Woolfest 2014

Sadly Woolfest is over for another year.
It was the first proper wool show that NDS had a stand and will always hold a special place in our hearts.
Its always chaotic, always exhausting, but always enjoyable and we love it

We arrived home late Sunday afternoon and were at work first thing Monday morning trying to sort out post show chaos.
Yesterday was an enforced day off as both the van and Daisy's car were at the garage and the only way to get to the studio was a 3 mile hike up hill.
So my day off was actually a designing day, as I left my laptop at work it involved about 15 hours of crochet.
So today we are back in the office and attempting to get back to normal.
And my first "normal" job is to write this post and share the photo's, so here they are.....

We had lots of lovely wool

 And lots of crochet kits and rainbow skein collections

And more wool and Twinkle, Twinkle looking extra colourful in the corner.

Yet again Lily was a superstar

And best of all lots of lovely customer's came to see us and chat and buy their NDS fix.
Here is Nic, with her stunning March kaleidoscope, you can't see the detail in the photo, but believe me her stitches are incredibly neat and perfect, a fantastic work of art.

Day dreaming of maths and wages.........

One of my most frequently asked questions at shows is "how long did it take you to make that blanket?"

I hate answering this question and normally start off with the phrase "You have to remember this is my full time job"

When I tell the asker the answer, they are normally shocked and tell me it would take them years to make the blanket.

The  "You have to remember this is my full time job" phrase just doesn't seem to sink in.

I know its difficult for some people to understand that doing a hobby that you love can actually be work, but it can be and is for me.

Even my own mother-in-law doesn't understand, the last time she phoned up in the day time I was crocheting She asked "are you busy",

I said "Yes, I'm working crocheting one of the book blankets"

She laughed in a kind of "don't be stupid, that's not work!" tone.

I've been timing myself while making the book blankets and so now have a real idea of how long it takes me to make a blanket.

Of course it depends on the blanket.

I've just finished 2 blankets one is a king size in 4 ply which took about 8 weeks, the other is 60 x 60 inches in DK which took about 2 weeks.

I crochet and design part time or rather part time in my world.

I spend 4 days at home on the sofa drinking coffee, lazing around watching CSI or some other murder that I don't need to concentrate on.

And 3 days at the NDS studio in front of my laptop or dye bath and then 3 evenings of the same day's at home doing more crochet and not concentrating on something on the tv screen with Phil.

So I did some number's to see how much I would earn if I turned my hobby into a proper job.

3 x studio days, crocheting from 5 pm to 11pm = 18 hours

4 x home days, designing & crocheting from 9 am to 11 pm = 56 hours

= 74 crochet/designing hours a week.

- 4 hours for trips to the kitchen and a Friday night local's pint (or 2) at the Rising Sun

= 70 hours

If I were paid minimum wage at £6.30 (ish), I would earn £441 per week, according to the careers website below, if I classed my self a senior designer I could earn £2,800 per week.

http://www.prospects.ac.uk/fashion_designer_salary.htm

• The range of typical salaries at senior designer/creative director level is £41,000 - £85,000+.

Which means the 8 weeks it took me to make Book Blanket NO 2 would of earn't me £22,400, enough to mend the Zoom and buy a new car while the Zoom is at the garage having its engine replaced !
It also means that the blanket is worth £22,400 + yarn + 8 weeks of electricity and coffee + several seasons worth of DVD boxsets.
So when I'm asked how much I sell my blankets for £25,000 is a reasonable response, except that that doesn't take into account any kind of profit, all good business people know that you normally double the costs to come up with the retail cost.
SO.......
Book blanket NO 2 will cost £50,000.

So if you'd like to pay my wages or buy a blanket I take credit cards, cash and paypal :-)))))

I'll leave you with a sneaky peek photo of Book Blanket NO4, just in case you feel the need to buy a blanket.....

Kaleidoscope Update

The Kaleidoscope Crochet Blanket Club members have just received their June pattern instalment.

The club has been a massive learning curve for me, I've run crochet clubs before and only ever had about 20 members, so I wasn't expecting the response we got to Kaleidoscope, the club has just under 90 members and we are still getting new members joining up!

I started designing the blanket back in October last year, I had the bare bones of the design when I started crocheting, I didn't really plan the colours so used what ever I had to hand at the time.
We decided to send out the yarn each quarter rather than send it all at once, my main concern was the membership costs a lot of money and so I wanted members to be able to spread the cost over the course of 2014 - BIG MISTAKE!!
I hadn't even thought about how and when we were going to dye the yarn or the fact that most of the colours would need re-winding into smaller skeins.
So we were dyeing and re-winding yarn for Kaleidoscope during the whole of December, and then again in March and now we are working on the third quarter, plus preparing for Woolfest, plus we have a couple of massive wholesale orders in!

