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  • Costco is the 7th Ring of Hell

    The best thing to come out of the pandemic was curbside pickup. S’true. This is the only civilized way to visit places like, say, an Ikea. Ikea is perhaps the 6th ring of hell, with its confuzzling labyrinth, angry, seemingly unattended children and dictatorial shopping experience. But I digress.

    When it comes to Costco, generally, we stick to online ordering. But sometimes a cruel and unusual urge takes me, to visit the dreaded dungeons with the lighthearted statement “I’m just gonna go see what they have in person.”.

    Such an urge reared its nonsensical head yesterday. Like “seeing what they have in person” will revolutionize my shopping habits by adding new and heretofore unknown delights. As though, somehow, it will result in Something that is not only staggeringly, unthinkably desirable, but that, this elusive Thing, is worth being there in person to buy it.

    I gathered my intestinal fortitude and ventured to Costco, on a Monday morning, in a blizzard, at a location that’s out on the highway instead of in town. Now, you might think that Costco, on a Monday morning, in a blizzard, in the sticks, is a slightly moderated version of hell. And you would be wrong.

    It began with the fact that we had to scramble for parking. Cars convert people into single-minded maniacs. Christmas, doubly so. Add on the fact that it’s a Costco parking lot? May the odds be ever in your favour.

    When we got in, there were no carts. The folks bringing carts in through the blizzard emerged less like people bringing carts and more like dog sledding teams bringing precious serum to our dying population. They were immediately mobbed. I almost checked out at this point, but I reminded myself that I was an adult, and a 4th degree black belt, and that my family needed a kind of cheese which is apparently impossible to get elsewhere. I whispered affirmations under my breath and went IN.

    A little known fact about a Costco is that, once you scan your membership card, your cart converts into a battering ram. I emerged into a post-apocalyptic world filled with fuming people, like a machine where you insert a nice person at one end and a psychopath comes out the other, willing to fight to the death for a bulk bag of bagels.

    Stopping in a Costco, however empty you *think* the aisle around you is, is a crime. If you do try to catch a breath somewhere, someone else will actually materialize out of the ether to yell at you.

    It doesn’t matter how many times you’ve been, the thing you need is never in the same place twice. It’s a wack-a-mole for cheese. A guessing game, a blind thrust down a hall in hopes that, at the least, that brand of chicken fried rice that mom likes will be here. You rush around with your crumpled little list clutched like a lifeline, whispering “Let me not have ventured forth in vain.”.

    The concept of gladiatorial combat never went away. Costco is the Colosseum of our day, where we are both the fighters and the spectators, locked in a battle unto the death for eggs. The difference is, we enter the pit (mostly) willingly.

    What I’m saying is, it ain’t all it’s cracked up to be.

  • The Art of the Image

    I’m not just a photographer as a hobbyist, I’m a legit, professional, award-winning, certified BIG DEAL. S’true. I had a job job before I left it all to chase string.

    I love my camera. I’ve photographed people, landscapes, aerials, potraits, weddings, and lots of yarn. I built The Blue Brick, in a way, to give a vehicle to my photography; I had such an archive of colour that I wanted to share. If you’re new here, every yarn I sell is based off a photo that I have taken. No stock photography, no AI, no excessive editing, just nature’s colours.

    My favourite type of shot, out all of all of them, is when I have a chance to catch something fleeting, to freeze a moment that will never be there again, to hold it in a perfect memory made solid. These are some of my faves over the years :)

    I took this photo in Rome, on one of the many side streets that you can get lost in. There was a lady with her budgies, and those little pieces of paper in front of her are fortunes. For change, she’ll give you a fortune. Mine was some generic stuff about when I’d marry, and how many children I’d have (both wrong) but I’ll treasure the photo forever! When Nat Geo wanted to publish it, I got the email on April 1st. Took me 2 days (and more emails) to believe it wasn’t a prank. A dream come true.

    When you go to Hawaii to see Kilauea, you need to be flexible. Sometimes the lava is only visible from land. Sometimes only from a helicopter. On this trip, it was only visible from the sea. The waves were rough, and shooting was hard, because you’d ride a big wave, see the lava for a second, and then crash down into the trough. That wave would go on to crash against the cliffs, and the lava would send up a big head of steam that would make seeing impossible again. I had to time it perfectly, after one big wave had receded, and while I was still on the crest of the following one. Here is the result.

