The last dye bath & onwards

Last week was all about end of the NDS dye room.
We started off the last weekend with a mega packing session, well over 100 parcels of the last NDS update wool to pack and send all over the world.
As expected the stupid website sold the same skeins twice and even sold yarn that I had deleted off the website, several hours after I had deleted it - Grrrrrr
So sadly there were a lot more refunds than we had expected.
Thank goodness Etsy doesn't behave in the same way!
I am planning to thin my stash in the next few weeks and add the extras to my Etsy shop so our disappointed customers get a chance to buy some.

 

On Monday evening we filled the Beast with post for the very last time and took it to Lynton Post Office

      

We had 40 kgs left to dye for our friend Linda of TALL YARNS

We're working overtime this weekend to get it to her and really hoping it will arrive with her in time to be at Wonderwool next week.

If you are going to Wonderwool, go and see Linda as she will be selling the last skeins dyed at NDS.

Anyway on Monday the dye room looked like the above photo's.

And by Wednesday morning it looked like this, 3 dye baths down, 3 to go.

Our last dye bath was indigo.
This is Dais dyeing her last skein

   

And me dyeing my last skein, in the first photo I was crying so much I couldn't look at the camera and in the second frustration had set in, the tears had stopped as I was grring so much.
The indigo came out blotchy and so I had to re-dye the skein meaning it ended up a lot darker than I intended.

   

By the end of the day, we had emptied the last of the dye baths, We'd dyed 40 kgs in 3 days and so were both physically and mentally broken.
So we went to the pub and cried into our beer.
And then I took my dogs for a walk on the top of Countisbury Hill, it was peaceful, serene and beautiful, Lynton and my home is in the dip between the hills, which you can't see it because of the haze.
It was a perfect ending to a heartbreaking day.

And then on Thursday morning I woke up to the first day of my new life, although I was physically broken, the worst was over and I felt excited and positive for the first time in ages and it was full of exciting new possibilities.

The first was being asked to do a interview for an impressive South African blog.

 No 2 was being accepted as a exhibitor at Yarndale 2015, its going to be my first show as a designer and even though I'm so happy to be able to be there its also really scary, there are so many things to think about, I need to start planning now and have already decided I'll dye some yarn to take with me

The photo below is of the NDS stand in 2014.

The last possibility is so exciting and I can't wait to break the news to you, but you will have to wait for next week :-)

So back to this week, I'm still recovering from the mega dye session and so a bit blurry as to what to do next, so I wrote a "to do" list, I stopped after 2 pages, because it was beginning to make me panic, this week I will prioritise and fill in all the details and be far more organised.

  I played with some motifs and colour for Book Blanket no 8

   

And yesterday we started the long process of deconstruction, cleaning and redecorating the studio.
By the end of the day the dye room looked like this and we'd fill the Beast with dye baths & spin driers, so technically it had become a mobile dye room :-)

    

Cushions & Goodbyes

This week has been a very emotional one, my whole week has been consumed by the very last NDS update and the immanent end of a business that I accidentally built 13 years ago.
I wanted our last update to be amazing, like the last firework of a firework display, I wanted to go out with a explosion of colour.
So we dyed a rainbow of nearly 70 colours, I had planned to put together a photo of all 70 colours, but ran out of time, so I am afraid this is the best I can do.

  

I spent the whole week in tear's, I hadn't expected to be so upset as NDS still has a couple of weeks left at Alta Lyn, I guess the update symbolised the last of the yarn, which was the core of NDS.
So putting it on-line Thursday night felt like the end of my world, I'm surprised I managed to press the update keys I was crying so much.
I didn't go home until 8pm Phil was waiting at the front door with a glass of wine for me.
I also came home to a really exciting e-mail, which held lots of amazing possibilities for the future.
I can't tell you more at the moment as none of the details have been worked out yet, but when they are I'll be doing lots of talking :-)
On Friday morning I woke up with a smile on my face for the first time in months and a huge sense of relief.
So I have my fingers crossed that I have cried all the tears, done my mourning and can now move onwards and upwards.

On a side note I finally understood why Tinks was so depressed and why she wasn't eating or drinking, she was sad because I was so sad.
I was really worried about her because she is was so skinny to start with due to her whippet genes and  I didn't think she could afford to lose much more weight and was beginning to think I needed to take her to the vet in case there was something seriously wrong with her.
I'm really pleased to say she is a lot happier now, although she still won't eat unless I sit with her, but she's smiling and bouncing again.
I just hadn't given her credit for being so loving and in tune with me.

