Driven by an obsessive, passionate and often tumultuous relationship with colour, Felicia Lo, the founder of SweetGeorgia Yarns, has been writing about all things knitting, spinning, dyeing, and weaving since 2004. Follow her adventure in colour and fibre here »
On your marks! Get set! SPIN!!! This fall, the Spinning & Weaving Group of TNNA is planning an event named Spinzilla to be held during Spinning and Weaving week, October 7-13, 2013. The challenge is to form teams to see who can spin the most yarn during spinning and weaving week! Spinzilla will be a…
The joy of working with effectively the same group of students at Place des Arts over three terms is that we can build on what we have done in the term before. Since September, these students have learned to dye fibre using immersion and hand-painting techniques but we never delved too much into colour theory….
This is a guest post from Liisa, one of our studio assistants and dyers. Her undeniable passion for yarn and fibre, knitting and craft totally won me over and in December 2012, she moved to Vancouver from Finland so that she could join our studio. This is her story of how she learned to spin, from…
Our TNNA booth photos are up in the Spring 2013 issue of Spin-Off Magazine! Liz Gipson penned an article entitled “So You Want to Start a Business” for the magazine and included a bit about our work in dyed spinning fibres. The whole Spring 2013 issue focuses on spinning-related business topics. Everything from how to…
Last Friday, I was talking about setting goals for improving your spinning and Sandy commented, asking about my “bucket list” of 80 things to do with spinning. Here’s my starter list. I’ve broken the items up into four categories: Knowledge (background/general info), Skills (ability to do these things), Control (ability to do these things with…
Do you have new year’s resolutions or goals for your knitting or spinning? At the start of this new year, I asked my spinning students to set some BIG goals for the next eight weeks of spinning classes. “Bucket List”-type goals for their own spinning improvement. Things like, “oh, over the next eight weeks, I’d…
…or the reason why I was up until 5 am on Knit City set up day. So one of the lovely set decorators for a new A&E TV series, Bates Motel, came by the studio a couple weeks ago to see if we had any yarn she could borrow for a film set. One of…
Over the past several weeks, Denise Renee Grace (Customer Service) and Judy Pagels (Sales and Service Manager), both with Schacht Spindle set about learning the spinning techniques in my Craftsy class. And they just blogged about it on Jane Patrick’s “Violet Rose” blog here. It’s great to see how the handknit samples differ from the…
Handspun, handknit. Tweedy and plied. Colorful and subdued. There is so much activity going on in the Spinning Dyed Fibers class on Craftsy, I thought I should share a couple! I’m also very happy to be able to share with you this blog tour for the spinning class. Several of my personal spinning heros have…
Several weeks ago, I was out in Colorado filming one of Craftsy.com’s first spinning class offerings, called “Spinning Dyed Fibers“. And I’m so excited that it’s finally launched and available now! You all know I love colour. I’ve been dyeing and spinning and indulging myself in colour since early 2005. I’ve had spiritual encounters with…
These past few weeks have flown by as I’ve been preparing for a Craftsy.com class that I’m going to be teaching at the end of this month. The class is about spinning with hand-dyed fibre and I’ve been having a really amazing time working on the course materials. I love seeing the theory behind colour…
Okay, so they’re not actually from Russia. My first Russian spindle is from Carney’s Turnings, which I picked up at Fibres West about a month ago. And then I became so enamoured with it, I hunted down other spindle makers, finally discovering the amazing Lisa Chan at Gripping Yarn. She’s turned over 1,000 spindles and…