A superfastrecapofStitchesEast2008.

Ifyoureadreallyfastyoumightbeabletokeepup.

Weleftandwedroveandweunpackedandwesoldstuffandwetalkedtopeopleand

werestockedandwesoldstuffandwesleptandweateandwesoldstuffand

wetalkedtopeopleandweknitandwecriedandwetalkedtopeopleandwe

fondledyarnandwerestockedandwesoldyarnandwepackedupandtoredown

andwaitedinlineandweleft.

Notice how sleep was only in there one time.

If that's all you needed to know, then no worries. Stop reading now. All is right in your world and you can carry on.

If your name is "Katie" or "Francesca," stop reading now. You already know what happened, and continuing on will force you to relive Stitches East.

If your name is "Mom," "Mama," "Mommy," or "Julie," you may want to  continue reading. Because I know you, and you're the keep-reading type.

If you have dial up, now is a good time to get rid of dial up. I can wait while you call your cable company. There are too many pictures for dial up. You'll be dialing up all day. When you've gotten rid of dial up, then you can hit the more button and see all the pictures.  I'll still be here.

OK, then. Here we are. I see that you've found me.

I will just continue making idle chit chat and delaying the inevitable sharing of cringe-worthy pictures that must follow an event like Stitches East.

If you have no idea what Stitches East is, it's a large gathering held every year. There are many classes on knitting and techniques, there are special events like fashion shows and dinners, and there's a large market where people can hawk their wares by yelling "YARN! WE HAVE YARN! HEY! WAIT! HEY! YARN? DON'T YOU WANT SOME?"

Basically, I stood on a box with a megaphone harrassing all the passers-by, making them feel guilty for not stopping in. "AWWWW... COME ON! MAN, I CAN'T BELIEVE YOU WON'T EVEN STOP AND TAKE A LOOK AROUND! SHEESH, WHAT KIND OF MARKET IS THIS? COME ON! JUST A LITTLE PEEK?"

Perhaps I am mischaracterizing the event just a smidge. Almost everything I said was true, though. Everything up until "dinners" was the God's-honest truth.

Stitches is actually quite a civilized event. I was the aberration, naturally. There are at least four Stitches Events held annually -- one in the East, one in the South, one in the West, and one in the Midwest. People in the North don't knit at all, so of course there wouldn't be one there.  That goes without saying.

How am I doing on the stalling? Pretty good?

Just checking.

Because I have all night, I can totally keep this up.

I can see this is going to take more than one post. There's just too many important, non-factual details to share.

Katie, my partner at Yarn Love, was scheduled to fly in Wednesday night, and I needed to pick her up at the airport.

Wait, stop the story. Would you like to know an interesting fact? The fact that I just linked the phrase Yarn Love will send Katie running to this blog. She has some kind of beeper/pager/flashing light/alarm system thingie that alerts her whenever I do something like this. It takes her, on average, 43 seconds from the time I hit the "Publish" button to the time she responds to a comment about Yarn Love. Let's time her, shall we?

How am I doing now on the stalling? Yeah?

If you all put up a post on your own blog that says something to the effect of, "I LOVE YARN LOVE," and then you link to the website. (www.shopyarnlove.com), she will be there. Quite quickly, in fact.

Are you aware that I actually own two businesses? How am I doing on the stalling?

One is connected to the site you're visiting now, Three Irish Girls. The other is Yarn Love. Katie and I own Yarn Love together, actually. We sell to other yarn shops, so you have to go through one of our retailers to get Yarn Love yarn.

I wonder if the fact that I just linked to Yarn Love eight times will get Katie here any faster. Will she respond eight separate times, do you think?

So, I picked Katie up at the airport. We spent the night in our hotel, and then got up at 4:45 the next morning to drive back to my studio outside of Washington, DC. We frantically tried to finish winding yarn, and my friend Francesca assisted us in flinging everything not nailed down into boxes, which my husband dutifully loaded on to the truck.

Oh shoot, you know what? I am just too tired to go any further tonight. I guess this will have to wait until tomorrow.

<Insert evil laugh here>

A world of hurt.

That's what I'm in. That's what happens when you spend eighteen hours in one day working with yarn. It hurts to lift my arms. I can hardly type.

Thank you all for the excellent ideas yesterday -- I have gone through and written down all of your suggestions, they were very helpful!

I'm going to be leaving tonight to pick up my Yarn Love partner Katie at the airport, and bright and early tomorrow we'll start loading up the truck and then unloading the truck and then loading up our booth and then collapsing in a heap on the floor for two hours and then freshening up our makeup for tomorrow night's market preview to keep from looking like a couple of crazed, over tired lunatics.

I will take pictures to share. If I can lift my arms to use the camera.

Thank you all again! MWAH!

Need some assistance.

That's obvious.

I need assistance on many, many levels. I need many types of assistance.

But that's not what you're here to help me with.

I am leaving in two days for Stitches East. Have I mentioned that before? I have? Oh.

Well, how about one more time for good measure: Me, Stitches, Booth 239, enough said.

What I need from you is assistance in remembering all the things I've forgotten. Aside from yarn, what should I be bringing? For some reason, I keep thinking that I need tape. Lots and lots of tape. Tape is useful in times of crisis.

I hope there's no crisis about to befall me.

