Ahh yes.  Now I know that this isn’t about my fibre biz, spinning or knitting or anything else.  But as I said in the post below, it’s been a tricky few days, so I just thought I would. My husband has a thing about crickets.  He hates them, one bit him once and he has had it in for the entire species ever since.  Ahhh yes, my wild and woolly man who gets me to fix the computer when it’s fragged.  This man is a really clever guy, he’s a doctor at a busy hospital.  He’s smart, and incredibly well educated.  He is well read, and well respected by everone who knows him. 

On this one particular night, I was checking on  angel face in bed.  In the light from the hall, I could see a dark shape on the little one’s curtains.  I went closer to have a look, bingo, it was a cricket.  It saw me, waggled it’s feelers and disappeared into the folds.  Now, I know crickets bite.  I know they can get pretty ticked.  The baby was asleep, turning on the light would be dumb, so I decided to leave it be until morning when I could get at it without my little one being in the room and running around while a terrified cricket did the tango on everything that moves.  I  went to bed.

 At 2 am I was woken up by “him in doors”.  He was holding his chin and telling me he was going to go to the emergency room.  While I was trying to wake up, he decided to show me his wound.  So on top of being sleepy, I was now feeling nauseous  as well.  This is what happened. Him in doors always likes to fall asleep on the lounge in front of the tv at about 9.30pm (he’s there now).  He wakes up and comes to bed any time after midnight.  It’s nuts, I have tried to get him to just go to bed and stay there, nope, he does it his way.

 who am I to stop him form being a lunatic.  Anyways, he decides to come to bed. On the way there, he stops into the angel’s room to check in on her. As he gives his little girl a kiss and stands up to come out of the room, he sees it, just like I did.  A cricket.  The poor thing was probably asleep.  So what does this incredibly, bright, intelligent man do?  Does he back out quietly and leave everyone sleep so he can deal with his arch nemesis in the morning (when he can see).  Oh no, that would have been really smart.  So what cricket boy does is reach around in the dark for a suitable weapon (in a three year old girl’s bedroom). He grabs the hobby horse from the corner of the room (the one with the head of Donkey from Shrek).  He starts swinging that sucker around his head like something from the Kingdom of Heaven.  It connects with the curtains, and the cricket leaps out of the way.  Now my bright smart man, freaks, because he doesn’t want to get bitten. So he grabs his weapon, err, toy and ducks.

 But in the dark, and because he’s tired, he misjudges the distance and cracks his chin on the top of my daughter’s crib.   He bleeds all over everything, has to clean it up in the dark (for the record, angel face never stirred).  He looked like something from a zombie movie, big fat lip all covered in blood.  All he could say was “The bugger was laughing at me”.  So of he went to the Hospital to explain all that to a nurse that had been on duty for about a million years.

 That’s my boy. 

So too be honest, everything in my life has been on hold.  I have been knitting a bit, I have been making princess features a little pair of socks, when they are done, I’ll show them off but they are taking a while because I can’t put my girl down at the moment.  I have a pint sized packet of three year old not letting me out of her sight. So pretty much everything is being done one handed.  Fabo.  So no business plans in play, no spinning and no fibre arts either.  But, she is on the mend and the better she gets, the more I’ll get done.  I will post in the next couple of days.  Actually, I think I’ll post something funny while my creative juices ( hello ?) get flowing. Well, I thought it was funny.

BIg news, it’s been three weeks since I posted, wait a minute, that’s not the big news.  My baby is sick and I haven’t had any sleep, nope, that’s not big news.  I had been reluctant to say much in my blog until it all happened.  It did!  Last Friday, I sat on the lounge room floor and unpacked a very large box from New Zealand.  Inside it was … an Ashford Joy!  It’s a spinning wheel, and it’s in my house!  For me to use when ever I want! 

Woooooooooooooooohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhoooooooooooooooo!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!  

