For centuries, the well-to-do of Britain came of age by embarking on a Grand Tour of Europe, where they took in all the great art and architecture and history that the continent has to offer. It was a fine tradition that defined an era.
And so, in that vein, I am embarking on a Grand Tour of my own…
The SpaceCadet’s Grand Tour of… Cleveland!
with two Trunk Shows on Fri May 11 and Sat May 12.
If you’re in the Cleveland area, do come and join us!
Friday, May 11 at River Colors Studio
1387 Sloane Avenue
Lakewood, Ohio 44107 (map it!)
(216) 228-9276
(where theYarn Harlot will also be teaching classes that day. Yeah, you read that right!)
Saturday, May 12 at Soft N Sassy
8047 Broadview Rd.
Broadview Hts., OH. 44147 (map it!)
Phone: (440)746-9650
It’s going to be a fabulous weekend filled with yarn, colour, and all manner of fibery goodness. I’d love to see you there — please come and join us!
Somehow….. somehow it turns out this weekend is the Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival (MDSW). And even though I’ve had my hotel room booked for months, it has still managed to sneak up on me. Will you be going? If you will, please look for me — I’m not vending (I wish!) but I’ll be shopping and having the fibery time of my life! You can spot me by the SpaceCadet tattoo on my cheek and please stop and say hi — I’d love to meet you guys in person!
But listen, there’s someone else who’ll be at MDSW that I want you to meet, and even if you’re not going to be there this weekend, you’ll still want to get know her. Her name is Melissa Tompkins-Stahl and she creates beautiful buttons and knitting patterns as Melissa Jean Handknit Design.
I’d mentioned previously that I met her at Rhinebeck, but I love her work so much, I wanted to get a little more in depth with her and she was kind enough to answer a few questions for me.
Which came first, the buttons or the knitting patterns? And which do you feel is more your ‘true’ calling?
Knitting definitely came first. I was writing children’s patterns and making them up as kits. I wanted to write the patterns, dye the yarn and source the buttons. I met some potters who made buttons for me, but I had specific ideas of how the buttons should look, I decided to start making them myself. I worked for a pottery called MacKenzie-Childs and felt comfortable venturing out on my own…however, there was still a learning curve. I had to do quite a bit of research along with trial and error before my buttons were good enough!
As far as knitting, I knit a lot but have not released any new patterns in a few years. I am waiting for my youngest to go to school full time, which she will do this fall. I have 2 patterns to release this summer…Dublin Tee (pictured below) and Janey Pullover (a rerelease actually). With my kids in school, I feel I can better meet deadlines…pattern writing involves more than just me…test knitters, tech editors, photo shoots, and the public. Buttons making is much more solitary and I can fit it in as I can. I can’t wait to get more ideas out of my sketchbook and onto my needles.
So, tell me what you love about your job…
I love that I work in my studio at home…I can crank my music, or listen to podcasts and work. It affords me time to take care of my family while doing something meaningful to me. I also like the process of making buttons, working with my hands, with color. I love the element of surprise when I open the kiln and find shelves of color…that never gets old!
How crazy does it get for you before a big show like MDSW or Rhinebeck? How many buttons do you bring, and how long does it take for you to make them?
No matter how far in advance I start gearing up, the 2 weeks before Maryland and VERY busy. I bring about 5,000 buttons (I did not count) but there are a lot!
Where will you be located at MDSW this year?
I’ve changed from a tenter to a barn dweller this year. I will be hunkered down in Barn 4, booth 12.
What new or interesting buttons are you taking that we should be looking to nab at MDSW?
This year I’ll have very small buttons with shanks, I am very excited about. They lend themselves well to sock weight yarn. On the other hand, I will also have some very large buttons, great for bags, hats and shawls. I will also have a beautiful teal color and a deep red.
Where else can we buy your buttons and knitting patterns?
Don’t you love her buttons?!? I do — and I’m going to buy a ton of them at MDSW so if you want them, you better get there before I do! I have a hankering to knit some lovely wide wrist cuffs and put Melissa’s buttons all over them. What do you think?
Oooh, and there’s one button up there in particular that’s really calling to me — ten points to the first person to guess which one it is!
At Knitters Fantasy the other weekend, a customer was looking through the bundles of gorgeous, adorable mini-skeins that we’d brought to introduce people to the Mini-Skein Club. She was completely lost in them, studying each one intently as she moved her hand from bundle to bundle, looking for exactly the right colours.
The mini-skeins have sold like hot-cakes at every show we’ve taken them to. There’s something irresistible about hundreds of miniature skeins of SpaceCadet yarn all piled up together!
And even though we normally sell the mini-skeins exclusively through the SpaceCadet’s Mini-Skein Club, I love taking them to shows. Why? Because it’s so much fun to watch people suddenly spot them, come rushing over to look more closely, and then — just like the customer at the show the other weekend — get totally lost in finding their perfect combination of colours.