BUT its all been worth it, the club members have been amazing and crocheted like busy little bunnies.
I am adding each month's pattern to my designer page in the Ravelry database just after the members get it, which you can find HERE
And members have been posting their blanket photo's in the KALEIDOSCOPE GROUP
So there are plenty of photo's to look at.

The photo's below show how the blanket has grown over the last 6 months, they are a bit rubbish as they are my wip photo's and were all taken with my iPhone, but you'll get the idea :-)
I will be making a Kaleidoscope Gallery page for member's photo's, maybe today, maybe tomorrow.......

                                            JANUARY                                 FEBRUARY

                                            MARCH                                             APRIL

                                                   MAY                                              JUNE

What I've been doing this week

I've had a very busy week playing at being a Graphic Designer and I am really smug and happy with the way my design work has turned out :-)

Its for next year's crochet blanket club, I know it seems really early, but we are going to send all the wool out in January, so all the members will need to be fully paid up by then and we want everyone to have a chance of being able to pay for it.
I've already added it to the site and made an information page - HERE
We'll be opening the club membership sign-ups during the first week of July 2014

Here is my Graphic Designer work

I've also been a incredibly bionic crocheter and will have made the whole of Book Blanket NO 3 in 2 weeks.

That is if my plan works and I finish it tonight or tomorrow.

I've decided I love DK and can't wait to start Book Blanket NO 4 which is also DK.

I think NO 4 will take a bit longer than 2 weeks, but if I can finish it by Woolfest I will have caught up with myself and be ahead of schedule rather than behind which is what I have been all year.

And here's the sneaky peak, the photo reveals a bit more than the previous 2 blankets photo's, but I don't think it hurts to give you a "bit more" from time to time :-)

New Crochet Scarf Kits

I've finally managed to find the time to add a couple of new crochet scarf kits to the NDS website.
You can find the crochet kits on the crochet kit page of the website which you can find  HERE

I say new, but what I mean is one new and one old kit.
The new kit is Ariana, I've been holding off listing this kit and pattern, because I'm not 100% happy with the photo's.
But I decided that I was being a bit too OTT, so have decided to add it and change the photo's when I've taken some new ones.
The scarf can either be made with NDS's Dazzle HT and a slightly bigger and more luxurious version in Godiva Silk and there is a kit for each yarn option.
The scarf in the photo's is made with Godiva Silk

 I've also re-listed some new Lula Scarf kits.
The original kit contained 10 x 20 gm skeins of Dazzle HT, but we could never find the time to rewind the 20 gm skeins, so the kit has always been unavailable.
So we've changed it, now it contains 5 x 50 gm skeins of Dazzle HT, which means you can make the scarf slightly larger.
The Lula kits will contain at least 1 variegated colour skein.

Identities and blogs

I've just resurrected the Dye Studio Diary blog.

The main reason is I am writing/designing a crochet blanket book and need to separate my identity from the day to day workings of NDS.

I've always just been a designer in the background who designs for NDS to help sell yarn, but my book means I have to start thinking about myself as a designer who has her own identity, as I will need to do lots of marketing for it.
All the designers I know are designers who design under their own names and so have blogs and facebook pages and are known for who they are and what they do.
I feel a bit embarrassed about being "Amanda Perkins - Crochet Blanket Designer"
I feel like I'm puffing up my pants and saying "look at me, look at me" the whole time, although I already do it already for NDS without any worry.

Yesterday I started a Facebook page for "Amanda Perkins - Crochet Blanket Designer"
I told the NDS page I was doing it and overnight gained 169 likes, which has given me a lot of confidence.
I've always thought that our "likes" were from knitters who suffer the crochet while waiting for the wool posts to appear, guess I was wrong.

Another reason for becoming myself is the changes we are making at NDS, but you'll have to read DYE STUDIO DIARY to find out what they are :-)

I have copied and pasted part of the post, but I thought I'd add a bit more here, not much, but a bit :-)

The bit more is this photo of the Ariana Scarf on top of a pile of blankets all waiting to be photographed.

The pile includes book blanket's NO1 and NO2, the finished Kaleidoscope club blanket and Supernova.

As soon as we get a lovely sunny day I will photograph and publish Ariana and Supernova.