    This ocean formation is a sinkhole called Thor’s Well, in Cape Perpetua, Oregon. Like so many photos, this one takes patience and timing. The tide must be in, and you must be safely situated close to the sinkhole, but braced by the (sharp!) volcanic rocks so you don’t get pulled forward. There is a hole that we cannot see, below the cliff face. A big wave rolls in, geysers out of the sinkhole, and then flows back down. I’m using a long exposure to smooth out those waves. It takes a million shots sometimes, but this was the winner.

    Multnomah Falls is also in Oregon, and though the classic image of these gorgeous falls includes the bridge across the middle, I decided to climb down to the bottom. Here, the waterfall is little more than a narrow, misty column, lit from without by the sunlight falling into the valley. I managed to catch it before the sun passed behind the cliff face, when that last, golden beam came in. When you catch perfect, fleeting light, it feels like nothing else.

    When the last solar eclipse happened, I was totally bummed out at first; we were under heavy cloud cover. But there were these pockets of clear sky, and thinner clouds, so I set up anyways, and hoped for a “pocket” to pass over me. As it happened, during the peak of the eclipse, the sun was in a layered area of thick and thin cover. I obtained this shot by stopping the camera way down, and using a very fast shutter. I believe I also stopped down farther using a neutral density filter. The idea was to under-expose the clouds, so I could see the detail (and the thin clouds in front helped me do that). As a result, the brillance of the sun, and the “diamond ring” moment were clearly visible to the camera.

    Before drones, if you wanted aerial photography, you either needed to up on a roof or into a helicopter. Aerial was one of my specialties, I have no fear of heights, and these karate arms were able to stablize the camera in the high winds of a helicopter with the doors taken off (necessary for shooting, and yes, you got very cold). I also had to be able to shoot, in low light, from a moving object, without either creating a blurry image, or an underexposed one. I had the knack.

    Those buildings in the centre don’t exist by the way; I took these shots for a presentation on a possible project, and the 3D modelling team placed the buildings in. A fun detail is that, for the buildings to look correct, I also had to shoot the reflections that would be in their glass. A lot goes in to making a realistic image. It was always tricky, but always rewarding.

    I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention my underwater work. Scuba diving is very relaxing, and somehow amniotic (is that a vibe? You get my drift (drift! See what I did there?!)). I’ve taken a lot of photos, but one that’s special to me is this little black saddle toby, taken in the Maldives. It’s special because this fish was about 2 inches long, and hiding in a dark little alcove and woo boy did he give me a challenge.

    Underwater, all colours except blue gradually disappear (and so does light), so you need artificial lights to work with. However, you need to be delicate about it; you can’t blast light into the sensitive eyes of marine life, and you can’t touch the coral to stabilize yourself while you shoot. So, you have to have solid buoyancy control, and the lights have to be offset, and of course your critter needs to cooperate :) This was my favourite shot of the trip.

    Hope you enjoyed my little photo trip! I do have so much to write about, I’ve taken up calligraphy, I’m testing for my fourth degree black belt in a few weeks… but life has been really nutty and sometimes it’s like riding the wooden rollercoaster at Wonderland. You know, that “this could fall apart under me at any moment” feeling. But that’s life, you hang on ;)

  • A little advice. A big reason to celebrate :)

    Tito and I have been married for 10 years!

    Years ago, long before we were married, we were watching the movie Paranormal Activity. In the horror movie trope, there’s always that one person that doesn’t believe the place is haunted. Tito turned to me and jokingly said “babe, if you ever tell me the place is haunted, that’s fine. We’ll move”.

    Over the years, that grew into what we call the “Paranormal Activity Protocol”, and it’s saved us from many potential fights. The point is, if it’s important to him, then I don’t need to get it. But I DO need to respect it. You think it’s haunted? Good enough for me. And vice versa. 

    Today, if I could give one piece of advice to the world, that would be it. If something is super important to someone you care for, and you don’t get it, it’s cool. You don’t need to. The other person’s feelings are more important than proving yourself right. 

    In a world divided by political lines, colour lines, and economic lines, where we consume polarized media in echo chambers seeded with incendiary bot accounts… it’s so so important to just listen to other humans and try to respect their side. Try to accept that it matters to them, and let that be enough for you. Because that human connection is what will ultimately save us and if we lose it, we’ve lost everything. 

