Tag Archives: sock club

If you’re looking for our Moonshine giveaway, look no further.

March is a tricky month. At the beginning of the month, it seems like it should be spring. And yet, it’s most definitely not. Especially when you’re hit by a ton of snow, like we were today.

But eventually the snow will melt. We will go through mud season, a seemingly endless period of cold mud with flooded grass, just teasing us.

But it will start to dry out and we’ll be left with dirt and tiny, tiny sprouts of green grass.

And then something wonderful will start to happen. We will start to see grass on the farm. Not yet the green grass of full spring month, but yellow-green grass that comes in a bit patchily.

It’s hard to believe that by the end of March, spring will have sprung and we’ll see grass on the ground, but I’ve found photographic proof that grass always comes.

And the grass will be quickly chomped on by the sheep and goats. Who will see that the grass is always greener on the other side.

Much like our March Sock Club’s colorway…

The yarn holds the promise of spring. That we’re on the other side of winter. That this is the first vestiges of the spring that we will have, with it’s yellow-green hue.

Eventually we will have a deep spring green, but not yet. right now we have the promise of spring. That place between winter and spring called mud season. (Well, it would be mud season if we would stop getting so much freaking snow!) But by the end of the month, spring will be here.

If you want to be notified for when memberships open up next quarter, sign up to receive an email. I will be releasing any slots that open up later this month and because the number are so limited, I will only be sending out an email to those who’ve signed up as interested, so don’t miss out on next quarter’s offerings!

It’s time for our sock club members to open up their February packages! What do we have inside?

Hay Bale! Hay is incredibly important to the winter maintenance of our animals. There’s no grass for them to graze on, so in addition to grain, all winter long they get fresh hay to munch on. This means regular hay deliveries. One of the great things about living in Virginia is that the price of hay is much cheaper than when we were on Martha’s Vineyard. Still, we go through 1,400 to 2,000 pounds of hay a week, and it adds up quickly.

We have the hay delivered to the front of the farm, but once it arrives, it still needs to be moved back to the pasture for storage and then into the pen as needed (2-3 times a week).

Amy is in charge of moving the hay. It is a very delicate operation, particularly in the mud, but I can’t imagine it’s as difficult as maneuvering a bus, which Amy has a license for.

Inspired by the multifaceted yellow found in a round bale of hay, I got to work mixing up some colors. In addition to pure yellow, I also mixed up a brown and a yellow-brown solution of concentrated dye.

Then measured it into the dye pot by the milliliter.

Next came the pre-soaked yarn…

I allowed the base color to absorb…

And then added additional brown to get that hint of brown found throughout the bales.

In the end, I was really pleased with the tempered colorway that I came up with.

What would some good patterns be for this lightly variegated yarn? I’ve found a few patterns that I think would pair well with this yarn:

Top Row: A Roll in the Hay socks by Gina House / Ear of Wheat scarf by Natalia Sha / Winter Wheat socks by Valerie Wagoner
Middle Row: Gingko Shoulder Shawlette by Maggie Magali / Winesap socks by Darlene Hayes / Wintered Wheat Mitts by Melissa Schaschwary
Bottom Row: Winnow socks by Janice Kang / Katy mitts by Darlene Hayes / Yellow Dwarf Shawl by verybusymonkey

Do you have any other patterns that come to mind? Share them below! If you have ideas for March, email me (lauria at fiberfarm dot com) and I’ll share them in March’s post!

A special thanks to Cris, who took the photos of me dyeing yarn.

If you want to be notified for when memberships open up next quarter, sign up to receive an email.

I was floored by your desire to participate in our A Year at the Farm Sock Club in a smaller-than-full-year or quarterly payment commitment. So, we’ve added several paying options in our shop! Although the biggest savings still comes by purchasing the club outright, you can now purchase it and pay quarterly. Or if that’s too big of a commitment, you can buy 6 months at a time, or 3 months at a time.

More Kool Aid Dyed Yarn:

I’d love to hear what you want to see this sock club! Do you like tonals? variegated? semi-solids? What’s floating your boat right now?

