Dye Studio

The other day when I was dyeing I decided that it would be fun to share where I do all my dyeing. I have converted our enclosed porch into my little dye studio. I is nothing fancy, but i works for me.  I love all the light I get in there and I also love the fact that the kids can be outside playing and I can keep an eye on them while I'm getting something done at the same time.

It looks like a mess, but it is a organized mess :) Both tables are preped and ready to go.

 This is roving that is all spun out and ready to be dyed, I'm doing this one some semi-solids.

 

Here you can see that I use old milk jugs and make my most common colors by the gallon. The less common colors I use small soda bottles.

Here is some of the of the fiber that I dyed drying on the clothes line.

Finally, maybe you saw this big pile in the first picture. This is my done pile. Well its kind of done.... its done in the sense that its all dyed and pin drafted, now it just needs to be weighted skeined and tagged,lol. This is one job that I can't wait to give the girls when they are a little older ;)

Boo Boo

So I have a few post that I really need to get up here, but the only one that is going to happen tonight is that I got a little boo boo the other day. I was getting the spinner going and got my finger caught in the gears and lost the top of it. Thankfully it is my right index finger (I'm a lefty) so it could be worse, but it still hurts and I can't get it wet which kind of get in the way of washing wool. I'm going to give it a few days and see what the Dr. says before I try too much. Anyway I will post a few more fun things in the days to come.

Some new colorways

WOW!!!!! I guess I'm not so good at this blog thing, its been like a year. I real am going to try and get better, I swear. Maybe I just think my life isn't that exciting or maybe I am just to tired at the end of the day. I think its a combination of both. The mill is doing great. We tried our hand at adding spinning, but I have decided to keep to roving. With no employee's it just was not feasible to add the spinning and keep my wait list down. I want to offer the fastest turn around I can so I am going to do what I love the best and that is custom roving, pin drafted roving, and batts as well as dyeing including handpainted fibers. Here are some recent photos for some hand painted roving that are/were on my Etsy store.

This one is one of my favs- Strawberry Fields :)

Holiday Feast another one that spins up totally different than it looks as roving.

This one doesn't have a name yet, but I love it ;)

Twitter?????

OK, I signed up for twitter thinking that this would be easier to do since I'm not the best blogger. I really don't find it easier though because I can never say what I want to in that little bit of time. I don't think what I'm doing every minute is very exciting either. I would rather post here when I have things going on or something exciting and new to tell about. If anyone reads this let me know what you all think of twitter. ....

Creating roving vs. batts

The past few weeks I've been trying to concentrate on getting products together for the up coming CT sheep and wool festival. I have a bunch of handpainted pin drafted rovings done so I thought that I better make up some batts as well to have some variety. For some reason the batts have been harder for me artistically than any of the rovings that I do. I played around yesterday down at the mill for a while and it seems that the big carders are a little trickier because they card the fiber TOO well:). The colors that you want to keep a little seperate tend to get a little more blended than they would if they were on a drum carder. I tried doing layers, but I didn't like the fact that you couldn't see all the colors that you were getting and photographing a batt like this would be really hard to say the least. The next thing a tried was kind of mixing up the colors and the fibers. I got a much better result this way because you could see all of the colors that you were getting, but there is still some work that must be done.
My next plan is have things a little more planned out than I usually like to do. I am going to take a couple of colorways that I usually do as handpainted dye them up in indiviual sections and then try and make a few batts this way. Normally when I make batts I do it because I'm have lots of random colors laying around and don't have a real particular order that things go onto the carder. I've never really pre-weighted the fiber before making batts, but in the long run this will hopefully make things a lot easier because there won't be anymore guessing. It may also bring some new creative thoughts to the whole process and who knows, maybe some new colorways will be born.

Colorways

Lately I have been dying like a mad women. I'm so excited to offer so many new color ways to both my processing customers as well as my roving and yarn customers. The best part of it is that I am having a blast doing it. The whole creative process of creating them is just so much fun, even my 3 yo like to get involved with picking out the colors with me. Each colorway is available in somay different ways too. I can do it in pin drafted roving, batts, and yarn and each version of the same colorway comes out so different.

Tropical Rain

Numa Numa

Apple Orchard


Rainbow

Yeah, we've got yarn!!!!

