Tuesday, December 28, 2010

New Yarn

Remember the push in the last few weeks to sell my stuff before Xmas? Well, it worked well enough and now I'm seeing the first results from all that sales work: new materials for my next batches of weaving.



I get great exercise as a weaver. Not only is the giant AVL production loom akin to a treadmill, but I also have to transport all of the materials in and out of the forest where my cabin studio lies. This entails a half mile hike up a pretty substantial hill, across a bunch of mud, and up one last incline to the cabin. I can only haul 100 lbs of stuff at a time, so it takes a while to get anything done.





Here's the view on my back porch once I got the new boxes of yarn up the hill. Those purple and orange boxes are the yarn I already had in stock. Their inscrutability is the reason I got clear boxes this time. Yeah, clear plastic is more brittle and costs more, but I'm about to have way too much yarn to look through boxes every time I need some. I need to be able to see the whole stash at once and know how much I have of each color. With about 100 lbs of yarn coming in every month and at least 75 lbs getting woven up, it's only going to get more complicated.



And here's all of my yarn sorted into colors in the new boxes. You can see my production pipeline by looking at the volume of colors here. The next beam will be various shades of white. Then comes navy blue. I'll need to get more blue yarn before I will be able to weave that beam, but I've got a pretty good start. Then comes forest green, then burgundy. I need a lot more yarn for those two beams, but I've got plenty of time to get it.

Oh, and the back porch staging is temporary. Water gets into everything in this environment whether we think it's sealed or not. Those boxes will all have to fit in the cabin somehow.

Now that I've got all the yarn, it's time to bring my warping setup up-to-date and get warping! Woohoo!

3 comments:

teresa@teresaruchdesigns.com said...

So do you have a shed or covered place that the boxes get left at or do have to pick them up somewhere and then pack the boxes in? Sorry I live in Oregon and know what the wet can do. I thankfully have a covered porch where boxes get left.
Teresa

Unknown said...

Hi, Teresa,

Our place is so rural that FedEX won't come out here. They leave everyone's packages with one business in town. Then the boxes get packed in my van where they're safe from the elements until I haul them up the hill.

Thanks for following my blog!

Blossom

Anonymous said...

Blossom, that stash makes my recent 10 kilo purchase of merino look paltry! Looking forward to seeing what you make from it all. Beverley