>The past few weeks I’ve been trying to concentrate on getting products together for the up coming CT sheep and wool festival. I have a bunch of handpainted pin drafted rovings done so I thought that I better make up some batts as well to have some variety. For some reason the batts have been harder for me artistically than any of the rovings that I do. I played around yesterday down at the mill for a while and it seems that the big carders are a little trickier because they card the fiber TOO well:). The colors that you want to keep a little seperate tend to get a little more blended than they would if they were on a drum carder. I tried doing layers, but I didn’t like the fact that you couldn’t see all the colors that you were getting and photographing a batt like this would be really hard to say the least. The next thing a tried was kind of mixing up the colors and the fibers. I got a much better result this way because you could see all of the colors that you were getting, but there is still some work that must be done.
My next plan is have things a little more planned out than I usually like to do. I am going to take a couple of colorways that I usually do as handpainted dye them up in indiviual sections and then try and make a few batts this way. Normally when I make batts I do it because I’m have lots of random colors laying around and don’t have a real particular order that things go onto the carder. I’ve never really pre-weighted the fiber before making batts, but in the long run this will hopefully make things a lot easier because there won’t be anymore guessing. It may also bring some new creative thoughts to the whole process and who knows, maybe some new colorways will be born.

>Lately I have been dying like a mad women. I’m so excited to offer so many new color ways to both my processing customers as well as my roving and yarn customers. The best part of it is that I am having a blast doing it. The whole creative process of creating them is just so much fun, even my 3 yo like to get involved with picking out the colors with me. Each colorway is available in somay different ways too. I can do it in pin drafted roving, batts, and yarn and each version of the same colorway comes out so different.

Tropical Rain

Numa Numa

Apple Orchard

Rainbow

>The spinning is going much better now. The yarn is coming out awesome. I learned that the biggest part of spinning was the pin drafting. If you don’t get that just right you won’t be doing any spinning. Here are a few pics of what I done

>OK, I can’t belive how long its been since I wrote anything in here. So much has happened at the mill and at home. The mill is very busy. We bought a spinner over the summer and it has been absolutely crazy since then. The learning curve on this thing is HUGE. Way bigger than I ever thought. I am no longer advertizing it because of this. I am just so far behind that I just don’t want to promise people anything until I know how fast the turn over is going to be and right now there are no garuntees on when I can get things back to people. As soon I get this figured out I will hopefully be able to put it back up on the website. I will post some pics of yarn that I have done hopefully by this weekend. There is definately more science and calculations behind the whole process compared to that of the roving process.

>Yesterday was our first festival and we had a great time. The weather was a little chilly, but there was no rain so thats all that matters. I had a great time meeting and chatting about fiber with everyone. It was so nice to finally put a face to everyone that I see on Ravelry as well as people that have emailed me from my website. A few changes that we need to make for next year is that we need to post a sign that we are picking up fleeces to process and make sure that people know that we are a fiber mill that has processed all the fiber that they were buying. Other than that I think that we did a great job. Here are some Pics of the booth.