Just a quick note to remind you that it’s not too late for gift certificates! You can get them until noon tomorrow, December 23rd! Once you purchase it, I’ll email you (within 6 hours) a personalized, printable gift certificate (it’s no extra cost if you’d like me to mail it, but obviously it won’t get to the recipient before Christmas!)

(an example of a gift certificate)

Even though I’ll be away from a lot of usual internet-y places (like the blog and flickr), the Boutique will continue as usual. In fact, I’ll be adding a bunch of new yarns, including a new color of Bananiere on Friday!

You know that I love local fiber, right? And that I love sharing it with you?
Inspired by the awesome response to the LocalSpun line (I didn’t get to announce the yarn, it sold before I got the chance to tell you about it!), I’ve decided to make it a monthly event.

The LocalSpun Club is all about sharing my local fiber with you, in both fiber and yarn form. You can subscribe to either the Yarn Club or the Fiber Club.
Here’s how it’ll work:

• Each month I’ll visit a local farm, get a fleece (always a different breed!), take lots of pictures and get some info from the farmer.
• Each month you’ll receive 4 oz of fiber or yarn by the 20th. 1, 2 or 3 month subscriptions are available and you can tailor your subscription by telling me your favorite color and by choosing between batts or locks (for the fiber club).

Along with your subscription, you’ll also receive information about the sheep that produced the fiber, the farm where it was raised and access to pictures and videos of the farm visit!

Know a spinner or knitter who might love this as a gift? It’s not too late for the holidays!
Within 12 hours of your purchase, I’ll email you a personalized, pretty, printable gift certificate for you to give to the recipient! They’ll receive their package with everyone else, by the 20th of the month! That’s right – you can buy a subscription to the LocalSpun club right at the last minute, until midnight on December 23rd!

Yesterday, I announced this to my newsletter (if you’re not on the list, your missing out on finding stuff out first! Sign up here!) and they’ve pounced on it! There is only 1 spot still open for the Yarn Club and 2 for the Fiber Club.
This is my first time offering a subscription service and I’d like to know what you think! What would you like to see in a club? If you subscribed, what would you like to recieve?

I’m a homebody. A real, honest-to-goodness, I-could-stay-inside-for-weeks type of homebody. I’ve built a home-friendly business (spinning and dyeing requires that I remain near my kitchen and couch!) and if it weren’t for the dayjob, I might never venture forth.
Which is exactly why I insist on applying to crazy-huge, far-away craft shows.

They challenge me and stretch me and, yeah, force me out of the house. The last two weeks, nay, the last two months have been consumed with preparing for Urban Craft Uprising. I made more yarn than I ever thought possible, created a new “mini-series” (yarn with jingle bells! yarn with pompoms! Holiday Happiness!) and packed it all up and lugged it across the country. Once in Seattle, I met customers, vendors, authors! I explored, I rode busses and ferries and planes, I consumed hundreds of cups of coffee (if you’d like a coffee review, I kept embarrassingly detailed notes, which I’d be happy to share here).

So fun and so worth it, but also a little too much. I was only gone for one week but for the two months preceding I allowed my entire life to be focused on preparing for the show, keeping the Boutique stocked and fulfilling custom orders. I love being that busy, feeling the crush, buzz, but the truth is, it’s not healthy. I promised myself that when I was done with the show, I would take a step back. But being away from what I love the most (you, the fiber, the color) isn’t healthy either.

When I returned, I eased myself back into it. I’ve been away from my dyepots and my wheel and the whole business for one FULL week. I thought it would be restful but I feel all at odds. So odd, I’ve actually done a lot of *gasp* cleaning. Like, my whole house. Obviously, I’m not well.

I need to work on balance: yarn time and personal time. Accomplishment and relaxation.
I’m going forward with that intention.

That said, I can’t leave Seattle behind without a second glance!
A quick sum up: Urban Craft Uprising was magically delicious. I brought NONE of my own display units, everything I could possibly need was donated by the wondrous Kayce, of World of Whimm.

My friends helped me at the booth (that’s Carissa above) and I met the most fabulous customers.

Like this one, who bought the yarn on Saturday and returned on Sunday, with it as her hair. Weird. and Wonderful.

The girls (3 of my college roomates) managed to show me every good thing in West Seattle.