Friday was my only real crochet day, as we spent a lot of the weekend at the studio sorting out stuff to recycle, stuff to give away and stuff to take to the dump before we can start cleaning and decorating.

So back to Friday, I didn't do much crochet as I felt like I had been run over by a train and needed some recovery space, but I did take several photos and looked at wool for a few hours.

  

On Saturday and Sunday in between trips to the studio and the dump I crocheted and had more good idea's.
I finally got around to working on the May instalment's of the Zodiac blanket clubs, the crochet one is nearly done it just needs it ends sewn and the knitted one doesn't take long as I have already sewn the ends, all I need to do is crochet the motifs together.

   

My good idea's were concerning cushions, I have always avoided things like cushions because they are one step away from cup cozies and iPhone covers, which I really don't want to design, not that there is anything wrong with them, but that they are far too small for me to play with motifs and colour.
But I came to the realisation that cushions were a lot quicker to make than blankets and took a lot less yarn and as I've already got a big queue of work I don't have any time to self publish new blanket designs for me.
And if I published some cushion patterns along side my blankets they might appeal to a much bigger audience.

The first design in the cushion queue is the colour wheel, I do have a blanket planned for this design, but its for my friend John Arbon's Knit by Numbers and I'm putting off starting it until I have a bit more brain space as I need to do complicated maths to make the pattern work.
The cushion maths is a lot easier :-)

Once I'd decided on the colour wheel cushion I started thinking about old designs that I could quickly translate into cushion patterns.
The most obvious and recent design choice is my Myrtle Scarf
Myrtle sadly seems to have been passed over, it hasn't sold many patterns and hasn't had much love compared to my 2 kissing circle blankets.
I'm not sure if its the photo's or maybe it looks too complicated or maybe it just doesn't look good as a scarf, but its going to look fantastic as a cushion - just watch this space..........

P.S - these 2 photos are of the scarf wrapped round a cushion to see what it looked like rather than the actual cushion design.

The final update & Easter

Last week's dyeing schedule was dyeing for NDS's final update.
We started off with 35 kilo's of white yarn and not much idea of what to do with it.
After lots of discussion we decided to dye the whole of NDS's rainbow, so we did :-)

As you can imagine dyeing, washing, drying and winding 35 kilo's is a long process, we still haven't finished dyeing it all and I don't think all of it is going to be ready for this weeks update, so instead of having another last update we will be adding the extra's as soon as we've finished them.

Which means that we will probably still have a few to add early next week, although the sun is shining so they might be ready by the end of this week, who knows... :-)

The designing part of the week started with me publishing April's Zodiac installment, I've sent it to the member's but haven't had the time to add it to Ravelry or Etsy yet.

Then instead of concentrating on the things that needed to be done I worked on my colour wheel.

As it had been sitting in a basket for a week I was able to look at it with new eyes and discovered there were a couple of issues/mistakes.

In the first photo you can clearly see that the third round of circles was too big, so I made them smaller, which would mean I had to fit in new fillers to fill the gaps.

Then I realised I had made a mistake and mixed up 2 of the second round circles so they were in the wrong place.

Unfortunately a lot of you couldn't see what I was talking about so I kept posting more photo's to try and show you where I had gone wrong.

 

I couldn't decide whether to correct the mistake or not, so I thought I would carry on crocheting to see if when I added the fillers it would be noticeable in the final piece.

And it is, also I am not happy with the look of the wheel, the fillers pull the circles out of shape and you can clearly see where the circles are joined, its far too messy for my liking, so I need to do a new colour wheel (or 2).

I realised that this swatch was not going to be a blanket because I was unhappy with it, so I have decided to publish it as a cushion cover.

Maybe there will be a series of cushion covers before I finally settle on a design I am happy enough with to put the time into a blanket.

I went for a wool walk on Saturday.
Starting off at Lynton Town Hall which is at the end of my road and finishing at the Iron age hill fort on the top of Hollerday Hill.

As my big girl had come to visit us for Easter I took the whole of Sunday off.
We had lunch at The Hunters Inn in Heddon Valley.
Its an amazing place, a hidden river valley full of peacocks, so far off the beaten track that its quite difficult to get to, but has a beautiful hotel with a huge beer garden that is perfect for sunny afternoons.
A lot of the valley is owned by the National Trust so is normally quite busy with walkers in the summer.
It looks misty in these photo's, but was actually quite sunny and warm and of course I took my crochet!

