Reason #1 why this is the best month evar:
My club members are so awesome--Check out the monstrous pile of club packages and sale orders that I had to take to the post office last week! Month #1 of the Nom club was so successful that I was able to buy a high speed motorized Crazy Monkey triple skein motorized winder (with counter!). Now three times as many Noms can be wound in half the time! The old single-skein hand-crank model will now be converted into a vertical swift. I took some pictures but they just don’t do it justice, so I’ll post a video of the winder in action some time this week.

Reason #2:
The 40% off sale was a huge success, and it only took 10 days for the batt & dyed top sections to be emptied out completely! The sale, combined with the new club memberships, have put me within $100 of breaking my monthly sales record, and it’s only the 11th of the month!

Reason #3:
As of next week, I will own every single piece of equipment on my wish list. My warping mill, wool picker and skein winder have already arrived, and soon I will also be the proud owner of a Fancy Kitty Big Tom motorized drum carder! It’s scheduled to get here on Tuesday.

There are 3 more reasons this month is awesome, but I’ll save them for separate blog posts. Everything is coming up roses. (And pears! My pear tree has fruit on it.)

I can’t believe how successful the 40% off sale was! It’s only day 9 and you guys have cleaned me completely out. I have one poor lonely batt left. Won’t you please give this sparkly little guy a home?

My new Lil Dynamo picker arrived on my front porch about an hour ago, and I’ve already tested it out and decided that I will use it to single-handedly take over the fiber universe. (Possibly double-handedly. I have two hands; I guess I may as well use them both.)

It has some mixed reviews online, but I am so glad I decided to give it a chance. It works perfectly for my needs. L.D.P. (already with the nicknames) took a pile of dyed Romney locks and turned them into a giant pile of cloud fluff in about 60 seconds. This fleece was clean and unmatted with very little veg matter so I don’t know how the Dynamo would handle difficult or delicate fibers, but these slid through it with no problems. When I fed a half-ounce at a time, the box looked too empty but the handle slid easily and finished in about 6 swipes. When I fed a full ounce, the in-box was full and there was some resistance required to hold the lid down while combing back and forth. Check out the before & after pics:

^ As you can see, a decent amount of the fiber stayed stuck in the points, but I was able to clean it out easily without poking myself.

The box itself is light enough that I, Natasha the Weakling, carried it upstairs without any trouble, but there’s enough weight to it, combined with rubber feet, that it stayed in place without sliding around on the table while in use. As I said, I was using a very clean fleece. I know some people use pickers to get out the veg matter, but all I got was some dust & dander that I can easily dump out:

For the grand finale of this review, words can’t express how much I LOVED spinning this fiber.

Between knitting, crocheting, carding, and spinning, my carpal tunnel syndrome has reached a scary level of severity in the past few months. But I was able to spin this fiber with no drafting, and therefore no pain. Since I only ran the fiber through the picker once, there were still curls here and there, mimicking the look of tail-spun locks without the hassle of having to tease each lock open individually. The finished yarn (shown above) reminds me a lot of Ozark Handspun.

In conclusion, this thing is AWESOME!! It took me longer to edit the photos and type this blog post than it did to prep and spin the fiber from start to finish. I wish I had more raw fleece on hand to play with.

Get thee to my shop at once for savings the likes of which have never been seen at Gritty Knits:

40% off all dyed top and carded batts during the month of June. (Art yarn kits NOT included.) I figured I needed to do a little spring cleaning. Since the blazing summer months are a bit slow for wool sales (I can’t imagine why…) maybe this will give my numbers a jump start.

Festival news: Gritty Knits might have a booth at Fiber Christmas in July (in Kellyville, OK) this year, so I’m ramping up production. There will be a big shop update on July 1st; that way you guys will have first crack at all the new stuff before the festival goers.

Since it’s 3:30am and I can’t sleep, I though I’d show you guys a picture of my newly-organized fiber room. I got some gridwall panels with 12” pegs and hung up all the fiber that was previously stored in plastic bins & drawers. My skeins of sock yarn and dyed top can now flow freely in the breeze air conditioning. Even the carded batts hang nicely with a peg speared through the middle of the roll.

I am considering participating in a couple of fiber festivals next year (DFW Fiber Fest in Dallas or Kid ‘n’ Ewe near San Antonio). In order to do that, I need something more professional looking than plastic bins to display all the merchandise I plan to bring. And since my “stock room” (spare bedroom) shelves were bursting at the seams, this seemed like a good excuse for the gridwall purchase.

Seeing it all on display like this makes me want to have a brick and mortar store so other people can come in and marvel with me. Houston has several yarn stores, but we really need a good spinning fiber shop in this neck of the woods. The closest one is near Galveston, I think.

One afternoon while daydreaming, I even looked up the cost of retail properties around here. As suspected, they’re still way out of my league. I’d have to quadruple my current monthly sales before I could afford it.

Note to self: figure out how to quadruple monthly sales.

1. Ashford warping mill

2. Dyeing the sections (51” each) in mason jars

3. The 16-yard-long, 550 gram OMG Double Rainbow Nom self-stripe skein on the warping mill, about to be separated into balls

4. Spare yardage, ready to be knit

Last year I built a contraption (ok, I designed a contraption and my husband built it for me) to wind long-repeat self-striping yarns, and it was a disaster. It worked for about a week and then all the parts started falling off, stretching out, and generally causing knots, tangles, and tears of frustration. My new mill was worth every penny, and so far it’s been hassle free. It’s fairly large, but it spins easily. You just wrap the yarn around the post at the bottom, spin the mill while gradually moving the yarn up, wrap it around the post at the top, and go back down again. The more wraps, the longer the skein, and therefore the longer the stripe repeat. This colorway took about 10 wraps.

As pictured above in my test-sock, you’ll get approximately 1.75 rounds per color. (Test sock: adult size small, knit on US #1’s.) There are 14 repeats (pink-to-pink) in each 105 gram ball. It was a lot of work, but I’m very happy with the results. I predict I will continue making self-striping skeins of Nom in the months to come, especially now that the Nom of the Month clubs will force me to invent a minimum of 12 new colorways per year.

There are several new colors of NOM in the shop, including the first batch of self-stripes. Shown above (L-R) are: Agony, Slate Blue, Renaissance, Black Cherry stripe, Blue Note stripe, and OMG Double Rainbow stripe. Black Cherry and Blue Note both have long, mirrored repeats that lend themselves to knitting two identical socks at a time, pulling from both ends of the ball. OMG Double Rainbow balls each have 14 repeats of the rainbow shown in the picture. (This was a seriously mammoth skein – I’ve got some pictures that I will share in a future blog post.)

Also, the Nom sock club memberships are now available. You can choose to receive a ball every month or every-other month. And don’t forget—sign up by May 31 and get DOUBLE YARN in June! You can choose between 2 semi-solid balls, 2 multi-colored balls, or one of each. (And as always, there’s no commitment. You can take advantage of the two-for-one offer and then cancel, guilt-free.)

p.s. visit the NOM page on Ravelry to add it your stash and rate it!