Mustard Seed Yarn Lab

I don’t even know where to start. It has been a while since I’ve posted, I know. And every time I look at my StatCounter and see that people are looking at the blog, I feel guilty. But since a few weeks ago, life has gotten CRAZY busy.

I work from home, proofreading, and sometimes it’s really slow and I have extra time and that is when I dye yarn, clean the house, knit Christmas presents, type up blog posts….catch up on life. But since before Thanksgiving, work suddenly got busy. And I let my fulltimers have Thanksgiving weekend off. And the work came in fast and furious, but not many proofers were around to deal with it. Including me. Well, we’re dealing with it now. I’ll have worked almost 50 hours this week by the time today is done. My brain is tired.

I haven’t started Christmas shopping….I have a 4 year old who has asked for everything in every commercial he’s seen. (No, he will not be receiving very much of it but I think I should get him a few things 😉 I have 3 knitted Christmas gifts to finish, and only 24 days to do it. I have about 10 more skeins of yarn to dye before I can take pictures of it all, and upload it to my new Etsy store, which has nothing in it at the moment.
I need to make my tags, of which I have to show you. Here’s one of the 4 I’ve finished so far:

I’m madly in love with it. My husband designed my logo and I’m making the tags with the rubber stamp he had made of it. Mustard Seed Yarn Lab is being birthed! It’s not here yet, not completely, but I figure it will be by the time December is over…I hope.

And can I just say, Yarn Lab is such an appropriate title. You should see what I’ve got cooking today. It’s very complicated…I don’t even know if I can explain it completely, but what I’ve got going right now, as we speak, is probably best described as a debacle. And the whole experiment, well, I would call that a fiasco.

It started with a grand idea I had to make self striping yarn. I had an idea, a picture of a contraption in my head, and I was determined to try it. But how? Well, let’s start with 5 heavy pint glasses on the floor, now how about a wet skein of undyed yarn…now imagine the wrapping of the yarn around the glasses…carefully…caaaaarefully….and now we’re tangled. Tangled, wet yarn. Now imagine me taking the rest of the day to untangle a skein of yarn that is half hooked up to a contraption on the floor. Picture backache and tears, and a 4 year old accidentally knocking over one of the glasses, inciting a temper tantrun from his mother. At 8:30 at night, said mother was done untangling and wrapping, and decided to tie off the different loops of yarn…only to realize this was never going to work.

That mess of yarn sat on my dining room table for a couple of weeks. Sections tied off, stinking of vinegar, waiting for me to do something with it, even if it meant undoing the whole thing and just plain dyeing it. Now here’s the kicker. After I realized this was obviously NOT the way people make self striping yarn, I thought I’d be sneaky and google “How to dye self striping yarn.”  I feel like such an idiot. Why I didn’t think of this in the first place, I have no idea. Oh,…there is a MUCH easier way to do it, and rather than explain it, you can google it for yourself. Sigh…

So. The yarn. I decided for my lunch hour today I would show this crazy looking sectioned off yarn who was boss. After all, miracles happen right? Well,…let’s just say I feel like a mad scientist in my yarn lab.  Rather than trying to describe the scene that just took place, just go ahead and picture yards and yards of tangled plastic wrap, drips of acid dye, paper plates, plastic cups, rubber gloves, plastic medicine syringes and a mad dye scientist running back and forth 40 times from the dining room table to the kitchen sink. It was not an ideal situation. But now, now my friends, I have a large pot of steaming yarn hanging out in a colander precariously placed on top of the pot.

I can’t wait to see what becomes of my creation. If it were green, I’d call it Frankenstein.