    Tito, you are the love of my life. The engineer to my artist, the adventurer by my side, in the mountains, in the sea, or just watching Star Trek. I can’t wait to see what the next ten years bring. And in the words of our beloved officiant John Joseph Mastandrea, here’s to life, here’s to love, here’s to you.

  • How to cope with stress like a BOSS.

    If you’ve been following, well, anyone Canadian, you know that the tariffs have been a royal pain. A hamfisted implementation. A logistics nightmare. And thus, we have been under stress.

    Follow along, dear reader, as I explain my extremely responsible, adult, and valid coping mechanism with all the elegance and grace of which I’m capable.

    I went to the local grocery store. I got a birthday cake. I don’t mean a fancy cake. I mean a shitty sheet cake with icing roses in a colour nature never intended. I bought that cake… and I had it made out “To me”. Buying my own birthday cake, on not-my-birthday is a habit of mine when things go south. I’m not ashamed to say that it’s been a two-birthday-cake month around here.

    I used to have them made out to “Ralph”. Eventually I gave up hiding my true intentions. But up to that point, Ralph’s of the world, I had your back. (That, incidentally, was the origin of naming the entity in my studio who controls kiln firings and humidity levels “Ralph”).

    It’s ok to cry while you eat the cake. It’s encouraged, actually, nothing adds flavour to cheap icing like the tears of the despairing. I spent the pandemic haunting my studio alone, slowly losing at McDonalds box jenga. But I digress.

    Here’s the other reason to buy yourself cake; I read an article recently titled “the benefits of getting old” or some such. There were several bullet points, but they all added up to one thing:

    Older folks just don’t have as many fucks to give.

    The article tried to vary it up. They really did.
    “You have greater emotional intelligence”.
    “You have more life experience to draw from”.
    “You are less likely to be reactive”.

    They really could have just summed it up though, thusly:
    You no longer give a fuck when you don’t have to.

    Back to the cake. When I went to the cashier, she looked askance at my cake (this is not my first time having an odd interaction with a grocery store cashier, scroll to the bottom).

    Her: “Birthday?”.
    Me: No.
    Her: Special occasion?
    Me: No. 
    Her: Ok then… *goes on to pointedly do Other Things*
    Me: The cake is for me. I’m going to eat it myself.
    Her: …
    Me: You may not know this yet, but when you’re in your 40’s, you can purchase, and consume, your own birthday cake any time you like. No one can stop you. Depending on how you feel about your glucose levels, you could even start now.

    She gave me an admirably level look. Then she said
    “When I get there, I will think of you. You fucking legend”.

    Goddamn right I am.

    = = = = 

    Many moons ago, in the footsteps of the Great Dyers, I decided to try dyeing yarn with Kool Aide. I had never dyed yarn before and had no idea what to do. So I started by going to the grocery store and buying up every single serve package of Kool Aide I could find, in as many flavours as possible. 

    I dumped my findings (40 or so packages) unceremoniously onto the conveyor belt.

    A cute guy was standing just ahead of me, and he kept looking back at my unseemly pile.

    “I’m Dyeing!” I volunteered.

    “You’re WHAT?!” He exclaimed in horror.

    “Yes! Tonight!” And, as an afterthought,
    “Did you know you could use Kool Aide?”.

    ====

    And yes, for my pedantic readers: While use of the phrase dates back to 1968 book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, and the saying “drinking the Kool aide” has entered our common vernacular, in the case of Jonestown it was Flavor Aid,  laced with cyanide and other horrid things. :) 

  • Today’s Post Sucks.

    I’ve been labouring under the impression, the apparently misguided impression, that CUSMA was a real and useful thing. However, it turns out, in the absence of a De Minimus shipping amount (and in the presence of de-maximus insanity), I’m not sure anymore. The information around this has been very, very confusing.

    If you’ve somehow managed to get this far without hearing about this, good on you. Also, don’t feel too badly; the day before William and Kate’s wedding Tito turned to me and sleepily said, “Hey, is some bigshot in England getting married tomorrow?”.

    So here is the thing. Starting August 29th, the US will suspend the $800 de minimus entry that has been in place for years. That means that all packages entering the states, no matter how small, will be subject to duty.