The spinning is going much better now. The yarn is coming out awesome. I learned that the biggest part of spinning was the pin drafting. If you don't get that just right you won't be doing any spinning. Here are a few pics of what I done

Its been way too long since my last post

OK, I can't belive how long its been since I wrote anything in here. So much has happened at the mill and at home. The mill is very busy. We bought a spinner over the summer and it has been absolutely crazy since then. The learning curve on this thing is HUGE. Way bigger than I ever thought. I am no longer advertizing it because of this. I am just so far behind that I just don't want to promise people anything until I know how fast the turn over is going to be and right now there are no garuntees on when I can get things back to people. As soon I get this figured out I will hopefully be able to put it back up on the website. I will post some pics of yarn that I have done hopefully by this weekend. There is definately more science and calculations behind the whole process compared to that of the roving process.

CT sheep and wool festival

Yesterday was our first festival and we had a great time. The weather was a little chilly, but there was no rain so thats all that matters. I had a great time meeting and chatting about fiber with everyone. It was so nice to finally put a face to everyone that I see on Ravelry as well as people that have emailed me from my website. A few changes that we need to make for next year is that we need to post a sign that we are picking up fleeces to process and make sure that people know that we are a fiber mill that has processed all the fiber that they were buying. Other than that I think that we did a great job. Here are some Pics of the booth.

Not Enough Hands

I have decided that I just don't have enough hands to do all of the things that I want to do. I have so much to do at the mill everyday just flys by and before you know it is time to go home. Besides processing everyone elses fiber I also want to start dying and blending my own rovings to sell. The last roving that I made sold as fast as I put them up on my website.

Here are the rovings that I made that sold right away. The orange one was my favorite, I was trying to get the fall colors of the leaves around here in CT and I think I did a pretty good job.
The other things that I want to do is spin for myself, weave, try wet felting, and most importantly is to spend some quality time with my two young children (2yrs and 1.5 months) it just looks like it would be so much fun and you could do so much with it. I have to many ideas in my head and I just don't have time time to do all of them. I have come to the conclusion to just do as much as you can everyday and eventually I will have been able to try everything.

Moisture is Key

I have found out over the past few weeks how important moisture in the fiber and the air is while processing the fiber, ESPECIALLY ALPACA. I have been working on a huge order of alpaca for what seems like forever and as soon as the cold weather came along the fiber gave me the challenge of my life. It was flying everywhere and sticking to the equipment like you wouldn't believe. The static was so strong the the metal it was almost impossible to take it off.
To solve the problem we got the biggest humidifier we could possibly find. This helped the air and then to keep the fiber moist the most import thing was to keep it covered. After it was washed and dried I sprayed it with a mist of water and bagged it up. Then after I picked it I sprayed it with the correct amount of antistatic and placed it in bins for 12 hours before carding it. Finally after carding it I spray it with water again and stacked the barrels with the roving in it to compact it and made sure that the top barrel was covered waited another 12 hour and then I was able to pin draft it without it falling apart. This was all very frustrating while I was learning, but I'm glad everything is working again.

The First lessons learned

The mill is getting busier and busier. I've had lot of beautiful Alpaca that I've been working on and a lot more that was dropped off in the last week. When we were opening we were told to be prepared that people were going to test me with their worst fiber before dropping off there good stuff. So far I don't feel like this has been the case at all. All of my customers so far have given me some really nice fiber to play with.

Since the mill has been open there have only been a few issues I've had and a few lessons learned. The first thing is how different fleeces are even among the same breed. The next is learning what grease content to soap ratio are needed. There were a couple of fleeces that appeared to be washed and grease free until the were dry and picked and then they all felt greasy again and needed to be re-washed. Finally the newest lesson which has not been completely solved is the static issue. The mill has dried out so much in the past few weeks that the static is out of control. We ordered a misting system, but I'm not sure that this has solved the problem completely. It is increasing the moisture content, but at the same time is not completely evaporating before it is falling and then makes everything that is below the misting heads all wet. I need to find a middle ground where there is moisture in the air, but doesn't get the equipment all wet. Hopefully this week we will have this sorted out.

Yeahhhh its finally here !!!!!!!!!!!

All I have to say is yeah!!!!!! All of the equipment arrived yesterday and everthing looks great. Now it all just has to be put together. Keith had to travel this weekend, but will be back on Tuesday and spend 10+ days here with us putting it all together and training us on everything. I am just so happy that I can finally get everything moving forward. I never thought that I would be excited about going to work, but I really am. It is going to be so fun and a new adventure.

