The domino effect

It's the domino effect that's going to kill me. My every attempt at efficiency, at getting stuff done, is thwarted by the domino effect.

I go to write out an invoice, and it takes me twenty minutes to find the checkbook. (On the piano, where I wrote out the check for the last piano lesson.) I write out the check, find an envelope, and can't find the stapler. I finally find the stapler (on Elvis's desk) and it has no staples. I know I've seen a little box of staples somewhere because one of the kids spilled it recently and I stepped on a staple, but now it's nowhere to be found. I run around the house looking for it, yelling the word for staple in French because it's galling (gaul-ing?) that I can remember the word for staple in French (it's "agrafe") but cannot remember where the damn box of staples is. And so it goes. A five-minute task takes an hour.

I have given up on the staples and stolen a paper clip from somewhere, and now I'm going to wind some yarn. I've got more Cashsock, that luscious blend of cashmere, merino and nylon, and I'm doing a big update tomorrow on BBF.





I've done a bunch of colorways in batches of two skeins, just in case you decide you want to treat yourself to a shawl's worth...I'm going to bring back free shipping through Christmas, too, so use the code "STAPLE" for free shipping on orders over $25.

P.S. Has anyone seen the stamps?

The 75% Point of Despair

In every project that I do on a deadline, I hit what I think of as the "75% Point of Despair." It's the time I get close to the end of the project, close enough that I can start to taste what it will feel like to be done but with the finish line far enough away that I despair I will ever reach it.

The worst part is the certainty that the project I happen to be in the midst of is the biggest pile of crap ever knat upon. Every unevenness in tension starts to alarm me (should I have gone back and redone that part of the waistband?), even little inconsistencies that the rational side of me knows will block out (that little voice whispers insistently: but what if they don't?!). I start thinking of all the other ways I could have done it -- a different edging, a contrast color, a new stitch pattern. It looks too plain, or too tarted up. I am convinced my gauge has been thrown off no matter how often I measure it (it's hard to make progress when you check gauge five times per row). I think of the stuff I see in books or magazines or on Ravelry -- a Norah Gaughan here, an Eunny Jang there -- and shudder at the thought of my crappy project just a click away from those masterpieces. I look at it, its unblocked, sad mass of stitches cowering meekly under my scowl, and know that I just don't have enough time to redo it, even if my dissatisfaction were rational and I could figure out its source.

I'm around that point now, and I'm working with someone whose work I have long loved and who could make a paper hat folded from newspaper look like Chanel's best creation. (No pressure there.)

So I'm very happy that I will be greeting someone special at the airport tomorrow,






in time for a meet-and-greet Friday evening and a lace class Saturday at Loop. The 75% Point of Despair hardly ever lasts, but even if it tried, how could one possibly stay mired in the depths of despair when Franklin's coming?

On the dilemma of pricing

I'm going to be doing a Black Bunny update this Friday (around noon), with a mix of odds and ends (some sock yarns, some laceweights, a few rovings). Due to the interruption of the holidays, it'll take me a couple more days to get back into maximum production mode, but I will be going back to a schedule where I update the shop at least once a week.

In the meantime, as long as I've been airing my neuroses on the blog, allow me to tell you about another. (At least you don't have to worry that I will stop writing the blog due to running out of things to say: I have enough neuroses to last us well into 2054...)


It is the dreaded question of pricing.


You may laugh at my earnestness, but I take pricing seriously. In a more traditional retail setting, say, a department store, the shop buys at wholesale and marks up the price, knowing that there is a traditional percentage or range that is the standard markup in the industry. (Anybody remember my post on keystone pricing?) But I'm not simply reselling a product as is. I'm adding something intangible to my fibers, something artistic if you'll pardon my pretension. It's hard to place a specific dollar value on what I add to each skein of yarn or batch of roving -- and it's also hard to calculate a dollar value to the "costs" of producing the yarn. (For example, how do you divide the cost of a small jar of dye among who-knows-how-many skeins of yarn that it helps to dye?)