    There seem to be two main concerns. How to get the yarn past the border at all (that is, correct HS codes, certificates of origin etc.) and whether the customer will have to pay more to get it. And thirdly, whether there is enough Nutella in this world to get me through this mess.

    I was under the impression that all but 4% or so of Canadian goods fell under CUSMA, but this is what I am getting for our tariff codes (and yes, our yarn is milled in Canada and qualifies as Canadian in origin).

    This is sourced from https://tariffguide.ai

    And this is sourced from https://www.tariffinder.ca/

    It seems fair to assume at this point that someone is paying something that was not part of the original contract. That, as vague as it is, is the most that I can say with certainty right now. I’d love to know the amounts, but it seems to vary from 6% to 41% to up-to-$200USD-regardless-of-value-because-we-can-so-suck-it%.

    Here’s what other countries think

    “Postal services in Germany, Denmark, Sweden and Italy said they will stop shipping most merchandise to the U.S. effective immediately. France and Austria will follow Monday, and the United Kingdom Tuesday. India’s government also said the country will temporarily suspend postal deliveries to the United States starting Monday” the AFP

    What’s a Canadian entrepreneur to do? Here’s where I’m at:

    August 25th – September 2nd: I am going to pause shipping for one week. This is because I won’t be able to get things across the border in time for the 29th, and because after the 29th I’d like to see where things net out.

    My goal is to figure out how to pay the tariff on my customers behalf for all orders that were placed before the 29th. Further, I am hoping that it can be done in a way that allows the customer to have proof, so they will have recourse if someone tries to double-dip at the other end and charge them again.

    During that same week I will not accept orders from the USA. Once the dust has settled and I can see which way the wind is blowing (metaphor city y’all) then I can get a plan together. Perhaps it involves building tariffs into my pricing and covering it at our end. Perhaps the customer will just have to eat the cost at theirs and I will end up losing tons of business. Perhaps I will have to stop shipping to the USA altogether which would likely crush us (this is not an option right now, because I do not like the idea of being crushed).

    (Side note, during the Salem Witch Trials there was, in fact, a person who was crushed to death. Toward the end, folklore has it he screamed “More weight!”. Absolute Legend.).

    This is going to hurt the company badly. Paying all those tariffs will hurt, and refunding all the inevitable requests will hurt. I have no clue, honestly and transparently and humanly here, how to get by that bit. And I can say that here, while mixing metaphors (the other day mom declared, in a fit of drama, that she could no longer “see the rainbow at the end of the tunnel”), and run-on sentences, and more than a bit of self-pity because this is my blog and I don’t shave my legs for this space. I gave myself a good cry today and ate several ice cream sandwiches.

    I bet I can make you laugh before you leave though….

    Tito just does not have the flair for the dramatic that I do 

    Him: “yeah, I was cleaning the backyard and I hit a wasp nest. Had to get the spray foam.”

    Me: “So Tito managed to open the gates of hell in the backyard. The puzzle box from hellraiser. The rift from Pacific Rim. And the denizens of Hell, with beelzebub, kaiju and cenobites in tow came pouring out. It required armour. And so I put on a 7mm wetsuit, armed myself with wasp spray and went into battle to close the rift and emerged victorious.”

    Moral: If it looks stupid, but it works, it ain’t stupid. Tito came out with 8 stings. Me? Zero. Yeah, I wore my goggles, too. And if wearing a wetsuit to ship yarn helps, then start the bath y’all.

  • Pivot! Pivot! Pivot!

    I am looking to tweak some things about how the Blue Brick operates, to adjust for some really big, relatively recent challenges. Tito and I are mom’s main caregivers. This wasn’t a surprise, we planned for this time when we all moved in together last year, but her health has taken a downturn since the last stroke, and the challenges around mobility and pain management are pretty intense.

    It’s taken a lot of time away from The Blue Brick, for which I apologize and feel awful. I know that many of you (bless your hearts) will say “Family first, yarn can wait” but that simply cannot work long term, because The Blue Brick is the only source of income for our home and it needs to be a robust, healthy company for us to get by.

    The second challenge has been the tariffs. Again, I know many folks will point out that we are, technically, currently, covered under the CUSMA agreement, and customers should not pay extra money to receive our yarns. And they would be right. However, market uncertainty has still resulted in greatly reduced sales, a natural consequence of all this instability. There has been some confusing and conflicting messaging out there, which means lots of people aren’t sure what’s going to happen.