And the mini-skeins start so many conversations. “What do you use them for?” (answer: here) “What could I make with them?” (answer: here) And my favourite, “So, what is this club you do?” I love that one because it gives me the opportunity to explain how the club works. Each month, club members receive a parcel of mini-skeins in colours that I’ve chosen for them (as a complete surprise!). The mini-skeins are made up of a variety of SpaceCadet fingering yarns, so you get a chance to try the different yarn types. And that the best thing is that you can cancel your subscription as soon as you have enough Mini-Skeins for your project. See what I mean? It’s a great club!
After looking carefully every single bundle, my customer finally chose a favourite. And, as she walked over to me to pay for it, she clutched it in front of her chest with both hands. She had a huge grin on her face and light in her eyes that told me she had just found herself some treasure.
“So,” she said, as she reached into her bag for her credit card, “what made you start this club?” She had set the bundle of mini-skeins down on the table, but one hand rested lightly on them — protecting them, laying claim to them. I smiled to myself. If she could see herself in a mirror, the answer to her question would be obvious.
The shine in her eyes… her hand on the yarns… the little moment of joy they’ve already brought her and all the joy her new mini-skein project will bring her when she gets home…
A couple of weeks ago, I showed you the SpaceCadet collections — groups of colourways designed to go together and to make it easier to choose coordinating yarns for your projects. And one of the groups I showed you was the Submerge collection. Remember it?…
I started this collection by playing with colour, until I created a variegated colourway that just made me gasp as I pulled it out of the dyepot. That colourway was Submerge, a rich combination of blues, teals, greens, and gold. I fell completely in love with it, and so I developed an entire collection around the colours in that skein. And that wonderful gold, I named Honey. See how well they work together?
And the it’s not just the variegation of Submerge that pulls the collection together. This lovely rust-red is called Pride. See how it works with Honey as well?
Now, I’m not a yellow person — not at all. It always makes me look washed out and tired,so I never find myself drawn to yellows or golds much at all. But there was something about the depth and richness of Honey that I just couldn’t pull away from. I kept going back to again and again, turning it over in my hands, just loving the colour.
And so when I was in studio, I found myself going into every new experimental colourway by starting with the recipe for Honey. Every single one. And I thought to myself, This is never going to work. You can’t base every new colourway on Honey! Not everyone likes yellows. And everything will come out looking like Submerge…
Just goes to show how much I know. Because try as I might, I couldn’t stop myself from starting with Honey and, as I laid on layer after layer of dye, the whole colourscape began to change, until I finally pulled this out of the dyepot…
This blew my mind. This is gorgeous! And this is nothing like Submerge — it doesn’t go with the collection at all. It looks completely different. And yet, it started with Honey. And, looking at it on its own, you might not even think this goes with Honey at all. Until you put the two of them together… and you fall in love all over again…
I’ve called this new colourway Diaphanous. And I think, if it plays its cards right, it might be the start of a whole new colourway collection come the Autumn. I’ll keep playing with it, and we’ll see… (In fact, I’ve already started. Here’s what happened when I laid more colour onto Diaphanous.)
In the meantime, there’s a whole bunch of gorgeous Diaphanous and Honey that I’ve just put in the shop. It’s in Izarra, a wonderful BFL-nylon yarn that Ruth Garcia-Alcantud of Rock & Purl used to design her elegant Medianoche gloves.
(Oh, and two of those yarns in the Diaphanous photo up there aren’t in the shop yet. One is a lovely delicate laceweight and the other is an exquisite new yarn that is so luxurious it’s almost scary. And because they’re so special, I’ll be putting them first into a Yarn Adventurer’s email — if you’re on the Yarn Adventurer’s mailing list, look for that in the next few days. And if you’re not, keep an eye on the shop for them in about ten days).
Today’s post was supposed to be the one I’ve been looking forward to writing for a long time — a little guided tour of the development of a brand-new colourway called Diaphonous, (which I just love!), and then a shop update with some lovely yarns in that colourway. But somehow, as I’m looking at the photos I took today, they just aren’t quite right… the colours are just off. And I can’t be showing you the development of a colourway if the photos don’t show the colours. So the pictures will be retaken tomorrow and the blog post written later this week. Watch for it, ok? This colourway is worth it!
But… that leaves me sitting here at my computer blog-post-less, no idea what I’m going to write. The past few weeks have been insanely busy and I’ve barely been able to catch my breath: my husband (and head skeinwinder) has been in England for three weeks, I’ve been taking care of the family on my own, while tying and dyeing and winding like mad to build up stock again after we got mobbed at HomeSpun (what a day!), getting ready for Knitters Fantasy (last Saturday and wow, what a great day!) and… and… there was something else… What was it?
