My new fiber blog, and Hedgehog Fibres on Etsy

Hi all!

As you may already know, I have an established blog at Baba Black Sheep Yarns, where I post about knitting, spinning, a little gardening, and the occasional picture or two of food (my husband is turning into a great cook). I've been posting there for a few years, not as regularly I might have liked sometimes, of course.

This is a spin-off from that blog. No pun intended... Anyway, that one is a more general-topics blog. This new blog, though, is intended specifically for talking about dyeing fiber and yarn.

I've been working on learning how to dye fiber for the past few years, and I definitely plan to pass on some lessons I've learned. (I'm thinking this is the perfect excuse to buy that Flip Video Camcorder, finally!) I'm starting to get a handle on what parts of dyeing feel most comfortable to me, and what are more challenging. I was an art major (painter and sculptor) in college, and I always thought the "canvas" of fiber would be a great place to do color work for me. Well, I have a long way to go before I will feel like I can lay down color the way I see it in my head, so it aint as easy as just painting the colors I picture.

But what I've really been studying is the work of other (wonderfully adept) colorists. At work, when I take a break from programming to read the RSS feeds from my favorite Etsy shops, as I gaze at pictures of hand dyed and hand painted fiber and yarn, I'm simply lusting over the gorgeous images. I do occasionally buy yarn and spinning fiber, of course, but looking at the pictures is itself a wonderful activity that gives me no end of pleasure! Sometimes I save an image of an amazing brown or red that touches a chord in me.

This is "Nutmeg" silk yarn, dyed and sold by Beata of Hedgehog Fibres on Etsy. To my mind it only adds to the romance, that she is hard at work making these lovelies in her kitchen in Cork. Someday I may have to make a studio visit ... wouldn't that be a perfect excuse to head for Ireland?!

This is also by Hedgehog Fibres - she doesn't name her spinning fiber colors, only her yarn colors; I don't know why. So it's an unnamed, but still gorgeous palette of brown, olives, and deep rose shades that just blow me away.

Those are both long gone (although she does repeat her yarn colors, so you will probably find Nutmeg again if you keep checking), but this spectacular vision in orange is still available:

Honestly, though, I don't know whether I can keep from snapping it up myself, so you better act fast. The only thing that stops me is my already-GIANT fiber stash and the fact that I'm in either two or three spinning fiber clubs this year (I'm not actually sure) so I have a lot of other fiber coming my way, very soon.