More Delays...................

OK, I feel that I've been very patient so far, but now I'm beginning to get frustrated. My Equipment was supposed to arrive yesterday, but was turned around at the Canadian border. Why me????? As of this month they decided to make some electronic filing a mandatory process instead of voluntary and of course Textek only had the hard copies of my paper work and nothing electronic so they would let him come into the states. Now I must wait another week in order for them to process the paper work so he can come down here. I am so tired of waiting for everything. As crazy as it sounds I just want to get to work and have a regular daily routine. I just hate having to rely on everybody else to get things done. I just want to start doing my own thing and not have to work around everyone else's schedule. I am going to try and start washing all the fiber I have that is waiting, but I need Billy (DH) to make me some larger drying racks for me, so again I need to wait for him to do this. Well I guess we will see what next week brings us....... Let's keep our fingers crossed.

To good to be true

Well I guess things were going to smoothly. Unfortunately, my money for the equipment is slower to arrive than orinally thought therefore the equipment is going to be delayed a week, it now is going to arrive next Monday. However, I guess things could be worse, right? Also this gives us more time to work on the mill space. The water is going in this week and hopefully my husband will have time the middle of the week to put the A/C and finish putting the plywood on the walls. Once those things are completed then we will be ready to go. We moved the office over there on Friday so now I also have plenty to do over there. I need to organize all my stuff, put shelving up so I can separate my husbands company and the mill (I take care of all his office stuff too). Doing all this with a 1.5 year old helping me will probably take all week anyway. I'm sure the week will go by fast with all the things that need to be done.

Mill Update

There is only a few weeks left until we will be open for business and things are starting to come together. We decided for now the best thing to do was rent space in town until we get going. We found a great space in an old woolen mill that is rich in fiber history. We thought that this would be really neat to have a new mill inside of an old mill. By doing a lot of the work ourselves we are saving on some rent as well. Today we got all the plywood up and put a coat of paint on 3/4 of it. Being 61/2 months pregnant during all of this I can only do so much, so I need my husband to paint the ceiling (I'm a little clumsy so I don't dare go that far up a latter). This weekend our plan is to go on the biggest shopping spree to home depot (what guy won't love this; buy tons of stuff and his wife won't complain) to buy the sinks, faucets, buckets, shelving, and so many other things that I can't think of right know because I'm so tired.
The one thing that we did forget to do is take before and after pictures of what the space looked like. It has changed so much with just a coat of paint. I can't wait to see what the mill is going to look like when it is all done. I am going to try and get down there tomorrow and take some pictures that I can't post here and also on my web page so people know what the building looks like when they come to visit. Well I must go, My little girl will be up bright and early ready to play.

WOW its been a long time!!!!

How things have changed since February.... Right now we are one moth away from opening up the fiber mill. So far it has been so exciting. I can't wait. We are suppose to get our first piece of equipment (the pin drafter) in a week or so and then the rest will be built right here on site the end of July. Once we are in the building (next week or so I hope) we will have to make a giant trip to home depot and get lots of supplies. We need to build a picker room, drying racks, shelving and I sure lots of other stuff that we haven't thought of yet. Well I'm going to attempt to attach this to the mill's website.
As for my projects that I have going... I haven't had to much time to work on them. I did finish weaving a blanket for my sister and have been able to spin a bunch of yarn, but I'm not quite sure what I will be doing with it yet. I will post some pics as soon as I get them off the camera (I'm kinda slow when it comes to that).

Life Changes

Today is the day that all the job postings are up here at work. Everyone is going crazy looking for a job and I am here just doodling away. I am not planning on staying here any longer. I can't deal with the one hour commute any more and if the IVF work who is going to hire someone that is pregnant and didn't meet expectations. But this is OK because if I'm pregnant I won't be able to work and if I'm not it will give me the opportunity to start my fiber mill!!! I would so much happier I think if I was working for myself doing something that I love to do. Plus opening the fiber mill I would be able to get an agriculture loan for the building and this would benefit Billy's company as well. I really look forward to this it is just a matter of when it will be.

Here is some of the yarn that I have for sale. It is handspun 100% merino and is sport weight.