A Geranium Top For Willow

Last week I realized that Willow was rapidly outgrowing all of her clothes and I needed to get a few new tops and pants for her. I made a quick trip to the mall and picked up a few essentials but nothing I saw got me very excited. I decided to make her something fun. This little top is adorable! I used less than 1 fat quarter of the floral print for the yoke (from Garden Party Tango by Iza Pearl Design which I’ve had since 2015!) and the seabreeze gingham is a remnant my mom had leftover from a dress that she made for my sister when she was 10 years old. So, a solid 20 year old remnant. Way to be a hoarder mom!

I am obsessed with Made By Rae’s Geranium dress/top pattern. I made a smaller version for Willow last summer, look how tiny she was! I pretty much think that it’s one of the only dress patterns I’ll ever need for Willow because it is so versatile. It has many customizable options in terms of length and sleeve design and embellishments - the #geraniumdress hashtag is full of inspiration. The pattern comes with an expansion pack for all sorts of other details to make each version unique and I’ll definitely be getting it soon because I want many more Geranium dresses and tops. This version has me weak in the knees!

I’m really happy with how this top came together but was worried that I’d ruin it with sloppy buttonholes so I got myself a snapper? A snap installer? A snap gun? A thing that looks like pliers that allows you to put snaps on fabric and it’s the best thing ever! Willow is at risk of never learning how to manage buttons because I am going to be putting multicoloured snaps on everything from now on. I’m also pretty pleased with my hand sewing. I stitched the top lining down by hand and it looks neat as a pin. The inside is almost as nice as the outside and if I knew how to make the skirt hem and side seams invisible I bet this top could be reversible. Will have to look into that.

Even though this top is definitely more spring/summer appropriate I am too excited about it to wait for the thaw to have her wear it so for now we’re layering with sweaters. The lovely cardigan she wore yesterday was a gift knit in our Orchid colourway, the pattern is Mavis baby set by Oomieknits and it’s perfect. Even though I am a huge fan of super colourful knits I’ve found it extremely useful to have a few solid coloured pieces as well to layer over her more patterned clothing.

Lastly, I never knew that I would be a baby headband person but guess what… I am! Willow is pretty tolerant of them too. Micah calls them bow-danas, like bandana but with a bow. Get it? I thought that was pretty clever.

Hello Old Friend - Business Casual Socks

Pattern: Business Casual Socks - originally published in December of 2011. And it’s FREE!

Yarn: TFA Blue Label Fingering Weight.

Ravelry pattern page here and original blog post here.

I love this design with all of my heart! This free sock pattern is definitely my most popular and I have no problem with that. I love the crisp lines and the simple diamond motif. It’s easy to knit but packs a big punch. These were designed for my dad, lover of hand knit socks (a trait he passed on to my older brother!) and I love that I have a little corner of my knitting world dedicated to him.

Five Things

Pastel Mini Sock Yarn Skein Sets added to the shop!

These two!!!

Doing an afterthought heel without waste yarn. Snip snip!

I think Willow liked her birthday cake…

“When I grow up I want to be a yarn dyer like my dad” Rowan had career day this week. He dressed up as Chris. It was awesome!

Magnolia Chunky

Pattern: Magnolia Chunky by Camilla Vad. Hat pictured is Alpine Trail by Jill Zielinski.

Yarn: TFA PureWash Chunky in Trinity.

Ravelry Project page here.

Say hello to my new favourite sweater! I had no idea how badly I needed this sweater in my life until I finished it, blocked it and put it on my body. Now I never want to take it off! One glance at my Ravelry project page will tell you that I don’t typically knit chunky sweaters, or dropped yokes (Is that a thing? the yoke is much longer than my actual measurements from neck to armpit) or sweaters with puffed sleeves, or bobbles. Heck! I don’t even knit much lace these days! But the second I laid eyes on this pattern I knew that I wanted to give it a try and boy am I glad that I did!

Part of the reason why it was so easy to convince myself to give this pattern a shot, even though it happens to be such a departure for me, is the fact that at this chunky gauge it required very little time commitment from me as far as sweaters go. I knit the whole thing in under a week. Even if I ended up hating it on me I figured it was worth a week’s worth of knitting to find out. And the good news is I love it! This winter has been so cold. Maybe it’s just my old, frail bones, or my drafty house, but for whatever reason I have found myself chillier than usual and in need of a chunky merino/alpaca sweater. It’s perfectly warm and cozy yet somehow still light and wearable.

Look how pretty those staggered yoke increases are! I love that this design has so many feminine details, even right down to the colour I chose to knit it in, but at this gauge still looks modern and cool instead of just sweet and pretty. This pattern is the chunky version of a design that was originally published for fingering weight, and though both feature the same lovely details I just can’t get enough of this chunky version. It feels more fashion forward, dare I say even editorial at this gauge. I’m into it.

