I awakened this morning and was instantly on a mission. My mission was to find the perfect Thanksgiving greeting photo for the blog. It was a tough mission that would seek a photo to link Thanksgiving to sheep. Not very likely.

We have a lot to be thankful for at Pagewood Farm. Robin and I both are in good health. We work hard at the business, but we enjoy what we do and sleep well (as in 7:45 pm on the couch).

Here’s one of the pictures I found. Cute, with a Thanksgiving "revenge" theme, but no sheep.

We are thankful that we live in a nice spot. We are in the Los Angeles area, but have found a little bit of "country" isolation and quiet about 5 minutes from the Harbor Freeway.

Here’s another picture I found. It has a sheep, but no Thanksgiving.

We are thankful for our family and friends. We are thankful for their health and happiness. And we are thankful for the "Pink Dogs." We marvel at how they have added so much to our lives.

Here’s another cute one, Thanksgiving but no sheep.

We are thankful that our business has continued to increase (up 40% from last year). And we are thankful that we continue to stay at least one step ahead of the competition in our creativity, quality, and service.

Here’s a sheep/Thanksgiving photo!

Actually, now that I look at it, it's kind of hokey.

But as I am writing this blog, I want all of you to know that we are thankful for the opportunity that we have had to work with all of you.  Almost sounds like I'm signing off, doesn't it?  No way!  Just setting up this last photo.

No brief pictorial history of Pagewood Farm labels today.

I hope that none of you were hovering over your computers all weekend waiting for the brief pictorial history of Pagewood Farm labels. I have yet to figure out how to upload pdf files to my ftp server so I have a url to connect to. (and I almost know what that means). I guess I need to take pictures of the labels? If you want to see the new Pagewood Farm labels for the U-knitted Nations Hand Spun Bouquet use this link http://www.pagewoodfarm.com/sample/uknittednations3.pdf

But I cant get it to go up on the blog. Go figure.

So I guess you figured out by the label that we are going with the U-Knitted Nations concept. But we made a big mistake underestimating the popularity of the yarn. We are sold out. One of our reps contacted 5 of her top sellers and *POOF* all gone. We have an order in for another 400+ skeins of Hand Spun Bouquet which (cross your fingers) should arrive in approximately two weeks.

I’ll get that brief pictorial history of Pagewood Farm labels going soon.

I had some positive response to my pricing blog entry. So, here's the inside scoop on labeling. Go to your LYS and check out all the different labels the various Indy Dyers (as well as bigger hand dyers) have. Such a variety. And don’t even talk to me about the big companies. They have those commercial bands that come from some kind of yarn band heaven. I’ve looked for suppliers on the Internet. It’s kind of a wasted effort because our volume isn’t enough to warrant the costs of a 10,000 band per color commercial order. But, we are not alone.

When an Indy Dyer starts up, the first big question is labels. A label can encompass all the negatives of being a brand new (small) business in one big ugly package. The negatives of labeling are astounding. And usually we don’t ever think of them until the product is out in the market. This isn’t intended to criticize any Indy Dyer over their labels because we at Pagewood Farm have done the same. I just want to give an inside scoop on some labeling negatives because I know that we have experienced them all. What are these negatives?

Attractiveness is a big negative. When we Indy Dyers have a beautiful fiber product why would we surround it with an unattractive label? We often do. Using our own poorly fitting bands are another unattractive pitfall. Pagewood Farm used cut 4 bands on the length of an 8 ½ x 11 sheet. That gave us a band that was 11 inches long and 2 inches wide. Retailers would complain about the bands being too big for the skein. They would get crumpled, bent, and wrinkled in transit. One store complained that she had to cut every band shorter and reapply it. They really have to love your yarn to do that. Simply by redesigning our labels to that they were along the 8 ½ inch width of the label took care of that problem.

Cost is another negative. As an Indie Dyer produces more and more yarn, the hidden cost of a label can sap the profits a few cents at a time. In the competitive world of Indy Dyeing, a few cents a skein can do you in. Let’s say you are doing color copies on photographic paper (as we used to do) from the One-HourPhoto or Kinko’s down the street. Figure the cost of a color copy on card stock and you are looking at around $ .20 per label. Then, how do you attach it? I’ve seen lots of Indy Dyers use a tied label. Hole-punch each end of the band and use ribbon, raffia, or yarn to tie the two ends of the band together. But, then you are adding more costs of the ribbon or raffia or yarn plus the hidden cost of labor to tie it on. And what about colors??? Are you going to have a separate pre-printed band for each colorway in each fiber blend? For a long time, we used Avery stickers for our colors. I would print up a page and we would peel them off the page, apply them to the special spot on the label, wrap the label around the skein, tape the label ends together. We finally got tired of that whole multi-part process to put a label on a skein. We got the idea to have our skeiners put the label on when they skein the yarn and then we write the color on the band. Not great, but it works. But, there is another hidden cost. It never stops. ;-)

Professionalism is another negative of some labeling. I know that lots of us Indy Dyers are very small organizations (as in one or a couple). And I know that our market will forgive a lot of things for the creative products that we have. But, at Pagewood Farm we strive to compete with the big companies as much as possible. We want our product appearance, quality, packaging, and creativity to exceed our competitors no matter what their size. Our goal is hand crafted quality at competitve prices. And we try to convey that in our packaging. I’ve seen and used some funky home-made computer labels. We finally bit the bullet and have a graphic artist who does the creative stuff on our label. Guess what? Another hidden cost. LOL Tomorrow, a brief pictorial history of Pagewood Farm labels.