I showed myself a bit of Pike Place Market:

On Tuesday, while they worked, I took the ferry to Bainbridge Island

It was here that I experienced the best yarn store of my life, Churchmouse Yarn & Teas.

All in all, a really smashingly wonderful trip.

It certainly consumed my life there for a while, so I don’t intend to do any more shows until next summer. But I AM on the lookout for more big shows like this one (I need to get out of the house, remember?) Big enough to sink my teeth into and to push me into adventuring places I never thought I would.
With that in mind, as I sneak back into my regular routine of dyeing, spinning and blogging, can you share your favorite craft (or yarn or knitting) show?
Do you have adventures in your town that I simply can’t miss?

Are you a crafty soul in Seattle? If so, you simply must come to Urban Craft Uprising this weekend! I’m at booth 56 with loads of BCB yarn and Cloudlover’s roving!

Here’s some more info:

Over 100 vendors under one roof for one stop holiday shopping that will make you feel good about the holidays.

Date: Saturday, December 6th and Sunday, December 7th
Time: 11 a.m.- 5 p.m.
Where: Seattle Center Exhibition Hall
Admission: Free!

What is Urban Craft Uprising?
- A craft sale by indie designers and crafters throughout the day beginning at 11 a.m.
- Swag bags will be handed out to the first 100 visitors each day with samplings from vendors and sponsors – so be sure to arrive early! Last year a line started before our vendors arrived!
- DIY wrapping station- recycled materials to make your wrapping unique and green
- Free giveaways every hour

For a preview of who else is vending, along with the EXCELLENT author singings (I most excited about meeting Alicia) visit www.urbancraftuprising.com.

After the show, I’ll be in Seattle until the 11th. After that, I’ll return to the blog with the rest of the Eco-Friendly Yarn series and lots of Seattle pictures! While I’m gone, the Boutique will run as normal, but with all orders placed after December 1st, shipping on December 12th. I’ll still be checking my email, so don’t hesitate to contact me!

Now, I ask you: what should I see in Seattle? Where’s the best coffee? chocolate? yarn?

This Thanksgiving I’m so very grateful to you and to the entire fiber community. Last November, I sold a skein of handspun for the first time in the Boutique. That sale and the more than 200 that follow, pursuade me daily to pull out the dye pots or sit down at the wheel.
This blog, the Boutique, but most of all, YOU have stretched me. I’ve been challenged, inspired and encouraged. You, darling reader, have pushed me to try things I never imagined or to step into a role I hadn’t dreamed of. Because of you, I’ve started making small videos, to visit fiber farms and to try carding my own fiber.
For that, I am eternally grateful. A simple Thank You doesn’t seem like quite enough, so I hope you’ll enjoy the Thanksgiving Day Sale – 10% everything in the Boutique (even Gift Certificates!) from today through December 1st.
Have a lovely Thanksgiving and a yarn-filled weekend!

You already know that here at Blonde Chicken Boutique, it’s all about the Eco-friendly. But what does “eco-friendly yarn” mean? In the next few weeks I’ll explain the three main tenets of Blonde Chicken Boutique: Local, Sustainable and Recycled. Living consciously is a journey and I’ll be sharing the books, websites and people who have informed my journey. Eco-friendly means different things for different people, but this is what it means for me and for the Boutique.

Although all BCB yarn is eco-friendly, my first priority is always to find the most local fiber. Yesterday I shared my reasons for eating locally, today we’ll talk about what that means for yarn.

After being committed to eco-friendly yarns for two years, it wasn’t until reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle that I even considered finding local yarn. Sure, I loved meeting the animals and farms at fiber festivals, but it hadn’t occurred to me that there might be farmers nearby.
When I decided to find local farms, I figured:

a. there wouldn’t be any
b. the ones I found would be happy to sell me yarn, especially since I need to buy it in bulk (to dye for the Boutique)

I was wrong on both counts!

There are quiet a few lovely local farms, which I found through a combination of searching and serendipity. But the farmers I found are just that: farmers. Most aren’t fiber artists or spinners or knitters! So even though they loved their fiber animals, most farmers aren’t stocked with the actual fiber products (roving, yarn, etc).

