MousePants Returns! Now With 50% More Fiber!
How MousePants Woolens Was Born or How I Fell Hopelessly in Love With Corespinning
MousePants never really went away, but I did take a rather long sabbatical from art over the last year. My deteriorating physical health (I have rheumatoid arthritis and migraines) and an unstable work situation made art less of a priority in my life. As much as I love it, I just didn't make my art a part of my daily life, despite the fact that it probably would have been cathartic for me and good for my mental health. This is a story of evolution. How life constantly propels us forward despite us clawing to stay in the past. It is a story of my passion for fiber and how that love has changed and been reincarnated over the years. There is one thing that has never changed and that is my absolute love of yarn and wool. Almost ten years ago I bought my first skein of yarn at Hobby Lobby. I am so grateful to have discovered my true love. It's not a person. It can't leave me or judge me or fall for someone else. My love affair with fiber will only continue to deepen.
Last March, as a birthday present to myself I bought a little spinning wheel. It is nothing fancy. It is a secondhand travel wheel that spent most of its life in a garage gathering dust. The lacquer finish is a bit crackled from our dry New Mexico climate, but it gets the job done. See, even before I learned to spin, I was always drawn to vibrant fiber batts and raw fleeces. I like to know where my yarn comes from (I'm a hopeless knitting addict). The thought of controlling the process from start to finish really appealed to my artistic side (and inner control freak). Around the same time, a flurry of books on spinning art yarn were released and my imagination ran wild.
I took one spinning class, during which I had a migraine and had to excuse myself hurriedly to throw up twice, and then did a lot of studying my books and back issues of Spin Off magazine. I came across a technique called corespinning that really appealed to me. You take a commercially spun core yarn and basically use your wheel to wrap the yarn with fiber, creating a strong, easily manipulated finished product. One thing I didn't like was that most of the corespun art yarns I found for sale on Etsy and similar sites are very thick (think pinky to forefinger thick) and offer little yardage. This is because corespinning eats up a lot of fiber if you do it the traditional way. It's just not cost effective to produce hundreds of yards when it takes 4 oz of fleece to make 40 or 50 yards of yarn (and that's a generous estimate).
I started thinking of what I would want to buy first as a knitter. If I were shopping, I would want fine fibers, a workable gauge yarn, and enough yardage in a skein to actually complete a project. I understand that weavers and other fiber artists can use 30 yards of these crazy art yarns and actually make something wonderful, but for a knitter, there's not a whole lot you can do with that little yardage.
While I was working on this, I stumbled on a fiber supplier who had the batts I had been dreaming of. Exotic and fine fibers and all so soft. Vibrant colors and interesting add-ins like sequins, twine, and ribbon for texture. It was a match destined to happen. This was just the fiber I was looking for.
I began spinning, unsure at first. Thick and a little uncontrolled (which I knit up into bulky cowls and scarves for family and friends and myself), but gradually more refined and thinner. I can get a solid worsted weight corespun now, something I haven't seen anywhere while shopping. The advantage to this is that it is easily worked up with readily available commercial patterns and I can spin 4-5 oz of fiber into up to 180 yards of yarn. MousePants Woolens was born!
Because I love the MousePants name and brand so much, I decided to sell my woolens right alongside my felties. I haven't been spending much time on my felties since the Heartsy deal, and, in all honesty, the Heartsy deal really snowed me under. I got way too many custom orders, many of them intricate and complicated, and made way too little money to make it worth it. I didn't get the repeat orders I expected out of it. I even had one person who ordered one piece with the Heartsy deal and then one other custom who just never returned to pay (and it's a strange piece I probably won't sell to someone else). Heartsy recently went out of business. I don't know the reasons, but I wonder if other businesses had similar experiences and they started having a hard time finding people willing to take the big cut you had to take to be a featured seller.
In my Etsy shop now, you will find my usual assortment of felties (and a few strange ones from a gallery that closed) and my handspun yarn in two weights, regular and Phat. I have started working with local shops to get my yarn out there and am now at the Yarn Store at Nob Hill. This fall I hope to be in Village Wools. I am not at the point of spinning for production. I spin because I love it. I spin because it calms my nerves and gives my anxious hands something to do. But I have big plans for MousePants Woolens. Look for me on Ravelry as a legit yarn brand and if you are interested in purchasing some of my yarn but a little unsure, contact me and I might have a few yards lying around that I can send you. I have truly found my passion and I feel so blessed. It can only get better from here.
No comments:
Post a Comment