I love the silhouette with the front tucked in (I am never not tucking in my sweaters) but love it less so hanging loose. Untucked it’s just a bit less flattering on me, which is why I don’t have a photo of it untucked. It hits a bit low on my hips making my torso look long and shapeless. But with a front tuck? Perfect.

I’m very pleased that I decided to knit it in Trinity. Other colours I was considering were Mint, Cloak or Gold which I’m convinced would have all worked. Trinity is such a lovely shade of very wearable pale pink. The last pink sweater I knit turned out to be not quite right for me, but this one gets 2 thumbs way up!

PureWash Chunky is an organic merino/alpaca blend and that 20% alpaca content lends this yarn the loveliest drape and the littlest bit of halo which is so coveted these days. It manages to do all that while still providing beautiful crisp stitch definition and is quite possibly the perfect yarn for this style of sweater. I highly recommend this yarn/pattern combo.

So here’s to taking calculated risks with your knitting. To stepping out of your comfort zone and hopefully surprising yourself by finding a new favourite colour, or a new favourite silhouette or maybe just a new favourite way to work yoke increases!

And here’s a tip from me to you: slap on a statement sweater and a bright lip and you will be shocked at how pulled together you look! The lipstick I’m wearing is Laura Mercier Velour Extreme Matte Lipstick in Fire and it is amazing.

Hello Old Friend - Windward Hat

Pattern: Windward Hat - originally published in December of 2011. 

Yarn: TFA DK Weight.

Ravelry pattern page here and original blog post here.

I designed this hat right around the same time as my Cabled Canuck pattern and though I love them both equally the cabled pattern is far and away the more popular of the two. It’s funny how that happens. I think the pattern photos for Windward could be better, and maybe people just like worsted weight cables more than DK weight lace for a hat? Regardless, I still love this hat for early and late winter. Maybe not deep winter when the lighter weight and slight openness of the fabric isn’t enough, but for those transitional seasons it’s just right. The double brim goes a long way towards making this hat warmer than it appears. If my ears are warm, everything is alright.

This hat pattern works equally well as a beanie or a slouch (instructions are included for both) but the beanie version above is the one I get the most use out of. I like how the tighter fit really highlights the motif. And the OOAK colourway I knit it in still makes my heart go pitter patter.

Happy Monday!

Five Things

Out of 639 comments the random number generator chose #38… Making the winner of this week’s giveaway: Christine H! Christine wrote,

I'm so looking forward to the redesign! Keep up the great work!

Send me an email Christine to hello@tanisfiberarts.com and I’ll pop your skeins in the mail!

Thanks so much to everyone who entered and left such thoughtful comments on Wednesday’s post. I read each and every one of them. You guys really are the best!

Core Collection Colourways in PureWash DK all freshly photographed!

Me in my I Heart Cardigans and Willow in a Gramps cardigan I knit for Rowan. My kids need more Gramps cardigans. They are the cutest!

Rainbow cups drying beside the sink caught my eye.

He is so into reading on his own these days! He even “reads” a notebook with no writing in it. Hilarious.

There’s a new Mini Sock Yarn Skein Set in the shop! A new Palette too!

Have a great weekend everyone! We’ll be celebrating Willow’s first birthday by having family over tomorrow. I’m not talking about it too much because I can’t believe it! She turned one earlier this week… I can’t believe it!

A Giveaway + Some Thoughts

This giveaway is now closed. Thanks to all who entered!

Scroll to the bottom to enter the giveaway! If you’re in a blog reading kind of mood, I’d love it if you’d read through today’s post too. ;)

TFA Orange Label in Mint and Delightful

I’ve been brainstorming ways to try and make TFA more inclusive. There are so many different aspects of inclusion but the thing I’m going to talk about today is accessibility and availability. You know the big website redesign I keep mentioning? The main reason I want to do that is because over the years TFA has gone in several different directions and we’ve somehow ended up in a place where it’s not always easy to figure out how to get your hands on a special skein of our yarn. There are so many practical reasons why hand dyers depend on updates and I pass absolutely no judgement on dyers who work that way. But if you’ve missed an update because of work, life, you forgot to set an alarm or you just didn’t know it was happening, then you’re outta luck. It can start to feel like in order to get a skein of yarn you’ve got to be part of an exclusive club, which can be very alienating.