Moving On

Dear Readers

Now you'll all be aware that this is Amanda's blog where she happily rants for hours about her wonderful world of work and life in general. 
Whilst we see each other every day, we've tended to work apart as I've been winding four days a week at home and in the office on a Friday doing paperwork and she's at the office Monday-Wednesday, and home Thursday and Friday....so despite working together it's been 'ships in the night' as far actually spending time together, and in the evening she's crocheting and I'm knitting, and we snuggle down into our own little worlds despite being a few feet apart on the sofa.
So for me reading Amanda's blog is always and exciting experience as I have a chance to catch up on where her brain has got to, and this is quite tricky, trust me! (she has an amazingly active mind!)

So today I've hi-jacked the blog to tell you my news.

After three and a half years of working alongside Amanda I've been given the opportunity to return to the big bad world of the real workplace.  A very dear friend of mine, who is the Managing Director of a growing design/engineering company, approached me about a month ago with a business proposal.  Since the demolition of my confidence following the liquidation of a company in Felixstowe that I had worked for heart and soul, forsaking everything else, I vowed never to work for another company where this could happen again....it was less like falling from a bike and more like being in a derailing train with no hope of stopping the final impact and knowing you'd never trust the railway again! 
My friend is one of the most engaging and likeable individuals that you could ever hope to meet, and I could see that he desperately needed help to allow him space to develop his business ideas which he was struggling to do as he found himself bogged down with the day-to-day affairs of his job.
I knew immediately that I could work for him, it would be a pleasure in fact, but there was NDS to consider.  When I told Amanda she was like a rabbit caught in headlights - I don;t think she knew what to say, and it wasn't until we met with Daisy the following morning that she was able to rationally consider the possibility of me moving on, which could only happen if Daisy bought in to the change....thankfully Daisy was hugely positive about the whole thing and so we had a platform to work from.

Over the past few weeks Daisy and Amanda have been developing their ideas for the changes that need to be made to NDS to accommodate my departure, and I have been singularly impressed with they way they have worked together to this end.  I'm now 100% positive that they will take NDS on into a new era with a really positive plan of action.
This has left me to pursue my new future, and last weekend I met my friend's business partner and his financial controller, which went well - lunch in a rather lovely family run hotel in Martock, near Ilchester....all culminating on Tuesday night with a pint in the local and an agreement on implementation.

NDS has been an amazing ride for me over the past three and a half years, and we've taken ourselves from personal rock bottom, jumped off the cliff, and landed on our feet again - when I think back to the building of the log cabin in Suffolk, at that time I firmly believed we would live our lives out in a broken down old farm, and at that time I was happy to hide from the world and lick my wounds.
I don't think that some of the wounds will ever truly heal, but this is a step towards a time when perhaps they'll be just distant memories.

My time at NDS will come to an end at the beginning of August, giving Daisy and Amanda a couple of months to recruit a new player and empty my head of all the stuff that's collected there for the past few years!  The process has started with the purchase of new winding gear, and moving it to the dye studio - if you take a look at our facebook page you'll see a short video of the new set up - an important part of the new NDS design.

I know that many of you may be concerned about the future of NDS with my departure but please don't be, it's very much in safe hands and I look forward to watching how Amanda and Daisy take it forward from here (they have already made some important decisions about yarn bases).

It just leaves me to say THANK YOU to each and ever one of you for your incredible support of NDS over the past few years, putting bread on our table, and enabled us to put NDS right at the heart of the hand-dyeing industry.  You are an amazing bunch of customers and I will miss you all greatly when I leave.....but don't worry I won't be too far away and I'm sure you'll still see me at the shows :-)

Best wishes
Phil. x

Two years and a bit

Its 2 years and a few days since we moved here to Exmoor.
Although it seems like only yesterday I also feel I have been here forever and only have hazy memories of the trauma's that lead to us leaving Suffolk in the first place.
Lynton is now my home and I am beginning to feel like a local, I know I still have years to go before I can claim complete localship, but its enough for now.

I could write pages and pages of what we did last year, but instead I will share a few photo's instead or I should say a lot of photo's.

The day after Wonderwool 2013 we drove to Cornwall to pick up my new puppy Tinkerbelle

Ted Bad Poodle died in January 2013, Phil didn't want another dog and told me so many times right up until the moment he saw her tiny puppy face looking up at him.

In June it was my 50th Birthday, we had lunch at Hartland Quay and ate Thai in Dulverton in the evening with all our friends.

Then Daisy met her Adam and finally found happiness

Lynton and Lynmouth come alive in the summer, the place is full of tourists doing happy holiday summery things.

So the locals join in and have fun too.

There's the dog show, Tinks won first prize for best puppy

The annual Lynmouth raft race

The girls went on a boat trip to see the sea cliffs (including Tinks)

The boys went kayaking

And the dogs played in the river

We confused a lot of tourists by having an impromptu cocktail party on a boat in the harbour.