There were a couple of hiccups.  I read in the instructions that I needed to oil the bearings, with what?  Virgin pressed Olive Oil!  So out in the rain I went, to the lady next door and borrowed some sewing machine oil from her.  It had been in the garage since the discovery of fire, but it was sewing machine oil.  I am going to make her a spun and knitted dish cloth for that.  She doesn’t know that, but I am.Not only that, my fingers are still black with all sorts of colours from dying my own fibe and then spinning it!!!!!!!!!!!  Does it get any better?  No my friend, it doesn’t.  So I will post some pics and put up some of the dye notes and pics of the first attempts and I am off to change my little girl’s nappy and then, in the peace and quiet while she sleeps, spin.

I gotta a spinning wheel, I gotta a spinning wheel, I gotta a spinning wheel. 

 (Still want a Gem II tho, for the record.)

Well!  Blow me down and call me charlie!  I will continue my piece of setting up our business later but I had to write about this now.  I wanted a Little Gem II so bad, I thought it was driving me nuts.  I still want one, but after christmas (note to self, never listen to your husband’s drunk mate at a posh christmas party), I had come to terms with the fact that that wasn’t going to happen.  At all.

I am still really bummed by it.  But … being the grown up I am, I have kind of come to terms with it.   I have my long term sights set on a Majacraft Rose.  After christmas I set about trying to find myself a second hand Gem, it didn’t happen.  The costs of the Gem second hand were almost the same as new, and as I am funding this, I can’t afford the costs.  So I had to hit the net and see what I could find.

 I needed a wheel that could be folded away.  So I found an Ashford Joy that was a factory second in New Zealand, emails were sent, and it looked like I was going to get this wheel.  That was until last night, before you go thinking that I am going to pull a Gem out of my ear, think again.  It was another factory second joy, this time at nearly 100.00 aussie dollars cheaper, and thats including shipping, the other one was roughly 400.00 aussie dollars minus shipping.  Blimey, it’s raining Joy’s here.

 The only thing wrong with the wheel is that is has some marks on the board it’s made out of.  Considering that this is going to the breaking in, carrying to shows wheel.  I can deal with it. I like Ashfords as a company, but I don’t like the little bits of plastic that are beginning to creep in their products.  The only think that’s stopping me from getting a knitters loom is the amount of plastic on it.  Call me picky, but plastic like that can get brittle with age and break.  I am eyeing of a Kromski Harp loom, no plastic there but that will be later, much later.So there will be a wheel for jo, not the pretty one she wanted but a wheel.  Woo Hoo.  The next couple of weeks are going to be unbearable.  Still … I’m getting a wheel, I’m getting a wheel.

Ashford Joy = Pending … for real!

Listening to:  James Bond Themes

It’s raining here.  At the moment, I am in most comfy clothes and without a bra.  Thank God no one is coming today.  Mind you, I am half expecting a National Geographic photographer to be on my doorstep asking for pictures.  I never have to worry about wrinkles on my face.  All I have to do is take my bra off and as everything slides south, wrinkles gone!  Ah, nature so kind.  I have been playing on my husband’s tin whistle, while I followed my daughter down the hall.  She has a little drum she was playing and my husband was strumming a cardboard guitar and singing the beatles song “hey, you’ve got to hide your love away”, while we marched around the house.  That’s saturday morning here, and no bra.  And his singing was awful. But it got me thinking about stuff, don’t ask me why.  So I thought I would tell you all why Megan and I decided to go into biz, and how two magazines changed our creative lives.   This may be done over a couple of posts, like I said, it’s raining and I have a three year old who is potty training at the moment.  To be honest, I have been pfaffing about on the net all morning.  Thanks Ravelry.  My husband has been amazing, so here I am.

 Okay, picture two girls who have been artistic all their lives.  That’s me and my sister.  Our beautiful Nana, who we both miss, taught us how to sew and knit.  My earliest memories of time spent with her is of me sitting on the grey swirly carpet in her little apartment that had a view of the ocean.  Nana was in her chair, she was doing her cross word while I sat on the floor sewing clothes for my dolls.  She taught us both how to knit with endless patience.  Same with crochet, and embroidery.  She listened to us, laughed at our jokes, listened to us and made us feel like we were the most important people in the world. She started it.

