Things don't get quiet in this house until about 10 at night in August, what with the young one being out of school and the constant busywork of cleaning, home repairs, the 9 to 5, and garden tending (which I also enjoy doing at night). This is the practical reason the dye sessions run late, though I would probably run them late anyway. The About page says the night is partly schedule and partly preference, and that is true, but the honest version is that the work goes better when nothing else is happening. There is no reason to check a phone at one in the morning, and no other pulls at my attention.
What's In the Pots?
Warm things, mostly. That is not a coincidence — this is Lughnasadh season and the palette is amber, golden ochre, the brown of threshed grain, the burnt orange of a late afternoon when the light has already changed angle (as it does through the front window - on the red walls of the living room, it looks like fire). I dye toward the sabbat I am standing in. It is not superstition so much as it is that I cannot help it. If I try to work a cool colorway in August it comes out sullen.
The Reaping is the one that came out of this run and stayed. It is a tonal fade, amber and gold into bronze and rust with dapples of verdant green, on the merino worsted. I wrote up the full lore separately because it deserved its own entry, but the short version from the studio side: the fade took more attempts than I planned. I didn't want the knit/crocheted/worked object to have too much repetition from the fade, so figuring out the proper dappling was a trial and error process.
There was also a lot of ordinary work that will never show up as a product photograph: exhaust baths, note-keeping, four hanks that went a direction I did not want and are now sitting in a bin waiting for me to use them for... something else. Honestly I don't believe that bin will ever be empty - I experiment a lot, and mistakes almost always end up on my needles. Sometimes they aren't quite the mistakes I thought they were.
On the 4-6 Skein Rule
People ask about variation more than any other single question, which is understandable. There's a big difference between commercial dyeing operations, which need exact and aggressive recipes and are able to throw out hundreds of skeins that don't meet specifications. I have to work with smaller margins, but I can also make more precise changes.
I dye four to six full-size skeins at a time. That is the size of attention I can hold, as well as the capacity of my station. It means that within a batch things are close, and between batches things are near but not identical. A dye house running two hundred kilos at a time can promise you consistency, but only to a certain point, and not with the human hand and intention that small batches offer.
The practical instruction that follows from it: if a project takes more than one skein, alternate rows. Two rows from one, two rows from the other, all the way up. It takes about four seconds a row and it removes the problem entirely. Working With Hand-Dyed Yarn walks through it properly, including the cases where you can skip it and get away with it.
On a fade, alternate anyway. A fade is a limited gradient, so any variation in one end changes where your eye decides the turn happened, and two unalternated skeins of a fade will look like two different colorways sharing a garment.
The Bases
Three are in rotation right now, all from mills I have evaluated for consistency and transparency, all Peruvian: a superwash merino/nylon fingering, a superwash Blue Faced Leicester/nylon fingering, and a 100% superwash merino worsted. Fiber content and yardage are on every product page.
The BFL takes color differently than the merino. Blue Faced Leicester has more luster than merino, so the same dye load reads brighter and slightly cooler on it. On warm harvest colors this is either exactly what you want or can make dyeing to intention more difficult. Gold on BFL glows. Brown on BFL can go faintly metallic, which is lovely on a bronze and less lovely when you were after a golden wheat.
If you want a base that isn't in rotation, or you want more detail on one that is, write to me. tess@arachnefiberworks.com. I do read all of my emails and messages, although it may take some time (between batches) for me to get back to you.
Care is hand wash, dry flat, keep it away from the dryer. The nylon in the sock bases will forgive a good deal. The worsted merino, despite being superwash, is not recommended in the dryer or hot water with agitation. The care guide has the rest, and the FAQ covers most of what people write to ask.
The Part Where I Reflect
Lughnasadh is a festival of skill and of the cost of making. Lugh is the master of all crafts, and the feast he founded honors a woman who worked herself to death clearing ground. I find it hard to sit inside that season and not take stock.
So: this year as I started my batches, the dye notes got stricter. The night schedule is working. The batch size is right and I am not going to grow it just because growing it is what you are supposed to do. What cost more than I expected was the writing — The Craft, The Practice, The Wheel, all of it. It is also the thing I would least want to give up - since I was little, I always loved to write, even if it was for a school assignment that wasn't particularly interesting to me.
If you want to do this accounting for yourself, there is a fiber method for it. Seven knots, one for each thing brought in this year, worked into a cord as thoughts and intentions are processed. Lughnasadh's knot count is seven, for a cycle completed. The Nine-Knot Tradition has the structure and the verse, and it adapts down to seven cleanly. Abundance has the harvest frame if you want the working to point forward as well as back.
The Shop Now
The shop is what it is: small, and honestly labeled. Everything is here. The last few filter is for providing more insight into what's at the end of its run, and when it is gone I keep strict enough notes that it could come back. Some colorways and bases do, while some never will. If there's one that you love, feel free to write to me and I'll take it into account.
Mabon is next on the wheel, and the pots will go cooler and deeper as September arrives. For now it is still hot, still late, and still gold.
Blessed be,
Tess