I have had quite a chaotic few weeks. I have made the decision to re-organise my life and to be honest with you, I think everything is finally falling into place. I have decided to take the plunge and start up my own fibre-based business and my time has been spent trying to set up and find my suppliers. In addition to that, I'm working on a new design for my website so I can give Chopped Tomatoes a little facelift for the new year, and incorporating a shop so non-Etsy members can have access to all the goodies I'm planning to stock!

I'm at a bit of a lace-loving period of my life and I have been searching high and low for the most luxurious lace yarns to stock in the shop. While it isn't very difficult to find lace yarn suppliers, it's proving quite hard to source a nice selection of blends that don't contain silk. Silk makes me itch like there's no tomorrow, and seeing that I will be handling the yarns quite a lot, I don't fancy being the 'Scratchy Yarn Lady'.  I have ordered some samples of custom blends I have come up with and once they arrive I will be handing them out to knitters for testing...

As for knitting.. there is lots of that happening, but unfortunately they are either patterns for publishing, or xmas presents which I can't blog about! Here is a photo of a WIP:

It's made with hand-dyed, handspun wool/alpaca/soy.. I can't tell you who it's for, but I can tell you it's finished and blocked already just waiting to be wrapped! As you can see, I haven't got a set of 5mm needles, so I had to improvise with bamboo dpns and some elastic bands!

Up next is a Swallowtail that I made with my Clumsy Pink handspun (original blog post here). Here it is before blocking:

And after blocking:

I love this pattern. I love lace knitting.