    Our supply chain has also become much more expensive, and much more unpredictable in terms of availability. Sometimes we’ve been told that stellina, say, or red dye, cannot be had for love nor money. Nor kidneys (believe me, I’ve tried).

    Finally, social media isn’t what it used to be. Visibility is down. engagement is down. Bot accounts, false information and accounts that have been hacked for onlyfans proliferate (I, too, was surprised when my favourite “Baby zoo animals” feed became a sea of scantily clad bums). It can no longer be our main source of outreach.

    What am I doing to fix this?

    Never fear, I am not wailing in the corner and tearing at mine garments. Nor taking up a drinking habit. Both have been tempting, don’t get me wrong, but it’s times like this that I’m grateful to be a lifelong Karate student. Some days (rarely) it means enlightenment. Many days it’s the therapeutic benefit of getting out of my own head to be of service to others. And sometimes it’s just the cathartic value of punching, kicking and screaming for an hour, aka a controlled temper tantrum.

    1. Stabilize my supply chain by pre-purchasing in bulk if possible, and warehousing it all here at the house so I’m never short on the yarn, dye and chemicals I need to do the job. This will mean discontinuing some bases (TBD). I’ll do my best to retain everyone’s favourites and keep a range of pricing so our yarn is always accessible. This should, in turn, speed up fulfillment which will be critical.
    2. Building out a separate office Here at the house, but separated from everyone else. During these times Tito knows he’s mom’s primary person, and I get a few hours, uninterrupted, to focus on the non-dyeing side of the business. Including customer service, shipping and website maintenance.
    3. Diversifying sales. Many folks do not want to wait for weeks to receive a pre order item. I’m going to generate and maintain a beautiful inventory section of ready-to-ship items. I’ll bring in the occasional specialty base, or spinning braid. I’m going to try to find somewhere to fire my ceramics and bring them back to market. Maybe I’ll make resin jewelry, or turn nostepinne again. We are so much more than yarn.
    4. Diversifying communications For so long, it’s been social media driven. But all things Meta are now suspect, and I think that’s driving a lot of people to get their daily feeds elsewhere. I’ll get active on Bluesky and TikTok, and I’ve re-started this blog. I’d love everyone to go to our website and sign up for the newsletter if they’re so inclined. Sign up for updates from this blog if you want. I promise, sometimes I’m funny. The biggest commodity out there now is our attention. Let’s control where it gets spent instead of being force-fed things that make us sad. This one is a challenge. I don’t know where to find the time to be constantly working on outreach. I don’t have the kind of life where I can focus exclusively on high quality content creation or teach my dogs how to juggle for likes. But my audience is out there, and I need to meet them where they are.
    5. Focusing more on fiber arts myself. There was a time when I wove, and knit, and designed, and crocheted and spun. When I was actively producing FOs and talking about the great things that I was doing. These things, the enjoyable part of the business, are the first casualties when time becomes scarce, but they’re critical. They’re literally the bridge between what I make and what my customers want to do. To visualize, to get inspired, I need to rediscover the artisan within myself.

    I’m no business expert ;) this is a journey. But I’m an artist. I’m a teacher and a maker. I’m passionate and earnest (and I have super healthy kidneys if you’re interested). I will adapt this business to the new zeitgeist and I hope you’re all joining me on the journey. I remain so grateful for all the people who love what I make, who support us, and who allow me to make my living bringing beauty into the world.

    I’ll end with pretty pictures of what’s currently on for pre order :) Check it out if the colours call to you!

    Dried Lavender

    Kim’s Barn

    Flint

    Aster

    Autumnal

    And a hell of a selection of Blues

    Stay cool. Be ungovernable.
    S.

  • Kim’s Barn, a retrospective

    If you’ve followed us for a long time, you know that Kim is a pretty special person to us. She owns a Highland cattle farm out in Niagara on the Lake. The cows are her pets, along (at that time) with the pig (Wilbur), the goat (Diesel), two miniature horses, a dog, a cat, and one big horse (Pete).

    Pete was fired from his job as a carriage horse, for his propensity to cross fields to eat other people’s landscaping, and to take the carriage with him. Pete is my hero.