The boys sat around on the harbour wall in the evening summer sun, enjoying a few pints and talking utter nonsense to each other.

In August we visited Fep and her Moonpie in London 

And then we went back to Suffolk for a few days to see family and friends and re-visited Shingle Street with Fred. Moors Farm overlooked Shingle Street, so it was our local beach.

The first summer after the move I was too scared to go back as our last couple of years had been nightmare ones, I felt like I would be going back to the nightmare and wouldn't be allowed back to the moor.

We met a local lady on the beach who had lurchers, so had a chat about our dogs (it seems all lurcher owners are very proud of their dogs).

She asked where we came from and when we said Exmoor it suddenly struck me that Shingle Street wasn't my place anymore, even though I had lived there for 16 years it was no longer my home, it made me slightly sad to think I was an outsider. 

But I belong to another place that I love, so it was ok to leave it behind for her and her dogs to enjoy.

In September Daisy drove us to London for a surprise visit to Fep at the opening of her exhibition.

The winter was full of storms and sea surges

We had impromptu surge parties and Beaujolais night and Christmas and New Year, all of which were very drunken affairs at the Rising Sun on the harbour wall.

And then we began 2014, busy, busy working, too busy to spend much time gallivanting around.

We're still busy, busy, busy, but very much looking forward to the summer after the long months of hibernation

Billy and the book blankets

Just a quick post about nothing.....

Firstly Billy likes to test everything I make, luckily he doesn't moult like normal cats as he's a Maine Coon, so its safe to let him test them.

Here he is testing book blanket NO 1 which is half finished

And book blanket NO 2 which is completely finished.

And while I'm blogging I might as well share Daisy's and my new blog.
Its a irreverent take on food blogs, don't read it if you are a devout foodie and think you might be offended, but if you are domestically challenged you'll love it :-)
Today's post was about my cake making skills
You can find the whole blog by following the link below.
LUNCH AT THE NATURAL DYE STUDIO

Wonderwool 2014

We spent last weekend at Wonderwool, its the second show of the season and we were slightly more organized than we were for Unravel.
But I blame the disorganization on moving house 2 weekends before the show, plus trying to work on the book at the same time.
My advice is NEVER EVER EVER move house just before a big wool show, its exhausting and I spent a lot of time being incoherent to my customers and seemed to be incapable of using the till.

This year we had a much bigger stand, that was really daunting when we arrived, we stood and looked at the huge expanse of white walls and it seemed impossible that we would fill half of it, let alone the whole stand.

Then we unpacked and started constructing and we quickly realised that we didn't have enough space.

Plus I had stupidly planned my art gallery and hadn't allowed for tables to put the kits and books on - DOH!!

So I need to do some re-planning for Woolfest, I have a tabletop idea for the cabinets, hopefully Phil can make it work.

And we need more grids to fill the spaces, which means we can put more on the girds and give ourselves more table space.

We have been doing shows for nearly 10 year's, you would think that by now we would have the perfect stand and not have to add to it or redesign it every show.

But the space is different at every show and what works for one doesn't necessarily work for the next - sigh.....

However even with all the issues that need to be resolved I was quite happy with my art gallery.

I think the customers liked it, I know Wonderwool did as they awarded us the second place prize for best triple stand.

One of the highlights of my show (apart from meeting and chatting with lots of our lovely customers) was meeting some of my Kaleidoscope blanket club members who had brought their blankets to show me.

This is Sue and Denise meeting for the first time and the first time I have seen 2 blankets together.
I'm amazed at the difference the different dye lots have made, even though the blankets look the same, you can see that each blanket is unique to their creator.
The size is different due to the fact that Sue has just finished March and Denise has finished April.

There is someone missing from this photo and that is my beloved Valerie, she brought her blanket but somehow there we were either too busy or too busy talking with her to remember to take photo's.
So her is the photo of her April that I have stolen off Ravelry

However even though we didn't photograph her she did photograph us, as it was our 28th wedding anniversary on Saturday, if you've been following this blog you'll be aware of our anniversary adventures.
Daisy had made us special anniversary crowns, luckily mine covered most of my hair and the fact that I had forgotten the hairbrush and the Coop at the garage in Builth doesn't sell hair brushes, so I was sporting a lovely rats nest hair do.
And given us wine and chocolate, and Valerie gave us more wine and a card and we had several other cards, for the first time in years it actually felt like a anniversary and I'd like to thank everyone who made us feel special :-)
Oh and I forgot to thank The Mulberry Dyer's who were our near neighbours and gave us a lovely bottle of more red wine as we were breaking down the stalls.

I know there's lots more to say, but my brain has just gone blank thinking about all the wine and chocolate :-), so thats it for now.