But now, thank dog, spring has finally broken winter's siege. I've cleaned the house from top to bottom and decided to revivify my blog (along with my plants, whose leaves haven't been drooping, but I can't remember the last time I watered them, either). Unfortunately, I haven't finished too many big projects to show you, though I have managed to weave a few scarves out of 2/14 hand dyed. So much knitting's getting done at work that I get home with tired hands, happy to just spin or stare at stitch libraries and dream of future sweaters.
It's been an amazing process at work since I've started designing full time. I feel myself growing in bounds with every sweater, like I can practically feel the wrinkles in my brain forming. “Ooohhh, so THAT'S how you shape a sleeve cap” and so on and so forth. I owe so much to Linda for sitting by and answering all my nagging questions. I kind of regard her as my technical advisor, though I'm sure that's not part of her official job description. Kathy's been wonderful at keeping me inspired, giving me neat things she finds in magazines, since I'm way too butch (and poor) to consider getting a subscription to Vogue, though I do admit that I secretly like to peruse them when I get the chance, I just have to make sure no one's watching =). And Mary, dear Mary, is the marketing coordinator and the all-important no-ma'am. Essential for keeping my head somewhere beneath cloud-level . “Hey , Mary! I was thinking about making a big, ol' batwing-sleeve sweater out of tencel with intarsia hieroglyphs going all around it. Think I should go for it?” “Mmm... no.” “...nuts.” At first, it got me a littl e nervous and down on myself, but now I can't imagine designing without her input somewhere along the line. And my test knitters! O! I would be a woman dead from exhaustion and bloody stumps for fingers were it not for the noble efforts of Barbara, Marion, and the many others who've given up their spare time to help me crank out the ever-increasing number of designs. I can't do it without them. I've tried, and it ain't pretty.
So I'm getting the hang of things and I think the next catalog is going to be really, really stellar. It took the combined weight of Kathy, Linda, Mary, and even the store manager Karen, but they've finally gotten me to design sweaters that are bottom-up and in pieces, at least for this catalog. The reasoning that finally cowed me is that they need equal representation for all different kinds of construction methods, and we already have a ton of top-down, so it's time to even the scales. It still smarted a bit, and there was a lot I had to learn and re-learn, but I think the results are very nice and I'm actually pretty proud of the designs. Stay tuned for the Valley Yarns catalog!
On the home front, I've been doing a lot of spinning. Gail's dyed up some gorgeous merino roving that makes a self-striping sport-fingering weight yarn that looks like it's out of a dream.
I just don't feel right keeping it under a bushel. I'm going to try to sell it on etsy when I get a little more inventory, but it's slow going. It can take all weekend to do a single 340-ish yd skein, and I'm already getting a little fatigued. Not a good sign. But I'll keep at it! And if it doesn't sell, maybe I'll try knitting shawls out of it and selling those. Up up and away! And here's hoping I can remember to put more in this blog.