Oh, yeah, taxes. I was trying to do my taxes. And, I’ll tell you, with everything else that was going on, it was a real struggle to make myself sit down and work on the numbers. So, y’know, I tore into the accountant’s office late last week, my hair sticking out all over the place and a wild look in my eye, and dumped a stack of papers on her desk. “It’s all here,” I said. “…I think.”
She picked up the papers and cast her eyes over the first few sheets, and we quickly went over the main stuff. W-2zzz… 1099zzzz… 401kzzzzzzzz….
Things My Non-Knitting Accountant Says
But I’ve got to tell you this, because you’ll love it. After she looked through all that stuff, she came to the SpaceCadet spreadsheets. And as she looked over the numbers for the business, she said almost unconsiously, “Yarn! …Yarn!”
Now, the business is healthy, but the numbers are hardly mind-blowing, not by any means. But my accountant is not a knitter and, when first I told her I dye yarn for knitters and crocheters, I am quite sure she was under the impression that there were only a handful of you guys out there, and that you probably buy only a skein or two of yarn per year. (I mean, you only knit booties, right? Only when you’re pregnant. Of course.)
She remembered I was in the room and looked up again. “I… I wouldn’t even know what to do with it,” she said, still clearly flummoxed by the whole yarn-concept. “What do they do with it?”
“They knit with it,” I said, grinning. I couldn’t help it, her obvious confusion was too entertaining. “Here, look… ” and I pulled out my knitting, the Walnut Grove shawl in the Yarn Alliance’s Selfish colourway.
She squinted at it, then reached out and touched it gingerly with her fingertips. “Oh!” she exclaimed, “It’s really thin!” And then… “You could make something normal with it!” Why, yes. Yes, you could. My grin spilled into a chuckle.
I love dyeing yarn for you guys. And, she loves crunching numbers. It’s all good.
You know that moment when you suddenly realise something that should have been blindingly obvious to you? You roll your eyes, maybe slap your own forehead, right? Yeah, I had one of those moments the other day.
A few weeks ago, I updated my wholesale information for local yarn shops that carry SpaceCadet yarn, and when I did the colourway images, I naturally grouped them by collection. Collection?, you say. Yeah, I know I do a lot of crazy, experimental dyeing — and that’s what a lot of you love about SpaceCadet yarn — but I also develop and dye set collections of colourways. They’re colourways that go together, that mix-and-match, that will work beautifully in the same project.
I love these collections. Love developing them, love how one colour leads me to the next, love looking at them all together when they’re done. And my head-slapping moment came when I realised… I’d never shown them to you!
Here, let’s fix that. Now, the first one you’ve seen before — it’s the Quilt Collection and I wrote a post showing you the picture that inspired it, but I didn’t really show you the whole collection together…
The thing I love about this collection is that the semi-solid blue, greens, pink, and red work together on their own, but when you add the varigated yarn, Quilt on a Green Bed, suddenly, they are all perfectly coordinated. I see a cardigan knit in one of the semi-solid colours, with the details such as collar or cuffs knit in the variegated yarn. You may see it done the other way around. Either way, I love how they all come together.
Ok, so here’s another collection, one I don’t think I’ve shown you as a group before…
This one I love — it’s so rich, so dark and yet colourful, playful. And that Honey — oh, how it pops! And again, all the semi-solids pull together with Submerge, the variegated yarn, for a completely coordinated look. Can you see a project in there? Is it one colour and gentle, or is it popping with wild colour?
And just quickly, another soft and springlike collection…
That middle colourway there, it’s one of my favourites ever ever ever. And from it, I pulled out Gentle, the pink on the right. They’re gorgeous together.
The last group of yarns isn’t a collection, so I shouldn’t really include it here, but it’s in the wholesale information and I love these colourways so much, I can’t help but show you! They’re colours that make you just want to dive headfirst into the computer screen, aren’t they?
My goal in creating these collections is to make it so that you can look at the yarns and just see your project — see the colours working together in the patterns you’ve been thinking about starting. I wanted to make it easier to jump into variegated yarns by creating other colours that work with them, so that you can choose whether those variegated yarns are going to dominate your project or just act as a highlight.
And then a few days ago, I suddenly realised I’d never shown them to you! I’ve only ever put them in the shop — individually, even — and not really done anything to tie them together for you. Headslap!
So now that you’ve seen them as they’re meant to be seen, what do you think? Can you see your project? Tell me — because I’d love to know — would it be made of the wildly variegateds, or are you partial to the semi-solids?
Shop Update!
Speaking of going in the shop, I’ve just done a shop update. Great yarns with lovely cashmere, in some of the colourways straight from these collections. Oh, and one eye-popping colourway that I may never be able to repeat again!
