Fabiola Anderson is this Week's Jacket Winner!

             Alright it's Friday and as promised, Fabiola Anderson is this week's winner for our 2010 Fall Collection jacket. I hope you get to enjoy wearing it. Fabiola, come by the studio any time to pick it up. Have a great day.

Summer 2012 Collection

                 It's almost summer and I can feel the warmth lapping in the windows. This season, we're going to escape the grind with some of our favorite classics and new looks to surprise and excite. Each week, you will get to see a look I designed with accessories broken down over the week and the final look on Friday. All our dress samples are designed and draped for our form standard woman's size 8 dress form. If you are a store owner and interested in carrying a particular look in your shop, please contact me directly to discuss size runs.
                Today you can see our classic tote redesigned this season with one of a kind fabrics and pockets. Each tote is one-of-a-kind with custom pockets, handles, and fabrics. I love creating something unique for you, my customer.
                 Check out our Etsy store to see what we have in stock today. We will have new totes all this summer for $10.00-18.00 each based on fabric and complexity. A simple great gift for yourself or someone you love. Welcome to summer.

Day Thirty: Sample Sale

      Well, we're finishing up the winter collection super late this year. I meant to be done in February, but with the move we're happily finishing up a little late. I also have a great surprise, to celebrate the last day we're hosting a discontinued sample sale this week. Fun one of a kind looks or styles I've done over the past two years, mostly in a standard size 8. I hope you will be able to take advantage of these deals as we clear out space for our new designs this season. One of the pieces I'm letting go is this fun over the top cropped jacket I designed that was inspired by Lionfish. I love the ocean and wild coral reefs. It's a generous size 8 or 10 depending on how tight you want to wear it. A great fun piece for a collection.
      We're giving it away free this week. If you want, respond in the comments section and we'll give one lucky reader a chance to score their own look.

Have a great day. See ya tomorrow as we start to release our new collection.

April 14th: Beginning Sewing Class 1-4 pm

   This week, we are doing the first of a two part cross-over event with Splat Space in Durham. For those of you in the Acorn to Oak Team, you are probably already familar with this fun hackerspace located in the heart of downtown Durham on Martin St. The first half of the event will be a beginning sewing class run by Jeff Crews, the same man who taught me how to sew on home sewing machines a few years ago. I like and respect him a lot and I'm sure everyone will enjoy learning from him. He's very good and has a work project of teaching people to make tool belts lined up. The second part will be a May 1st meeting on eTextiles.

The address is:  

Splat Space
331 West Main Street
Durham, NC

This event is free and open to the public. Anyone can attend and feel free to bring a friend.

Day Twenty-Nine: Shiny New Business Cards

            Alright, I broke down this week and made something for me...with the shiny new laser. Awesome new mirror business cards. Yes, you read that right...my new joy these days is mirrors. It seems like every season I have a new material that speaks to me and this season, it's this one. Sadly photographing mirrors is harder than it looks because the mirrors want to reflect you in them instead of showing off their shiny surface. These are so much more awesome in person. I will be mailing them out with all our orders this spring for people to play with. Nash and I have been quoting Firefly all week with "Shiny, Captain." Gotta love Kaylee. Happy Easter everyone!

Day Twenty-Eight: Linus Quilts

    So I finally got around to finishing our quilt tops from our Etsy meeting a few months ago. I know some of you have been wondering what happened to all the quilts pieces everyone cut and the answer is that they became these...really cool quilts. :-)We had roughly a dozen when all was said and done. Who knew it took so many yards of fabric to make a couple of quilts? Thanks everyone who helped out. That was way more work than I expected and everyone was awesome troopers. I must say, I got a new appreciation for how hard quilting is. Well, here ya go...here's a couple of mine. Can't wait to do this again next year. Yay!

Have a great Easter Friday!

Spinning with HooksandEyes Recap

       Tuesday night was awesome! We had the best guest speaker, Theresa. Some of you are more familar with her Etsy shop, HooksandEyes. If you want to buy awesome local yarn in the area, check her out. She has a lot of great yarn not listed so contact her directly if you're looking for something. While Theresa spins year round, her shop fills up mostly in the fall when people pick up knitting. She spins fun things like cotton, wool, and bamboo. She also sells at the local arts and crafts market. Honestly, it was one of the most fun talks for me in a while. I've have always secretly wanted to learn how to spin, and getting to make a drop spindle was the absolute best. We all took cut up dowel rods and old CDS to make our own drop spindles.
      This set-up takes about 5 mins. The next 2 hrs. were spent trying and happily failing at learning to spin yarn. You can see Theresa's beautiful yarn on right (hint hint any yarn shops in the area that are interested in carrying local yarn give her a call). Mine looked like a lumpy mass of...well, it was supposed to be yarn for a scarf for Nash, but it really looks like rug yarn instead. There's definitely an art to this. So how do you spin?

     First you take a fluffy pile of batting and you tear off roughly in a thin 1 ft. section. Next, you draft it by pulling the yarn (this really needs to be seen in person) according to the staple of the thread.  You end up with this super fine puffy thread. After drafting, you apply twist. First you roll a section down your pant leg, then once you have a section of twisted yarn roughly 10-14 inches long, you tie it around the bottom of the spindle below the CD.  It will look like the photo below if it is resting on your knees. I'm pretty uncoordinated, but Theresa could spin it in the air really fast which was amazing. Me?
     Well, I wrapped it around the top of hook and proceeded to keep rolling the spindle away from me on my pant leg picking up twist as I went. Twist is apparently what makes thread in the first place. This is apparently close to a form of spinning that is done by Navaho Indians to make their thread. They have huge spindles they rest on their legs to spin, don't ask me how. When you twist up a section of thread, you unwrap the thread from around the top hook and feed the spindle below to build up the thread. Once you get done, you upwind the thread either onto a special device like the one Theresa is hold at the top which measures the length of the thread or use a partner's hands to wind a skein. I would show you that part, but mine is SUPER ugly. Instead I will show you the pretty one up top. Apparently, you can learn to spin in 3 weeks and I'm told 2nd graders successfully spin after a few hours. Me, I'm glad I know someone who can feed my yarn addiction.
            Hope you enjoyed reading this and maybe you can try your hand at spinning too. It's a lot of fun for all my rumblings about being uncoordinated. Have a great day and check in tomorrow.