. I did seem to get good pictures of the cherry pie yarn in the bottom row, but that is not a semi-solid red – it’s more variegated and I kind of think the flecks of other colors keep it from “flaring” out. I don’t know.
The man built me a very sturdy lightbox out of foamboard, so I just need to rig up the tissue paper for that and I will try it next. I feel like I’m getting really good at the dyeing, and I love the way my colors are coming out. But if I can’t get good pictures of my dyeing it won’t matter. No good pictures means no internet sales. Which means no more dyeing.
I love dyeing yarn. Really love it. But there are other parts that are less fun. Like the re-skeining and the photography. I think I might have to take some sort of photography class because honestly, I suck. I take 20 pictures and I’m lucky to get one useful one. (That picture above? Not particularly useful). Oh well. I’m enjoying the yarny stuff. I have an order of some merino roving to dye up, and I’m really looking forward to that. No reskeining!!! But still with the photographing. Oy with the poodles already.
This is very, very cool btw. KnottyLa and KnittyKnitterton of ravelry and blogland have come up with another awesome sock club idea. Sign ups start today and this is one of those very fun ones that you don’t want to miss out on. Super secret colorways and the kind of snarky goodness that you’ve come to expect from them – especially if you’re familiar with their rubberneckin’ skills.
The shop has stuff in it. I mean more stuff, other than patterns and bags. It has real live yarn. Yarn that is on sale. The normal price for my silk/merino blend (430 yards) will be $24. But for my “grand opening” all skeins are on sale for $21. If you are a blog reader and you put blog in the payment comments, I’ll even throw in free shipping. Come, buy yarn, you know you wanna!
Introducing Semi Precious Merino-Silk Sock Yarn by PicnicKnits
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