What's My Name Again?

And it's only Monday. Hah. We had a very lovely long weekend, it's taking a bit to get back in the groove. We didn't do any official Thanksgivingy things, but we did have lots of family hang-out time, which was really nice. Curt, Lia, and I came in to the studio on Thursday and Friday and worked on a mural on one of the walls. Lia got some excellent painting done.

Since she's in a groove, we got started on her room yesterday. She's never had her own room (it's all been full of my crap) so we're finally getting it cleared out and I took her to Lowe's to pick out colours. She chose seven, I talked her down to five. The three main walls are pepto pink, baby blue, and bright leaf green. I'd post a picture, but I don't want to nauseate anyone. Look instead at our studio, filling up nicely with yarn!


On to the update! It will be this evening, 8 pm-ish (meaning no earlier than 8, possibly slightly after) EDT.

Tons of stuff for tonight, including a lot of quantity increases to stuff we have in stock already. Discontinued Traveller (as voted for on Ravelry) will also be on sale, as Kypria was last week). There will be:

Bugga!: 100 skeins of Longhorned Beetle

Traveller: Grimpen Mire, Tashkent, Wocott, Groton, Valparaiso, Costa Rica, Belize, Delft

Little Traveller: Tashkent, Groton, Deception Island, Wolcott, Valparaiso, Costa Rica, Belize, Delft, Yarnmouth

Kypria: #41 - Ill-Fated Adventure, some WRM Lamb (aka. one-off yarn, no story), and four other colourways for which I haven't written stories yet (I'll be scrambling to do that tonight)

QED: small skeins in Minkowski Space and Faraday

Eidos: Thalatta, Aeolus, Cyclops, Zeus, Proteus, Poseidon, Polimarchus

Cormo Roving: From Utter Nothingness

Dance: Carioca, Manipuri, Sword Dance

Gaia DK: Chicken of the Woods, Turk's Cap, Cornflower

I know I suck, but no preview pictures again today. We haven't even taken them yet. Did I mention that we're seriously behind?

Luxurious New Digs

Ah, the luxury of a grand new studio! Now we can work in warmth and comfort! Right?

Or not. In fact, the dyeing still has to happen outside until we get an exhaust system built for the stoves. But where at my house we had nice wide eaves to keep off the rain, here we had to pop up the tent. No problem, it's big enough. Until we turned on the stoves and found that the carbon monoxide gets trapped inside the roof and we grew light-headed pretty quickly. So now the tent is covering only the dye table and Stacie and I are in the rain. Well, right now just Stacie, because I conveniently had to come in to blog ;-)

It's little muddy too.

Okay, really muddy. 

My skirt is now soaked up to my knees. Yay. Herod meanwhile is curled up on a velvet chair in the office under the heater, a red chair, because he knows he looks good against red. "That's King Herod to you." 

"Yes, Your Majesty."

On to some good news! In the interests of organization, we need to clear out some remaining yarn that's dyed in discontinued recipes. It's a lot to do all at once, so we're doing one base at a time - this week it's Kypria. That means tomorrow, along with the update, a whopping 18 colourways of Kypria will be 20% off, until they're gone. Hooray!

Another bit of news, is that we're only working 3 days this week. (Crazy generosity, isn't it? We're giving those elves two paid days vacation! So we have something to remind them of when they're cold and wet and threatening mutiny.) That means that orders from tomorrow's update might not go out until next week. Please forgive and don't order if you can't wait a bit. Also, we have only the laptop computer right now (the desktop doesn't come over until we get a new door and lock) and we haven't been able to set the email up correctly, so we can read emails but not answer them. Sorry about that - but know that we're not ignoring you! If somebody out there is better with Macs and the mail app than I am, please give a holler. We need help!

On to the good stuff! We have soap and Bugga! for you tomorrow morning. (Tuesday 9:30 am EST update)

Bugga!: 100 skeins of Tulip Tree Beauty, regular quantities of Rough Fungus Beetle (new, shown), Violet-Tailed Bluet (new, shown), Nebraska Conehead, Malachite Butterfly, Question Mark Butterfly, and Milkweed Beetle

soap: loads of them, I'll just list the new ones here: Chesapeake Mist, Wild Poppy, Herb Tea, Cucumber Aloe, Blue Nile, Egyptian Goddess, Cedar and Sage

Thanks for bearing with us during the upheaval!

SGHQ, Final Touches

Having skipped Friday, I went to visit the studio a couple times this weekend and do some final organizing so we're ready for action tomorrow morning. The yarn is all there and ready now

and the lunch room has been fixed up better. 