In fact, most sheep farmers (that I’ve met) send their fleeces to the Wool Pool. The Wool Pool is mysterious, semi-governmental thing in some states. You can read about Tennessee’s here. I learned that some wool distributors (like R.H. Lindsay) also hold them. The premise is that a processor collects wool from a bunch of different farms and pays the farmers a flat fee per pound. That fee is usually no more than 20 or 30 cents per pound. Compare that to the $30 (or often much more!) per pound that spinners pay for commercially processed roving and you can see that the farmer is NOT getting much of the profit of this product.

Supporting the farmer’s in my community is one reason to buy local, but just as important to me is the connection to the fiber and to the animal. Those wool pools through Merino in with Icelandic; even the single-type wools are a mishmash of excellent and sub par fleeces. Instead of highlighting the remarkable, the wool pool reduces all to mediocricy. Buying the fleece right from the farmer and washing it myself, that allows me even more control and freedom! I’m not the only fleece-loving geek, Fuzzy Galore wrote an excellent article on why you should process your own fleece.

So what do I do?

1. Continue to look for local shepherds. Sure, I have my favorite farms, but if I’m going to provide you with ONLY small-farm fiber, I need to find a lot more of them!
2. Build a relationship with the farmer’s I’ve met – by doing free spinning demos at their farm, referring my friends there and just keeping them up-to-date on the fiber products I’d like to purchase. I also meet up with them at local fiber festivals, provide feedback on projects their working on (processing their fiber into yarn, etc) and hook them up with other local fiber-people.
3. Buy what they have. Whether it’s a fleece or roving or yarn I might not have otherwise picked, showing my support by actually buying what they offer is incredibly important.
4. Learning how to process the fleece into yarn (or find small local mills – which I’m still working on!). Before I started meeting local farmers, I never even considered spending my fiber-time on washing and carding a fleece. But once I saw that the only way to go local was to learn to rely on myself – it seemed obvious. And it ended up being fun and teaching me so much more about fiber, in all it’s stages between farm and yarn!

Looking for local fiber?
Of course, you can always check out the Boutique, full of wooly goodness that is local (to me). If you live in the area, I’d be happy to deliver the fiber to you or take you to the farms!
If you want to find fiber close to you, I suggest you:

1. Check Local Harvest (type “wool” into the “Products” box). Call the farms and explain that you’re a knitter. Before you visit, I recommend asking IF they sell their fiber and in what form. You might be surprised!
2. Go to the nearest Fiber Festival (this is a good list.) Head to the barns and chat with the farmers. Ask where their farm is and if they allow farm visits. A lot of the shepherds I’ve met don’t have business cards, so be prepared with a notepad and pen!
3. Ask around. Although most people look at me like I admitted to being a vampire when I talk about spinning, they all somehow know someone who knows someone who has an alpaca. Or at least an angora bunny.
4. Call your local 4-H office. Seriously, those kids have every animal imaginable.

Now it’s your turn!
Any more tips for people who live in an urban area? Do you work with local fiber?

You know by now that I’m dedicated to only spinning and dyeing eco-friendly yarns for the Boutique. But what does “eco-friendly yarn” mean? In the next few weeks I’ll explain the three main tenets of Blonde Chicken Boutique: Local, Sustainable and Recycled. Living consciously is a journey and I’ll be sharing the books, websites and people who have informed my journey. Eco-friendly means different things for different people, but this is what it means for me and for Blonde Chicken Boutique.

Although all BCB yarn is eco-friendly, my first priority is always to find the most local fiber. Today I’ll cover the locavore lifestyle and tomorrow we’ll talk about what that means for yarn.

So, What’s a Locavore?

“Locavore” refers to someone who is committed to eating locally: local veggies, local meat, local dairy. I’m blessed to live in a very agricultural area with a long growing season. For 9 months out of the year, I have ready access to fresh fruits or veggies at the local farmer’s markets. Since my husband is a vegetarian and we don’t make any meat at home, I don’t worry about local meat. However, there is a nearby butcher who buys some of his meat locally and the bakery down the street smokes meat and fish that they’ve caught. They also make and smoke an excellent turkey sausage. I found dairy products to be the hardest to buy directly from the farmer’s, due to legal issues. For eggs, we buy Appalachian Harvest eggs at the grocery store. They are a distributor that collects eggs from many local farms and then packages them and sells them in traditional grocery stores (like my Kroger). We occaisonally get some goat’s cheese from Oak Moon Creamery, a local goat farm, but I’m still looking for cow’s milk and cheeses.

