Time Bisected

Yes, we have a logo.
Right now most of my time is spent of getting this business up and running, ASAP. On the other side, today I am about to start developing some of my own kits under the Krafti-Kit name.

Believe me, I know the most time consuming part of making a kit is writing the instructions. Fortunately we have a team of testers up for the task of checking each pattern before selling. As someone who has been a pattern tester for knitwear designs off and on these past years, I know what that means. It is somewhat a thankless job, but the reason I've always done it is to expand my skill set. In this case, we're going to try and do the same thing by having knitters to needlepoint, crocheters doing spinning, etc. An adventurous type is needed, for sure.

On the personal knitting side, I'm trying to finish some languishing projects that I now I'll want to wear soon. But, you know it's kinda bad when I shorten a sweater because I can't stand to knit on the body of it anymore. UGHH! Knitters need a sense of humor, don't we? If not, those pointy needles would become objects of torture for us or those we love...

Oregon Flock and Fiber is next month and if nothing else, it means that I will be immersed again into the fiberarts community again for 4 days. Here's hoping the weather does it's normal sunny September thing here in Oregon. It's great spinning outdoors. It's also great teaching and showing the little ones what we do. In fact, I think I've had more of that going on than ever. When we meet at the downtown library for the monthly Spinnerati meetings, more and more kids drag their parents in to see what we're doing.

Okay, folks. Back to work and dreaming of the next projects to pull together!

Sock Summit -- Experience of a Lifetime

photo courtesy of Deb Accuardi

I am not going to do an overall recall of my entire Sock Summit experience. That's why this is so late in coming! There's too much to say and so many feelings about the whole thing. As many of you already know, I spent 3 days doing registration. I have NO regrets about that. It was a wonderful way to meet my sock buds and celebrities alike.

The part of my weekend that was really unexpected is that I was asked to assist a teacher on Saturday afternoon. I didn't know who she was, or what her work was like. I was just looking forward to helping a teacher in any way that I could and get to be a fly on the way of her class.
The teacher that I was assigned to was Marjan Hammick, aka yarnissima. Traveling all the way from her small village in The Netherlands, her tales of rural life and growing up in a knitting culture were fascinating to me.

I'm generally pretty clear about what I find to be "fun" to know socks, and um...NOT. If I had time to examine Marjan's work in advance, I might have been more guarded about the class. What happened instead is that I saw her patterns and was called to the challenge. Marjan's design's caress the foot in the most amazing ways, bringing in traditional twisted, Bavarian stitches to truly fluid and inspired designs.

That Saturday night I went home and immediately cast on the most simple socks "Brainless" using techniques that I was not so very familiar with. A week later I had the socks complete and any worries I had about fit cleared up in the relaxing of the yarn in the first wash. The only thing that I did differently was to work the whole upper leg in stockinette, as it seemed in the pattern to be optional. Probably not, but moving up a needle size, it worked just perfectly for me and it added to the elegance of the design.

Yesterday I cast-on her latest design, Sottopassaggio.

Although better pictures of all of these socks exist elsewhere, these are my pictures of the same socks when I got to actually feel and examine their textures and construction. These were taken my my moment of glee!


Look at that calf detail!
And finally, below is my "brainless" using yarn from Miss Babs.
And for those of you who know me, I always make time to knit, right? Sweaters are just going to have to wait until I get a little of this out of my system!

New Business Venture!

Right now I'm embarking on a new business venture with my friend Laura Cohen.
We're very excited to say that we're looking for craft kit vendors to sell to this new business,
Krafti-Kit

We've really been looking forward to the day that we could formally announce this new project and hope that you know some craft folks who will be interesting in contacting us with submissions.

We really see this as a start for some new "cottage industry" and a way for folks to get more exposure for what they're already doing.

Our time line in...ummmm. NOW!

Sock Summit Post 1

This is the sweater I finally finished and will be wearing today to the Sock Summit.

And yes, day 2 of registration. Yesterday I started at 5PM after the folks before me had been there for 4 of the first hours. The message to register before the whole shindig started got things going on the right foot. Although it took me about 20 minutes to catch onto the process, all went smoothly for me.

Won't even TRY and process the whole event until it's over, but so far am as excited as can be. I feel happy every time I send a student on their way with tickets, book and schedule in hand. I have to say though that I was so tired by the time I got home last night I just flopped in bed. And seeing how exhausted the planners were just made me feel like a wimp! I hope they got some decent sleep, although probably not.