So, let's say you don't know me from Adam, you stop by my booth, you see the pretty yarn, you see my smiling face, what else would you be wanting? What would make you think, "They should really have..."

I know it would be great if we had a huge selection of books and whatnot. That can't happen in the next 24 hours. Plus, our booth is really about yarn. And there are huge book vendors who do nothing but books. I'm sure I will be stopping by. I have a serious knitting book weakness.

I know it would be great if we had a huge selection of FREE yarn. That would be really great.

Also not likely, though. Sorry about that one.

Should I bring our patterns? Should I bring dyeing kits? Should I make pattern and yarn kits? Should I bring lots of business cards? Should I bring a colorway catalog in a three ring binder? Should I bring chocolate? Should I bring tape? Should I bring samples of our other yarn bases that we won't be featuring? Should I bring postcards? Should I bring...what? WHAT IS IT THAT I SHOULD BRING?

OK, those are the first things I need help with.

Here's the next thing I need help with:

If there is ONE colorway that I should bring, one colorway that you think is really appealing and splendiferous, what would it be? I have many dyed up, but I want to be sure I have what people are looking for.

Does anyone get the feeling that I should have done this just a touch sooner in the process?

Me too.

But it is what it is. It's 5:52 am, and I'm heading down to the shop. I've dyed over 100lbs of yarn this week, I can do a little more to make sure I have your favorite.

So, that's the assistance I need. Tell me:

1. What I'm forgetting.

2. What you would like to see if you were a customer

3. What one colorway I should be sure to remember

Please help an old Yarnista out! :)

Ask and ye shall receive.

Wouldn't it be nice if all things in life were like that?

Aiden and Carson are now available.

Because if you asketh, you shall receiveth.

Sometimeseth.

A rare peek into my methods.

Rare = never seen before. Just thought I'd get that out of the way.

I also need to get a few other things out of the way upfront.

1. I like yarn.

2. I like the color turquoise.

3. I like the color brown.

4. I like yarn

I said that already, wait. I've been very busy getting ready to go to Stitches East. I'm very excited. If you're planning to attend, please be sure to stop by and say hello -- I'll be in booth 239.

Well, that's a load off.

Now that we've got that out of the way...

From time to time, people will send me fabric swatches so I can create yarn to match. I think this is a fun challenge -- it's not something I normally do in the studio, so it creates an opportunity for me to flex my dyeing muscles. I can usually look at a color and figure out what dye components would go into making it. The trick is getting the proportion of those components right, and then also getting the saturation levels right on the yarn base you'll be using.

A minimally processed, Aran weight merino requires a different technique than a superwash sock yarn, for example.

Recently, a super nice customer sent me swatches from this fabric:



This is not the most accurate color rendering on my monitor. The color of the hippo in real life is actually more blue-gray, not periwinkle looking. And the elephants aren't black, they're inky blue. But you get the idea.

She wanted two colorways to match this fabric, so she could make something for her adorable son. One colorway was to match the blues, and one for the greens. She was very flexible, and let me have artistic license with shades.

I then worked up some digital swatches for her to choose from. These don't depict what the yarn will look like when knit up, just the colors and proportions of each color.

Here were the blue options:

#1:



#2:



And the green options:

#3:



#4:



You can see how each swatch coordinates with the fabric (again, don't directly compare my digital swatches to the picture -- the picture color is off, and I used close digital approximations of the colors in the fabric). In other words, there's a margin of error present.

Which swatches would you have chosen?

I know which I would have picked.

But I'm not telling, GEEZ.

My customer chose #1 and #3. Yay! So, I got right to work creating the dye colors and testing them on the yarn. I make small practice skeins, mix up a color, apply it to the skein, and then take the skeins through the whole setting and drying process. You really don't know how a yarn will turn out until it's had the dye set and it's been washed and dried. Some colors deepen as they get hot, others get lighter. Some colors tend to separate when mixed together, some don't. Some colors play nicely, others engage in fisticuffs.

So you can get an idea of the color matching process, here are some shots of the finished practice yarns:

You can see that these aren't representations of the finished colorway, they're just for color testing purposes.







Here you can see where I was practicing that sort of acidy-chartreuse green color. Would you believe that these two colors look almost identical when wet?



The lighter blues. Some are too light, others too sky blue, and not enough pale turquoise:



The medium shades. There was a bright blue and a steel blue in this fabric, so I had to work on both:



The dark blues were the hardest to match on this yarn. If I had been using a washable yarn, this would've been a piece of cake. It was hard to get an adequate color saturation that wasn't too blue and wasn't too purple and wasn't too black. Ultimately, I went with something not pictured here, which you'll see in a minute.



No, I am not blind. I know this picture is a little out of focus. At least, I don't think I am blind.

Am I blind? Maybe I need to check into this.

Here are the olive greens. Again, each of these look nearly identical when wet. Finding the right shade was a challenge.



And here's where the dyeing muscles get flexed. I nailed the brown on the first try. Because brown is my BFF. (Mom, that means "Best Friend Forever.")



After all this digital and virtual and mental and physical swatching, I was finally ready to dye the yarn.

Here are the two finished colorways. Ta-DA!





I had a really really hard time sending the green away to its new home. I wanted it for me. I hope these will get the coddling they deserve! If not, I'll be happy to give them a cozy place to stay.

Just sayin'.