The recent orders of yarns are coming in.  What should have come today actually arrived yesterday, so I was able to do up a couple dozen Phydlbitz Sock.

BUT… yesterday the digital counter on my electric skein-winder gave up the ghost, so I ended up have to manually count the revolutions as I pulled hanks from the cones.  I used to do it manually the first 4 or 5 years in business, so it’s not like I don’t know how.  It’s just tedious, time-consuming, and a little physical.

The good news is that the manufacturer of my skein winder (Crazy Monkey Creations) has good customer service.  Even though my machine is long out of warranty, the craftsman behind the company is sending me a new digital counter to install myself.   Not free, of course, and not cheap, but a whole lot better than having to buy a whole new skein winder!  By the way, they have expanded their lines of assorted high quality fiber tools – swifts, skein winders, etc. — if you want good quality products for serious fiber working, with good customer service, go visit Crazy Monkey Creations.

Anyway, back to today’s yarns ….

As I’ve mentioned previously, I’ve been using a dry-dye technique and coming up with FABulous results.   One of the features of dry-dye is that the dye is not pre-mixed into a liquid solution, but applied directly onto the yarn.   Many of my dyes are single color, but some are created by mixing different single colors so that when mixed in a wet solution it produces a single blended color.  BUT when the dye powder is apply directly to wet yarn, all those dye molecules stay separated and strike the yarn in surprising ways.

Today, I used the dye powder from the manufacturer’s jar, which was labeled Ecru.  It should be an off-white, sandy-beach sort of color.  But, as you can see here, the Ecru dye is made up of a mix of orange, tan, cream, and even a bit of red and blue!  I am still playing with the dyes, slowing getting a feel for what ACTUAL colors have been blended to create a single color of wet dye.  It’s a fascinating process, and it nearly always produces amazing results because I honestly cannot control individual dye molecules.  🙂

Anyway, here are the two racks (be sure to look further down for the 2nd rack).  #304 and 305 are singles, and all the rest are Twinsets, so you can create a larger project and the colors will be compatible.   When appropriate, I have rotated one hanks in each Twinset so you can see all the colors that are available on both hanks of a Twinset.   You don’t have to take both hanks, of course.

All of these are Phydlbitz Sock, and these will be available for shipping on Monday Tuesday (Monday is a holiday).. The unclaimed ones  will be reskeined and posted to the Blog Reader Specials page over the weekend.   I don’t need the digital counter for re-winding these, but since I know the new counter is coming next week, I will likely hold off preparing more yarns until I get it.

To claim the ones you want, just send me an email *  and let me know your state or country if you haven’t ordered before, so I can calculate your shipping correctly.  I’ll send an Paypal invoice,and will ship your yarn when the yarns are all processed and ready to go.

*  (please, no blog-comment requests for yarns —  Blog comments are GREAT, but yarn requests are honored in the order of their email time-stamp, and I don’t always get comment notifications fast enough so your blog-comment requests aren’t processed in a timely fashion).

All the unclaim yarns have now been posted to the Blog Reader Specials page; please check there for current availability. 

#322 and #323 are the Twinset dyed only with the dye powder from the jar labeled Ecru – a beautiful combination of colors, but I assure you it all came from a single dye jar.  

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