    Many colours have come from the colourful, eternally youthful, and certifiably insane person that is my friend Kim. She gave me the OG namesake that led to the Feather colourway. She collected the wild turkey feathers that became Quill. Even Rooster, Kim’s Barn’s direct descendant, comes from her.

    My first skeins of Kim’s Barn marked a love of turquoise and golden brown that would thread its way through so many of my later creations. Including (but not limited to) Rooster, Grotto, Mermaid Purse and Unicorn Fish. It got to a point where I would proudly introduce a new colour to Tito and he would stare at it blankly and pronounce “Wow. It looks just like all your other shit.”. Love that guy.

    When I first began dyeing, long before I had invented my gradient methods, that photo of Kim’s Barn informed one of my very first colourways;

    This baby, and a few other old school colourways, will hit the shop tomorrow morning :) So if you’ve been feeling nostalgic, here you go!

  • Tariff Update

    UPDATE

    Here’s hoping the above update is correct ;)

    —

    And the hits keep rolling! In addition to the impact on our material costs and supply chains, the $800 USD minimum for tariffs is no longer valid.

    Well over half our business goes to the United States. We’ve spent years building a great community of makers, on both sides of the border. We have to find a way to keep that alive.

    What are we doing?

    Starting today I’ve introduced a new shipping tier for free shipping over $250 CDN. Also starting today, if you purchase any two skeins of yarn, and then add a pattern to your purchase, the pattern will be free. You do need to add the pattern of your choice first, for the discount to be applied. Finally, these changes should not impact your ability to earn free shipping or to use your puppy points. I’m doing everything I can to reduce the sting of potential duties. Have an idea? Shoot it my way in an email.

    What can you do?

    Canadian small businesses need to keep our cash flow rolling as smoothly as possible in order to do business, to mitigate the increased material costs, and the unpredictability of the market, and our supply chains. Many of us are already operating with a greatly reduced margin compared to this time last year, so the ability to weather more hits is thin, to say the least.

    Regardless of where you live, if you are part of this crafting community we have built, all we ask is that you continue to be part of it. Support us with purchases, or by spreading the word to your friends in your crafting circle. Reach out to your stores to see if they want to stock us (historically we have not relied overmuch on wholesale, but perhaps that needs to change). Share what you make, so we can share inspiration with others. Let’s keep the creativity alive and rolling and not allow what’s happening to destroy what we’ve built, as a company, as a community, or as friends.

    Here’s a little creative endeavour to soften the shit news :) I wrote a short story, and I illustrated it. It’s an aspirational autobiography. I would love to die close to the sea, with a little legacy of small kindnesses. Image is Faber Castell Pitt Pastels on Clairfontaine Pastelmat paper.

    Once upon a time there was a girl who was a potter, and who lived by the sea. She would make little tiny teacups and leave them on the shore.

    When she was gone, everyone knew that she had lived, because all the hermit crabs there had little teacup bums.

    The end.

  • Guyana

    Above are all us cousins. I’m in a white shirt with a colourful design, back row, looking right at the camera and ROCKING those bangs ;)

    Fun fact, I’m half Guyanese, and spent a chunk of my childhood in Guyana, which is in the Amazon :) They think differently there. For example, the houses in our village were built on stilts, so that during the monsoon season the homes don’t flood. This means that in the off season, there is an “up house” and a “down house”, that is, the area under the house where chickens are kept, hammocks hung and so on. 

    Along with the other things that we stored in our down house was a local Amazonian tribesman who had taken to drinking overmuch, and would sleep it off in our hammock. My mom did what made sense; she made him my nanny, in return for which he got to go on sleeping in the down house and share our meals. 

    Now… I understand that the idea of taking an indigent person of no fixed address and making him responsible for your child in the jungle seems… unorthodox. Mom was onto something though, he never drank around me, and he became my guide for childhood wanderings in the rain forest. I called him Uncle Quack because I couldn’t understand him, but he made himself understood through gestures. What was good to eat, what was dangerous, where certain animals could be found. 

    My favourite memory was whenever he took me to see Guyana’s famous “Black Water”.  The water is a deep golden colour, due to the tannins that seep into the water from the jungle vegetation that falls into the river as it travels north through the country. It’s magic. And in my memory, the water was sweet. Believe me, I’ve considered dyeing it, but I have yet to get it right.