Until yesterday a very important element was missing though, without which I think neither Sarah nor I could feel truly at home in a yarn studio. What's that, you ask? Why, a cat, of course! 

We visited the humane society on Thursday to make a selection and, having a hard time choosing, rationally talked ourselves into two. I picked them up yesterday so they could have a chance to acclimate before all the people and action show up. This is Herod:

He is a very handsome devil, and knows it. He's the more outgoing and has already made himself quite at home. Today I caught him lying in a box of tags. 

And this is Tiamat:

She's much more shy and it was hard to get a good picture of her, though once you get up close she's all for a cuddle. She's a beautiful calico with a perfect orange and black checkerboard on her back, a tiny thing with the cutest little sway belly. They're 5 and 4 years old, respectively, because we wanted to rescue cats who weren't so likely to get homes, not kittens which are sure to find a place.

Now we have a new studio. Ssshh, don't tell the elves, they don't know yet ;-)

SGHQ, Day 5

No pictures of the new HQ today. Want to know why? Because, for the first time since I hired any helpers, I stayed home from work. Because I don't live at work anymore. Even though, when they were here, I could certainly have retreated to the bedroom when ill, I still knew the work was there, continuing, and I couldn't keep out of it. But today our house is completely our own again and, after a brief visit to the studio, I took my sick self home to bed. It was really, really nice. 

After a recuperating sleep I did do a little playing around in my new empty space, moving in my sewing stuff and all the various piles of craft and fashion books that have been lying around the house. This makes me very happy, as does the resulting tidiness in the rest of the house.

See the trike in the foreground? Lia had a blast riding around the empty deck. BTW, my girlie is three years old today. I can scarcely believe it.

Rachel reports that the packing station is mostly set up now, but that the inventory is still in some disarray. Other than that, we should be ready to be back in action on Monday. Hooray!!!

SGHQ, Day 4

Today we toasted. Somewhat prematurely, I grant you, but Sarah and her crew where here so we used it as an excuse. The champagne bad farewell to the old space

and welcomed the new one.

We do have one work area already operational - the all important skeining station. 

The kitchen was also key to get together early.

The office area is very temporary as we're waiting for the landlord to build us an actual enclosed office. You can also see the dingy unpainted walls here, which we left that way since they'll be covered. 

Packing will be here, where we have good light for matching skeins

and dyeing and rinsing in the red-floor area (painted with super cool tennis-court paint). For now, of course, dyeing is still outside, while we wait for the exhaust system to be designed and built. Cross your fingers for dry weather!

Tomorrow we plan to bring the dyed yarn, packing materials, and any remaining odds and ends. I'm shocked how on target we are to the plan of moving in one week, especially given that we lost a day and a half to painting that I thought we wouldn't have to do.

SGHQ, Day 3

Today the stuff started to go over. I'm afraid I didn't get good pictures as I forgot to take the camera over with me, but I did get a few of the studio being dismantled.

We loaded Chrissy's (our newest elf - I know, we're way behind on the intros) car, Elissa's truck, and a trailer we're borrowing, and made two trips over, taking all the undyed yarn, the skein winder, the pots, stoves, dyes, and other miscellania. This space is now almost completely empty.

The dyed yarn and packing stuff are staying until tomorrow, while we finish packing up some recent orders. It's a bit chaotic just now.

By curious coincidence, the entry in this blog of one year ago today shows the studio when it had just been set up. There's even a comment from Sarah about taking notes for her future studio. It seemed so cavernous then, I thought it would be plenty of space for anything we wanted to do - a mere year ago. Looking back at those pictures now, next to the dismantling pictures, makes me a little sad. The space has been so good to us. 

At least I still get to keep it :-)

SGHQ, Day 2

Oy my aching back! Two days of cleaning and painting are taking their toll, especially as I've a nasty cold. But seeing the results makes it all worth while.

We picked 5 different colours of paint, to put on various wall sections around the room. Unfortunately, they're all rather pastel, but we had to go with that in order to use the less expensive paint. It's probably just as well, though, as they brighten up the space a good deal. 

Besides the walls, we're also painting a section of the floor where the dyeing and rinsing will be done to help protect the concrete and make the surface less slippery when it's wet and elves are walking with pots of scalding water. But first we had to treat it to remove grease stains and then etch the surface with acid.

Can you see the sizzling on the surface as the acid eats the concrete? That was pretty cool.

Each of us developed they're specialty:

Matt had to be pried off the Genie lift

while Carol became obsessed with the bathroom.

Here's how things look at the end of the day:

And a random pretty moment - autumn leaves reflected in a pool of acid on the floor.

Tomorrow: Painting the floor and starting to move the stuff.