How did I become a locavore?

Raised to eat fresh food, my mom often bought meat, bread and dairy from our Amish neighbors. I’ve always loved Farmer’s Markets and farm visits but just in the last year I’ve become more passionate about supporting local agriculture. For me, it’s not about the food, although there are plenty of reasons local food is better; it’s about buying directly from the person who grew it. It’s about giving back to my community.

Reading Barbara Kingsolvers’ Animal, Vegetable Mineral solidified this from a preference to a passion. In this book, the author and her family commit to eating locally for one year. They have a big garden and preserve a LOT of food to get them through the winter. They also rely on their neighbors for diary and some meat. Kingsolver writes about her connection with the land and her community in a way that is touching and compelling. The book is full of practical advice and she doesn’t gloss over the hours of hard work (or the inevitable “harvesting” of her turkeys).

Interested in finding local food?

LocalHarvest simplifies finding farms and stores that carry local produce. Just search your zip code or for a product. This is the best “local” database I’ve found, at least for my remote corner of Tennessee!

The Eat Well Guide is similar to Local Harvest, but without the huge database of self-added farms (again, this is just in my area). It has an advantage with it’s ‘Plan a Trip’ function which allows you to find restaurants and markets during any road trip! I plan to use the next time I visit my in-laws in Ohio…although I’m very familiar with the highways, I don’t know of ANY non-chain restaurants to eat it.

Animal Vegetable Mineral – the engaging book about a year of local.

In Defense of Food – If you’re wondering why local food might be better, this is the answer. Less gas to transport, fewer additives, all-aournd less of the bad stuff, more of the good stuff. Except, you know, in more scientific words. Everyone I’ve shared this book with thought they wouldn’t like the book (is it too diet-y? or science-y?) but ended up loving it.

Do you eat locally? Why? Any resources that help you?

As the holiday season approaches, I’m beginning to ponder the inevitable Christmas Gift List. Despite my best efforts to avoid it, I always feel the pull of handknitting gifts for my very dearests. The trickiest people on that list are also the smallest.
I have two, sweet little brothers, ages 8 and 9. Although adorable and irresistible they have one ginormous flaw: they have extremely specific ideas of what constitutes “cool” handknits. They love knowing I knit something for them, but they are very particular about what they’ll wear.

Here are just a few things I know they’d love:

Stegosaurus Hat
Ok, this one is a cheat: I designed it two years ago as a Christmas gift. Actually, D helped me design it: he drew a picture of his ideal hat and this is how it turned out!

Fingerless gloves
Both the boys want a set of fingerless gloves for recess. Leafy would be perfect for a pair (shortened for the shorter hands, of course!)

The Batman Logo chart and the Transformers Logo chart can be added to a basic hat or made into a simple patch for their backpack. They’d look great on a full-fledged sweater, but these boys grow to fast for a handknit of that size!

Although, at 8 & 9, they’re a little too young for it, the Jayne Cobb Hat would be a great gift for your Firefly fan.

For the extremely particular amongst your boys, this is Ribbed Beanie is probably plain enough. Not so plain knit in a bright color, like Festival:

What do you knit for the boys in your life?
And if you’re afraid of what your boys might buy you, may I suggest pointing them towards a Blonde Chicken Boutique Gift Certificate?

As the days get shorter and the opportunity for color fade into the brown of winter, I find it harder to become inspired. My TN mountains become brown, the flowers are long gone and my local farmer’s market closes up. While I’m bursting with colors, ideas during spring and summer, come October, I start to worry about drying up with the leaves.

Day 5

There seems to be something about October that makes me want to pick up my camera. It’s surely the trees and leaves and wonderfullness of fall, but I think it’s also the threat of winter. More than any other time of year, I need to be diligent in searching out inspiration in the winter.

Day 16

To combat this ennui, I give myself little challenges. In October, I challenged myself (and some Twitter friends joined me)- take a photo every day. Looking for the right shot and trying to capture it compels me to find the beauty and celebrate it.

Day 15

Now that the leaves are coming off the trees and it’s almost dark by the time I get home from work, I’m finding it harder to find the shot. This forces me to look inward – to my cozy home, my cute pet and even my office.

Day 20

How do you find inspiration during the ever-shortening-days? Any colorful movies or shows the light the fire?