Then my crochet had a little bit of a pub crawl with Tinks and Me and Daisy and her boyfriend Adam.
Poor Phil missed out as he had to take our big girl back to Taunton to catch her train back to London.
Our first (or second if you count Hunters Inn) stop was the Beggars Roost, which is just round down the lane from our dye studio and has just reopened after being closed for several years.

Our next and final stop was The Rising Sun in Lynmouth which is our "local", I had a lovely wool photo set up, but my stupid iPhone battery died, so I wasn't able to take it.

Yesterday I mended my mistake and did a bit of gardening in my tiny courtyard, with my helpful assistants who take up the whole courtyard!
Its not easy re-potting and pruning when you have to keep moving a giant German Shepard!

My design process

I am often asked how I design my blankets, so I thought I'd share a photo diary of my process.
I don't start out with a drawing, my inspiration comes from many varied sources, quite a few memories, the yarn and colour I use, the place I live and lots of experimentation.

I like to develop an idea and make several variations of the same design, I have been unable to do this while designing for NDS as our yarn customers want something new and exciting rather than the same old thing again and again.
But now I am about to become a full time designer/artist I can indulge myself and have promised myself I will create exactly what I want to create rather than create something that has deadlines and guidelines

The following photo's are of the development of my Kissing Circles blankets both past and present.

The very beginnings of my Kissing Circles started in 2008 when I designed my Circles blanket
It was a 3 round circle within a square.

 

At the beginning of 2014 I decided to re-visit circles for the first blanket of my new book, so I used the same pattern as a base for my new design, however I discovered that if I made the circles with more rounds they didn't lay flat.
So I searched the internet for crochet circles patterns and became increasingly frustrated as I couldn't make any of them lay flat.
So I ended up putting several of the patterns together and then taking bits away to make a almost flat circle.

  

Book blankets 1 and 2 had big circles set within a square.

I spent the next few months designing squares and triangle blankets for the book, then mid June 2014 I decided to play with the circles again, this time I wanted to just have circles on their own with no squares surrounding them.
My lovely Valerie told me circles on their own don't work as there are gaps between them which makes wonky spaces.
I hate being told I can't do something, I'm too stubborn to listen so set out to prove her wrong.
So I played around until I managed to design a filler I was happy with.

 While researching circle layouts and how to fit them together I discovered Descartes Kissing Circles theorum, even though I only understand it on a visual level I find it fascinating.
And so Kissing Circles was born, it was made in a hurry and ended up a lot smaller than I intended as I wanted to get it finished and on the wall for the Fibre East show in July.

 My next Kissing Circles design was Myrtle Scarf, its a different circles layout and was inspired by colour of the berries that grow in the East Lynn gorge.
Myrtle hasn't had much love, I blame the photo's and my issues with ancient laptops with failing screens, but I guess it might be because a scarf doesn't have the same impact as a blanket.

   

In November 2014 we went to see the Kaffe Fasset exhibition in Bath, I love Kaffe and have always loved Kaffe. I had a bit of an ephiphany which lead to the decision to mothball NDS.
It also made me realise that I was allowed to use the colours I wanted because even though he doesn't realise it Kaffe has told me its ok.
So I re-made Kissing Circles and the new version is called Kissing Kaffe
The photo's are a bit rubbish, so I need to take them again

   

I decided to make another scarf in a new layout, but didn't get very far as I couldn't get the colours right.
Even though I struggled with the colours I loved the layout, so put it to one side to come back to later.

 

Over the past few weeks I have been talking about adding a new colour page to my blog.
A lot of people have contacted me panicking because they won't be able to buy NDS yarn to make their blankets with in the future and I need to give them a solution.
The solution needs to be a page full of colour that makes it easy to choose which yarns to buy, so I've been playing with tiny circles.

    

  

This weekend my colour page swatches turned into a new blanket, the photo's below show how it developed over the course of a couple of days...

  

   

    

There was an emergency trip to John Arbon Textiles who lives just around the corner and has his shop just around the other corner when I realised that I would need a neutral colour for the fillers, my original plan was to use very pale grey, but accidentally (on purpose) bought a slightly darker shade than I wanted, so ended up using a old NDS dark purple instead.
But I did buy a very dark grey Knit by Numbers DK, which is lucky as I'm planning to use this version as a sample piece to display on my stand and to make the real blanket in John Arbon's Knit by Numbers DK.

 

So watch this space to see how my Kissing circles develop and whether I will ever manage to publish a colour page :-)