Megan started painting early, and by early I mean early.  She was astounding adult artists when she was a kid, and going to art classes with grown ups.  She was and is, that good.  Me? I just spent years tooling around with drawing, I doodle, that’s why I’m a textile designer.  But we both knitted, sewed and made stuff, all the time.  Megan went and learnt classical painting techniques and her skills jumped a step up, if that was possible. She went from being really good to uber good.  I went to design school.  Years pass, and here we are, at home with little kids.  After I came back form China with our pretty little Empress, I found myself trawling through a local newsagent.  I saw a magazine in the craft section that really caught my eye, but the baby was really cranky so I went home.  The next week I was back there, and the magazine was there but I didn’t feel I could justify the $15.00 price tag.  I went home.  The next week I was back there, and the copy was still there and I thought “aw … bugger it,” I picked it up and bought it.  When golden empress was asleep, I read the magazine from cover to cover, and I was on the phone to megan babbling like an idiot.  She went out and bought the magazine and then she was on the phone babbling back.  Here is the trouble maker:

 We both went nuts, really nuts.  Our stashes at home tripled in size.  This magazine was all about how we saw crafting and art, it was exciting, but it was missing something.  Cloth Paper Scissors is a sterling magazine, and we both have all the issues now.  It fed the papery/sew-y sides of us but there was a gap.  Still we decided after hours on the phone that maybe we should use what felt like our hundreds of years of experience, and start a business.  Its very easy to say those words, “Lets start a business” but harder to put them into pratice.  But we bought stuff, heaps of stuff, and got our collage sheets sorted.  we have our own paper collage sheets.  We registered our business names, checked out the taxation bits and bobs and set down a bunch of goals we wanted to achieve and then …. nothing.

 For a whole year nothing.  One day, I got a call from Megan, she was babling like a fool.  She was talking about a magazine she had bought and she warned me, it was going to set all sorts of things going.  She said this was the missing bit.  So off I went to the newsagent and bought.  Here is the issue I bought home:

 I read it from cover to cover and my head started to spin.  She was right, this was for a better term, the missing link.  More tomorrow…

Ashford Joy= deposit pending 

Listening to : Duke Ellington 

 I am filling out time here, because the place where I buy my fibre is closed until the 14th of January.  This gives me heaps of time to get the design ready before the spinning starts, and felting and crochet and all the other things I am going to do.  This project will be made into a pattern, so if you want it, I’ll post a link for it.  It’s going to be part of the business thing we are doing, and on our etsy store which we have set up and on it goes.

There are  so many in’s and outs of design and setting up a business, that I am going to write about here, so you can follow along with us.  I spent hundreds and hundreds of hours trawling the web, reading blogs, seeing what people do, how they talk about it.  So I have decided to chart our merry go round trip from here.  So if anyone else is at the same place in their crafting experience, they can see how we do it.  

I am feeling way mellow at the moment.  I had a grand night sleep.  Brent has our Empress at the park.  I had a shower, washed my hair, spoke to my sister and here I am.  Sipping caffeine free diet coke, listening to Charlie Parker, and blogging.  Ahhhhh, life.

Onward and forward!  Design journals, here we come!  I am going to real honest here, I used to think keeping a design journal was a lot of bollocks, but, and don’t let my husband know, I was I wrong.  Design journals are a vital tool for the design process.  I currently have four on the go, one for quilting, one for knits and fiber arts, one general and one for mixed media art.  My knit/fibre arts journal goes everywhere with me. A lot of famous artists and designers use journals.  Poiret , one my personal fav’s used a journal, so did William Morris. 

So why do it?  Well, for starters it will save a bunch of trees.  at least get all your trees in one place.  Scribbling ideas down on a piece of paper, results in hundreds of bits of paper with scribbles on them being used for writing phone numbers or shopping lists.  Add worse still, they can be chucked away by accident.  So a journal is a place to get all your ideas down.  It also serves as a place to develop your ideas.  Add colour, play with features, move it around, tweak it.  And then you have a group of guidelines to use while you set up your actual pattern. 

