How does one organise hundreds of sewing thread spools?

What started out as an innocent bedroom drawer re-organisation at the beginning of the week has turned into a mammoth task of organising EVERYTHING around me. Armed with my trusty cleaning basket and a roll of plastic garbage bags I set out to de-clutter the house. It took all week but boy am I feeling a lot better! 

I left my workspace till the end as it's the most overwhelming. I started to organise my sewing threads this morning. I inherited a LOT of spools from a deceased family member a few years ago who owned a haberdashry, and I had them stored in little boxes on my shelves. Since I never bothered to organise them in any way, I can never find the colour I need etc. I keep finding myself shopping for threads because I'm too lazy to go through the boxes to find what I want.

I looked out of the window this morning and saw that it had snowed all through the night and the entire street was covered. I wanted to take a photo of it but unfortunately, by the time I had woken myself up, fished around for my glasses and found my camera, people had already started going to work and the pure white street-scape was adulterated with tire tracks.

I didn't let that ruin my happy snow day though, Buca and I went for a stroll down the taff trail after I had had my coffee and I took plenty of snow pictures! 

I hope y'all had a nice time last week, I'm just winding down from the holidays and putting together all the yarns for my New Years launch. My new website design is still in it's paper form, I'm still sketching away ideas and it looks like it won't be ready until mid-January or so. What I'm going to do is update the Etsy shop with the new yarns until I sort Chopped Tomatoes out.

As from last night, all the knitting journals have sold out, so 'make more journals' is on the to-do list for the new year! I have some gorgeous green leatherette fabric I can't wait to play with so look out for lots of it in the journals to come! 

I have had a very busy, yet very entertaining, two weeks since I received my first shipment of yarns. I spent endless hours transforming the cones of yarn into dye-friendly skeins, but it gave me a chance to think and properly develop my first colourway. Inspired by what some may call the Eighth Wonder of the World, the gorgeous Rice Terraces of Banaue in the Ifugao mountains.

I'm calling the colourway Rustic Tranquility. The first batch of Heavy Laceweight yarns is almost ready and I will be listing them in the shop as soon as I come up with names for each of the colours (that's when the REAL hard work comes in!). The photo below is a stack of yarns showing all ten colours: 

I'm working with two base yarns at the moment:

Heavy Laceweight 85% Superfine Wool15% Cashmere, 500m/546yds per 50g/1.8oz

Laceweight 100% Cashmere, 650m/710yds per 50g/1.8oz

Both yarns are divine to the touch, with a certain 'creaminess' to thier texture that is hard to describe without grabbing and handful and rubbing it against your face... A 50g/1.8oz skein goes a long way and is perfect for small shawls and scarves. I used a layered dip-dyeing technique; each colour is a mixture of dyes, and each skein is dyed in stages to add dimension to the skein.

A little background information..

My parents visited the Cordillera Region back in 1980 before I was born, and this photograph was taken on the day, with the lush mountains forming a beautiful backdrop while posing with local Ifugao women (My parents are the couple on the far left of the photograph, dad in an 80's track suit with his arm around mom). I used to look through stack of family photos in my parents' drawers as a child and this one was one of my favorites. The colourful costumes and the elaborate headdresses fascinated me, so did all the greenery. You have to realise that I grew up in the very hot, dry, flat and urbanised Kuwait, so green mountains were a novelty, and I really wanted to see them for myself. 

My sisters and I went to see the Banaue rice fields in the summer of 2000 (I think it was then.. will one of you tell me if it was then or 2001?), and saw them for real. The view was beautiful. I marvelled at the handmade terraces, carved into the mountainside over 2000 years ago.