I’m stuck inside my house while the plows rumble in the distance so let us know what kinds of colors you want to see. It does a body good to think of color while looking at all this white.

So, in the madness that was the “All I Want for Christmas” giveaway, you might have missed us adding Juniper Moon Farm “A Year at the Farm” Sock Club for 2014.  I’m really excited to start dyeing the sock club yarns for 2014 and I have all kinds of ideas running through my head. At the beginning of each month, I’ll be writing a blog post showing off the yarn that I dyed and show you what’s happening at the farm that was my inspiration for that colorway. I have lots of ideas so far, lambing, the spring shearing celebration, the weather, our harvest. I’m hoping that I’ll always get close to my inspiration, but one thing I know about dyeing is that you have to embrace the mistakes because they just might turn out to be something awesome.

Like 2013′s December yarn. It started out as November’s yarn. I was going for a lovely brown color like a turkey. I had been imagining that yarn since September when I was dyeing share yarn, so I had a very specific idea in mind. But when the dye was shipped to me, the brown wasn’t there. So I started improvising, trying to get a brown. I started by mixing some red, orange, and some blue dye, thinking I might end up with a reddish brown. The color looked pretty good in the dye jar, so I put it and the yarn into the dye pot. When it was done, I had beautiful, deep purplish red yarn, with a lot of white still. So I added some green because red and green make brown. I mixed two different colors of green, one that had more blue and one that had more yellow. Added that to the dye pot and put the yarn back in. When the dye exhausted, I looked into the pot and I wasn’t pleased with what I saw.

I was ready to start adding more dye (because you can keep adding color until the yarn just won’t take any more and we were no where near that point, yet), but a little voice told me to slow down. I needed to allow the yarn to to dry and see how it actually looked. The most important thing to me was that it didn’t look muddy and I started to worry that by mixing all these different dyes that they might start to make the yarn look blah. So I pulled the yarn out and let it dry.

As soon as I did, I discovered that I really liked the colorway, even though it definitely wasn’t a November colorway. It was clearly a December colorway.

I called it Farmhouse Christmas. Red and Green in sepia-tones. And you know what? I’ve gotten the most emails from our club members about it. One person said that the colors glowed, just like a Christmas yarn should. Another person said that they didn’t celebrate Christmas, but that they really liked this yarn. It’s a subtle blend of colors, not loud and flashy. I can’t wait to see how it knits up! So sock club members, please share your finished knits! So far, the only finished sock I’ve seen is Julie’s!

We did some other fun yarns this year and experimented with some techniques. Tying knots into the yarn and over-dyeing:

Dip dying:

Kool Aid Dyeing:

We didn’t manage to take photos of every month. In 2014, I’m going to keep one hank of each color that we dye so that I can see how the whole year looks together. With over 5,000 yards of sock yarn I could definitely make a blanket, or have a whole passel of handknit socks, but I’ve got Christmas ornaments on my mind. Something that will reflect, well, a year at the farm, in a wooly-harvest-of-color kind of way.

I’m still waiting for more yarn and the bags that each hank will be packaged in to arrive, so I’ve been dreaming up colorways and doing a little light reading. I’m always interested in learning new techniques and new ways of thinking about things, so I often immerse myself is research to find inspiration.

That means that there’s still time for you to join in the fun. There are 14 slots left in the club and membership sign ups will be open until the 10th, which will give me a couple of days to dye before the first shipment goes out.

I’ve been thinking of doing a three-month membership option where people could join for as few as three months or break down their yearly membership payments into four installments spaced out over the course of the year. I’ve been looking at some software that would make this easier to handle, but it is an investment, so I want to see if people would be interested in this option (assuming that we have any slots left after January 10th). You asked for it, we listened! Payment plan options are now available. Please see the listing for details. Please note, this is the first time we’re trying this software, and although I read the manual very carefully, there is the possibility that something isn’t quite right. If so, I beg patience as we figure it out and fix it!

After the first batch of yarn has started to reach club members, I’ll share January’s colorway and inspiration with you!