I have always tried to keep my system as simple as possible but all sorts of little changes landed TFA in a place where if you’re looking for a skein of Purple Label yarn, you’ll likely leave the site lost and confused, you’ll send me an email with a simple question “How do I buy a skein of Purple Label in Grape to knit a Sunnyside Baby sweater?” and I will send you a 3 paragraph reply that leaves you even more confused then when you started. Not cool.

Etsy Updates, Dyed-To-Order Updates, Limited Edition items, these things are all super fun and creatively rewarding for us and I don’t want to get rid of them completely, but I also don’t want them to be the only things we do. I am very excited about the new direction I’m taking our shop in. I really think it’s going to work well for everyone!

I just wanted to share a bit about why I care so much about re-organizing the shop. I want this space to be welcoming to old customers and new customers alike. Thanks for reading!

Now for the giveaway! I’ve got two beautiful skeins of TFA Orange Label yarn to give to one lucky reader! Simply leave me a comment below to enter. Easy as pie. :) A winner will be chosen at random on Friday. Good luck!

If you’re looking for pattern ideas for a single skein of luxurious yarn, here are a few suggestions:

Ah Caramel Fingerless Mitts, Grammy’s Hat (free!) Bract Hat, Framed Slouch, Afterglow Hat, Ah Caramel Hat, Cabled Canuck.

Kit Restock!

I’ve restocked a whole bunch of KITS! I’m still very much in the weeds in terms of re-photographing all of our yarns and colourways and working on a website overhaul. It’s coming along but it’s not quite there yet. What is ready right now is a whole lot of kits! I’ve got a variety of Mitten Kits, White Light Skein Sets in Fingering and Worsted Weight, Mini Sock Yarn Skein Sets AND a few new Fingering Weight Fade Sets as well.

Pictured above are the 7 lining colourways from the current selection of Mitten Kits. I love it. :)

Five Things

Kind of a Valentine’s Day theme this week. I couldn’t give a hoot about Valentine’s Day but have to admit that even the silly holidays are fun with kids. They make everything an exciting excuse to celebrate! Also, Rowan made us the sweetest Valentine at school, so now I’m a fan. Have a great weekend!

Any excuse to bake and decorate sugar cookies. Micah couldn’t be more pleased about the sprinkle lava overflowing from his cookie.

Micah dumped out the box of crayons and Rowan put them back in. In rainbow formation!!! YES!

Rowan and I made these Valentine’s for his classmates, but we wrote: “You’re my purrrfect friend” and they turned out so cute!

Last week we brought the boys tubing and it was amazing! There was a chairlift and everything. Big time fun for small kids and full grown adults as well.

These two cuties!

Scrappy Rainbow Socks For My Brother

Pattern: Toe-Up socks with an afterthought heel.

Yarn: So many TFA scraps I don’t even know where to start!

Ravelry Project page here.

About once a year I try to knit a pair of socks for my older brother Luke. I don’t knit socks for everyone in my family every year, but Luke is a special case because the socks I knit for him literally save lives!!! Sort of… Luke is a doctor, more specifically he’s a Urologic Oncologist and he does this specialized surgery that, from what I understand (which is clearly not much) involves robots that he controls with joysticks. Ha! He’s going to kill me when he reads this because I’m certain I’ve got it all wrong! So, the first time he did this surgery he was wearing hand knit socks (he’s not standing over the patient, he’s sitting at a desk operating the “robots”) and the surgery went really well and since surgeons are notoriously superstitious he will now only wear hand knit socks while doing this type of operation. So I knit him socks to save lives. Luke and I are both basically heroes.

This most recent pair is one of my finest achievements! Using only the tiniest yarn scraps from my fingering weight scraps bin I faded this moody rainbow - moody might be a stretch, but there are lots of darker shades thrown in - and I’m so pleased with the results. To get the faded transitions I simply worked lots of stripes in varying widths whenever I was switching colours. I didn’t have a set number of stripes in mind because my goal was mainly to use up every last bit of my yarn, so there was a lot of eyeballing involved. Sometimes I ran out of yarn earlier than expected, sometimes my stripes ended up taking longer than I thought. With this sort of project you have to be able to embrace a certain amount of randomness. A cavalier attitude goes a long way. At the end of the day rainbow socks are awesome no matter what. :)

Five Things

The prettiest drying racks! Colours for a new yarn bundle kit coming soon. :)

This adorable little cardigan has 6 button holes but only 4 buttons. It makes me laugh and I’ll never change it.

My brother recently ordered 2 big bean bag chairs and they were delivered in the coolest boxes. The boxes featured instructions on how to turn them into play castles! Isn’t that brilliant!? Printed on the box was a unicorn shield (all part of the castle theme) that my boys were lucky enough to be gifted. Rowan’s is on the right, all rainbows and sparkles. Micah’s is on the left, just an eye patch. This is them in a nutshell.