I'm also painfully conscious of wanting to provide good value for knitters. I am a consumer as well as a seller. Like everybody else, I like getting my money's worth and I don't like overpaying. Sometimes, when I surf the 'net looking at other handpaints, I am kind of aghast that the prices have crept up so much. I want to price my stuff fairly and I want to keep it as affordable to the largest number of knitters as I can.* And honestly, I sometimes think it seems absurd to expect people to pay close to thirty dollars for enough yarn to knit a pair of socks, or twenty bucks for four ounces of fiber. Even though they may be perfectly fair prices, given the cost of what goes into them.

I also need to make money, and there's the rub. The cost of wool, especially merino, is rising. The post office raised rates last year. Rising oil prices means it costs more in shipping for me to get supplies. It's hard for me to figure out which costs to pass on to the buyer, and when, and which to suck up. For example, I charge actual postage with no handling fees, so when the Post Office raised rates, I passed that on to the buyer. But some of my wholesalers have raised prices, and I've tried to not pass them on to the buyer. (At least not yet.)

Other more intangible things concern me:

• Is my attempt to keep prices low a psychological undervaluing of what I do, a sort of self-punishing humility?
• Am I being unfair to other dyers, and thereby devaluing what they do, by not charging more?
• Am I being pennywise and pound-foolish when I try to do things to save costs, like not getting fancy labels printed up?
• Do people realize that the reason I use Priority Mail instead of first-class, or UPS, is because I can save a substantial amount of money by getting free Tyvek mailers from the post office and a substantial amount of time by using on-line postage and shipping functions on Paypal? Or do they just think my shipping costs are really high?
• Do I alienate customers by doing some things on cheap? How to decide what to do on the cheap and what to spend money on? Would it be better for me to, say, tie up my packages with fancy bows made of scraps of yarn, or use some kind of packaging, even if that takes away precious time from the dyepots?
• Should I consider more widespread wholesaling of BBF to yarn shops -- would the exposure to a wider customer base help overcome the fact that I'd be making half as much money per skein although my costs would remain the same?

Geez, it's hard being an overanalytical pointy-head who thinks too much.

Anyway, I'm throwing all of this out there so you can understand a little better where I'm coming from. People are very kind and send me lovely emails complimenting my yarns and fibers, and I appreciate that -- and they also throw suggestions at me. I want you to know that I do think about them all, really think about them. Right now, I'm going to continue selling on Etsy, and at Rosie's if they want to continue to stock me, and work on getting my BBF.com website up and running this spring. I may have to raise prices on a few of my items, but I'm going to continue to try to provide the best yarns and fibers at the fairest prices I can (fair to you and fair to me). I'm working on keeping inventory in the shop without sacrificing the individualized style of dyeing that I think makes it worthwhile.

Thanks for listening. I feel better now.








*This is why I get cranky when people resell my stuff on places like Ebay for more than they purchased them for. I have no problem with people reselling stuff, but I had a customer who was extremely high maintenance and after wringing my hands about trying to deal with her myriad of demands, I found out she had a sideline going on of buying knitting-related things and marking them up for resale on Ebay. She was taking the yarns she purchased from me for $20 and listing them with an opening bid of $26. (To add insult to injury, she was also adding a hefty markup for "handling and postage" after giving me a hard time for charging actual postage.) She was doing this with other handdyers' yarns, too, on an on-going basis, so it wasn't just a stash liquidation.

Knitting stage fright

I have knitting stage fright. When I'm around other knitters, even in a casual and comfortable setting, I often find myself too self-conscious to knit. This is not, however, the case when I'm around non-knitters. Then I feel perfectly comfortable knitting away. Weird, isn't it?

Today I had the pleasure of getting together with a few folks that I met through my LYS. Now that I've phased my hours out, I hardly ever see them anymore and it makes me sad. So they invited me to a Saturday afternoon "Knit and Knosh" to hang for a while. There was some yummy pear cake involved, and I visited with the initimable Knitty D, Purl MiaLoggia and some really cool blogless folks, too.

My schedule has been so unpredictable lately, that I haven't been able to see Anne Marie and her ragtag band of fugitive knitters at the Wednesday night SnB for a long time. So this was my first group knitting experience in a while, since maybe Stitches?

So I knit a few rows on a sock and then just petted the closest cat, which for a time, was Hobo here:



Not that petting Hobo was a hardship, mind you....