What is it that makes Pagewood Farm Yarn so unique?  One of the things is the way we meticulously pick our yarn.  You can go back to previous blog entries to read the details.  In a word, we are extremely picky about the yarn that we start with.  The other, more important thing, is Robin's incredible color sense.  I'm not a big color guy, but even I can see the difference when I see  some competitor's hand dyed yarns that don't have her magic touch.  But, how does she come up with these colors?

We are up to 51 colorways (yarns dyed using multiple colors to arrive at a colorway) and 14 Solids (single colors tone-on-tone).

Sometimes, Robin gets a vision of a colorway she wants to create and keeps trying and trying until she gets the right blend.  Other times, she just messes up when she is dyeing something and the light bulb goes on.  Poof; a new colorway is born.  And other times, she does a custom order (normally requiring a fairly large minimum order) and likes it so much we add it to our lineup.

An example of this was a special order from Blue Bonnet Yarn in Texas.  John-Francis, a friend of Pagewood Farm, wanted to make a shawl for someone in Ohio and he wanted the Ohio State colors (Crimson & Gray).  Robin gave it a shot and we came up with this.

The shawl he made from it was well received.  And the ladies at Blue Bonnet loved it.  We started geting requests to add it to our colorways.  Here's an example of a shawl John Francis made out of the Ohio State yarn.

Here's a photo of Pilar (one of the ladies from Blue Bonnet) modeling the shawl.  But wait!  What's that down by her feet?

Well, Pilar got ahold of a skein of the Ohio State yarn of her own, (by this point renamed JF's Folly because I didn't want to have to write out his full name every time we label it).  Shemade some very naughty looking fishnet style socks out of it.  Good job, Pilar!

FYI, The shawl pattern is Pavonis-huivi (it's a Finnish pattern on Ravelry) using
Size 4 circulars and two FULL skeins of Chugiak (about 15 yards left over).
The shawl took about 32 total knitting hours.

Here are some interesting tidbits.:  We started with 11 colorways: Rainbow, Cotton Candy, Pretty Pastels, Prism, Spring Brights, River Rock, Vineyard Blues, Mississippi Mud, Bird of Paradise, Meadow, and Orange Spice.  Some of these continue to be  our best sellers.  One of our sales reps came up with the idea of numbering the colorways to make it easier to phone in orders ( 3 skeins of #45 in Yukon).  When we introduced our solid tone-on-tone colors, we designated them by the prefix S (as in I'd like 4 skeins of S4 [Navy] in Alyeska)  Our colorway numbers start with 1 and run through 49.  There is a gap and we start again with 60.  Why?

Answer next blog.

As the title of today's blog says, the Pagewood Farm U-Knitted Nations is officially in session.  Please pause with me a moment as I bask in the warm rays of a well-crafted pun.  The yarns are in.  Our more attentive customers (the ones that read the blog) have already started ordering and we don't even have our labels designed yet.  We've already contacted the spinning collective for more.  So, here they are:

The first is called "Hand Spun Bouquet."  It is a hand spun yarn with felted flowers spun into it.  Skeins will be approximately 5.5 oz (155 grm) and should have a put up of 50 yards.  Enough for a unique scarf.  Robin has already knitted one up.  I'll be photographing and posting it this weekend.  In the meantime, until I get all the colorways photographed, here is a sample.

This next one is not a color that we were crazy about, but I wanted to include it to show you the detail of the flowers.  Hand Spun Bouquet will be available in 6 colors.

The next  U-Knitted Nations yarn is called "Giant Purls."  Let's take another brief moment to reflect on an awesome pun.  This is a hand spun yarn with felted balls spun into it.  We could have called it Hand Spun Felted Balls, but I would giggle every time I took an order.  Giant purls is so much more appropriate to their beauty.   Skeins will be approximately 5.5 oz (155 grm) and should have a put up of 80 yards.  More than enough for a unique scarf.  Robin has already knitted one of these up too.  Giant Purls will be available in Natural (as pictured) or in any of our other 14 tone-on-tone solids.  

Finally, we have "Tapestry" which is a hand spun yarn which will be 400+ yards per 5.5 oz skein.  I haven't got the gauge mastered at this point, but I'm thinking that it will be somewhere between a sport and a DK.  We'll give you the confirmed weight after our knitter checks it out.  Tapestry will also be available only in our 15 tone-on-tone solid colors. 

Those of you that are observant will no doubt question 15 tone-on-tone colors since S13 Charcoal is our highest number.  We have added S0 which is Natural and S14 which is Twilight.   Twilight is a dark blue with Oregon Ducks green highlights.  I'll get you a picture.

So, lots of work for Chuck.  Later.