There is a lot of talk on the web about the value of patterns and I have read some absolute rants about not needing them.  I am adding my 2 cents in here, all of that is cobblers.  My grandmother taught me everything she knew about  fiber arts and sewing, she used patterns and also did her own thing.  She was giving and kind and I am forever greatful to her and miss her terribly.  Patterns are about sharing what you have done.  Not everyone can share.  Stick a pack of three year olds in a room and see what happens.  And to be fair, you may have come up with something that you would never share in a million years because it means too much or has great business potential.  That’s all good, and I do it myself.  BUT … venting about folks who use patterns isn’t nice.  Implying that there isn’t any skilled involved with using a pattern is rude.  I have seen plenty of stuff out there made by self proclaimed designers without using patterns who have no skill technical or otherwise.  This goes right across the fiber arts, art spectrum .

All of the famous artists did, look at leanardo Da Vinci’s journal.  Holy Moley, now that’s a design journal. Anyways, a design journal is somewhere for you put in your inspiration, techniques, colour ideas, quotes, etc in effect becomes your very own crafting cook book.  Give it a go if you haven’t already.  You may like, you may not.  At least it gives you a record of what that fertile brain of yours can come up with.  For what it’s worth, I love mine.  (The pic above is of my Mixed Media Journal, I bought it on the Rialto Bridge in Venice, hand made in the shop I bought it from.  I have the address and contact details of the place I bought it from if anyone is interested.  See, I can share!)

Ashford Joy = deposit pending this week. 

Here is a copy of my little journal with my details that I have sketched out for the beginning of the Golden empress Peony jacket. As I said earlier, this is going to be the beginning of the design process to make this little jacket, and a break down of the design process that will go into it’s inception and execution! I am sounding a business like here, because I am a bona fide designer with the letters after my name to prove it. I tend to take this stuff seriously (well, not too seriously). I have decide that I am going to turn this jacket into a pattern that I will develop with my sister into a commercial product to sell. So not only will you get to see the jacket grow, but you will see what steps we take to get the pattern out and sold, and how we go about building our little, tiny, wee business into something hopefully a bit bigger, with customers, and everything!Okay sport fans, we’re off! How did I decide what to do and how do the professional alteliers and studios decide to do what they do. Firstly, the big guys. Everything is finely controlled, it’s nuts, everything is planned out normally 18 months to 2 years in advance. The shortest time being 12 months. Trends and colours are determined by a central body in Paris, which then filters down through every part of the industry until it hits the studios. So everyone is told what the look is going to be, what colours to use, and what inspired those choices.This is all good if you earn over a million dollars a year and lick stamps three times a day instead of eating. It’s also why every season everything looks the same. And no matter how ugly something is, you’re bound to see fifty other really ugly things just like it. Then there is the whole issue about just who has knitted the sweater you are wearing, and if a dollar a garment is enough for someone in a sweat shop or in another country to live on (I am being serious here, the out worker situation in the fashion biz is nothing short of an international disgrace).I just thought the other day when I posted that I would like to make something for my girl. So I asked her what colour she wanted and what she wanted on it, and that’s it. There’s a cafe au’lait drinking Maurice Chevalier in Paris at the moment twitching and he doesn’t know why. Huzzah! Vive le jo design! Anyhoo, so I got my design brief, which was :”Yellow mine favourite color mama, me like it. Me want woses and wosey tea too mummy, me like it.” And I have to say that it has to be one of the most direct design briefs I have ever been given.I knew right away that it would have Chinese styling, my baby is from China, so style is sorted out. Now comes the hard part, she told me what she wanted, and it would look silly on a chinese style sweater to have motifs that look like they have come from a spread in “Town & Country”. So I hit the net and some of my books. I made a rough sketch in my journal and made a couple of notes about motifs so I could see how it would roughly look. That’s what I have got here for you to see. Now what I am going to do, is add some colour to the sketch and start getting the feel for the motifs right. Next post I’ll tell you why I made a wee change in the “woses” and what else I have decided to add to the piece. I may also get my sense of humour back as well, assuming I get a full night sleep.Ashford Joy = pending