Luminosity Sweater progress. Getting there! Pattern in the works!

Did you know Willow’s middle name is Blue?

11 years! Time for a change?

Did you know that last year, January 2018, was the 10 year anniversary of Tanis Fiber Arts!? The date I chose to mark the beginning of it all is somewhat arbitrary, because the knitting and dying started earlier, but on January 15, 2008 I made my very first Etsy sale (which happens to be my brother’s birthday!) The very first skein I sold? A skein of Blue Label Fingering Weight in Shadow. And then on January 27th, 2008 (which happens to be my mom’s birthday! what!?!? I hadn’t realized the coincidence before right now!) I started this blog. So January of 2008 - no specific day, just the entire month - is what I consider the official beginning of Tanis Fiber Arts. Wouldn’t it have been lovely if I had taken this walk down memory lane last January to celebrate our 10 year anniversary? Why yes it would have been, but I was 8.5 months pregnant at that point and there was only one milestone that I was interested in celebrating.

So here we are, 11 years into our TFA journey and looking back on it all I can see that so much has changed and yet so much has stayed the same (we still dye that Shadow colourway using the exact same recipe!) We have made lots of changes along the way to suit our growing family, our growing fan-base and our growing interests and I think that 2019 might be the year to make a few more. I don’t want to scare anyone, I don’t have anything super drastic in mind, but I do think that it’s important to look at everything that we are currently doing with a critical eye and make sure that we aren’t just doing it that way because it’s the way we’ve always done it but rather because it’s the best way.

What I’m thinking of specifically here is our website. When I built and organized the site it served as both our direct to customer retail space and our wholesale product catalog. Since we haven’t done wholesale for years maybe a bit of re-organizing could make it function better for our customers. We’ve also been streamlining our bases (more on that next) but the number of colourways we regularly dye and the number of new, limited edition colourways we regularly feature has grown substantially. The one thing I hear more than anything else is “More kits! More kits!” so that’s something that’s always on my mind as well.

The knitty-gritty: Does shopping by COLOUR still work for you? I am definitely in the process of updating all of my product images. We sell predominantly PureWash yarns now yet don’t have them well represented within the colourways at all. Working on that! Would it be simpler to shop by yarn type? I definitely notice that most of the orders that we receive are for single bases. Often for multiple colourways, but more often than not they are of the same base. There are obviously exceptions, but it makes me wonder if shopping for yarn by base rather than by colour would simplify things.

About those bases: Towards the end of last year I made the bold announcement that we would be discontinuing ALL non-PureWash bases after the Boxing Day Etsy Update. Well… I’m having second thoughts. I love the specialty bases and after dying, shipping and handling so much of them for the Boxing Day Update I have a renewed love for them. Oh, and I should also mention that while my long term goal is to create my own PureWash versions of my favourite luxury blends that is still realistically a few years off purely for economic reasons. This is the thing, I was never able to have them available! There are multiple reasons for this but the main one is that our current set up relies on the fact that we have every yarn available in every colourway. Sure, I could keep Red Label and only have it available in a dozen colours rather than 60, but since we’re organized by colour you would have to click on every colour to see if it was one of the chosen 12 to be available on Red Label - not very practical.

This is what I’m thinking: What if I divided our yarn bases into two different categories in two different sections of a “SHOP YARN” tab on my website. “Core Collection” and “Pop Up Shop” or “TFA Boutique” (I’m still workshopping names - I think I can do better) and everything in the Core Collection (PureWash and probably a sock yarn) would be available in every colour in unlimited quantities dyed-to-order as it is now - so if you need 16 skeins of PureWash Worsted in Atlantic to knit an epic blanket, you can order it anytime and we’ll dye it for you. And, everything in the Pop Up Shop would be ready-to-ship luxury bases in limited quantities and colourways. It would sort of be like how we use the Etsy Shop but I would fit it right into the website. Having the Pop Up Shop ready-to-ship makes dyeing and inventory management so much easier for us. The easiest option by far would be to have everything ready-to-ship and do no dyed-to-order at all, but there is no possible way for me to have 20 skeins of every base in every colour available in a ready-to-ship format so you can order those 16 skeins of Atlantic for that epic blanket project. Am I making any sense at all? Does that appeal to you? Do you have a better idea? Are you still reading? I would love any and all feedback.

So that’s where I’m at. I’m brainstorming ways to have our core collection of yarns and colourways always available while still leaving room for special bases and colours as well - because that’s a big part of the fun for us. It will take time to re-photograph and re-organize the shop, so things will likely happen in baby steps over the next few months but hopefully this year will be the year we figure it all out.

Thanks for the last 11 years and hears to the next 11!