    Here’s something neat, when I was there, there was no electricity in the village (we’re talking 80’s). So to decorate the home, my aunt would fill empty coca cola bottles with water, and a little food colouring. She’d put those bottles in the windows, and when the sunlight came through them it would make beautiful patterns on the walls.

    When I got back to Canada, I would start squirreling away little bottles too, and I’d open up my markers and squeeze pigment out of the cartridges to make colours. Then I would mix them to get the ones I wanted and put them on the windowsill in different orders. It was my favourite past-time. I come by dyeing honestly ;)

    My Grandmother

    Another fun fact of my time there, one night my leg slipped out of the net while I was sleeping and I woke in great pain and covered in bites from a variety of night time creepy crawlies. They took me to the local witch doctor (I can’t make this shit up) because that was the option available at the time. He rubbed coconut oil on my leg and basically wrung it out until … stuff… started flowing out of the bites. Then he bandaged me up. 

    Last memory. We had to catch the Malali, which was the ferry that crossed the Essequibo river. My mom had to walk there, through the jungle, and she had to carry me because of my leg. I wasn’t small, I was 11. When I woke, it was dawn, and she had carried me all night. When I was trying to have a child of my own, it was that memory that drove me. That desire to give the very best of myself to someone. 

    These days I celebrate my culture mostly through food, though I remain unable to handle spice (to the embarrassment of my mother and my spicier friends). And of course though music; I listen to a bit of everything (except opera) but at family events it’s all about chutney, soca and reggae. For a few years running I “played mas” in Toronto’s annual Caribbean culture parade (Caribana!). I speak a passable creole, and my heritage on that side is a mixture of the Indians and Africans the British brought over to work the plantations.

    Thanks for taking this little trip down memory lane with me :) I have no idea what prompted this, but I’m glad I wrote it all down. I don’t know who I blog for, really, but I love having a place where I’m more authentically me.

  • The Return of the Ibis

    Ibis was released in April 2019, along with a pattern to go with it. I had asked Kyle Vey, a super talented local designer, to design wings for me. The entire yarn collection, of which Ibis was only part, was called The Aviary, and it seemed fitting. When he was finally ready to show it to us, it definitely took everyone’s breath away.

    That pattern/yarn combo, and these images (aided in no small part by how gorgeous Julie is!), went on to cause quite a kerfuffle in the knitting world, and after all these years I still get requests for it. I’ve decided to make it easier by putting the colour up for pre order again, including extensions. We’ve dyed lots and lots of extensions over the years for folks who ran a little short binding off their Wingspan feathers, so I definitely recommend that you get the extra if you think you might be a little on the loose side and plan to knit a Wingspan.

    Click here to shop the Ibis yarns

    Today is not about the Wingspan Incident though (though I do appreciate how many of you still come up to me at shows and express wonder that I survived). Today is about the Ibis colourway, the bright, jewel toned gorgeousness that formed the palette for so many beautiful projects.

    The Ibis in question is the fellow in the photos above. Tito and I got these images at an aviary in Columbia, and this haughty little bird kept turning his back to the camera. He was so stunning, like a muted rainbow, like an oil slick. Iridescent and saturated, but somehow dark and understated too. I set my mind to dyeing a colour that could do this little guy justice.

    Here was the final colour. I went with a muted gold, and rather than include that iridescent green, I allowed the green to be a happy consequence of meeting the gold with a brilliant teal. The space *between* colours became as important as the dyes themselves in creating this effect. That’s one of the things that helps Ibis shine. And speaking of shine, it’s most brilliant on bases that have a sheen to them, a little cashmere or sparkle.

    The OG Aviary Collection

    These were the colours Ibis originally launched with, most of which were kind of drowned out by Ibis itself (that upper left one is mislabeled, that’s Pictus). I’ve always had a soft spot for Pheasant and Turkey myself. It’s neat to look back on the whole collection, in its original form, as it was meant to be presented.

    That’s the story, of this vibrant, oil-slick-rainbow colour, based off a haughty bird. We did get a lot of notes from folks saying that this colour got them back into knitting. It turns out, wings meant a lot of things to a lot of people. The original Wingspan was gifted to someone who was not destined to live long enough to knit her own, and knowing that has always made me happy.

    I’ll always be grateful for being the conduit through which yarn that meant so much, to so many, came into this world.

    I doubt the Ibis gave a shit though, The truth is, the bird was an asshole.