News

It seems a little crazy that it was almost a month ago now that my boyfriend and I set out for our summer vacation! We left by train to Halifax at the end of June and spent a very full ten days visiting friends and family, and exploring the province in our trusty little Prius borrowed from Carshare Atlantic. I'm not the best travel photographer, as my tendency is to leave the camera behind in favour of just relaxing and enjoying the moment, but I did manage to remember to snap a few photos here and there!

I've been spending some time this spring working on developing new gradient sets in our Crescendo yarn for a couple of different projects, and I thought it would be fun (and hopefully interesting!) to document the process here. 

Elizabeth and I have shared our partnership running Sweet Paprika for over 10 years now, but we've been sharing many other things in life for much longer than that - including birthday celebrations!

With my birthday falling on the 16th of November and Elizabeth's on the 22nd, we often had shared parties and celebrated our birthdays together. In fact, our younger sister Margaret was also born on November 16th, so the third week in November has been "Birthday Week" for us as long as I can remember. 

A couple of weeks ago, Elizabeth sent me a link to this CBC article about a children's hospital in Nova Scotia looking for donations of hand-knit finger puppets. It was just before our September knitting tea, and I was inspired to quickly print off the patterns provided by the IWK Health Centre and gather some scrap yarn to make a puppet or two.

This past weekend I had the pleasure of witnessing (and participating in) a public art installation involving - you guessed it - a ton of yarn!

UNITY is an interactive art installation which creates a physical representation of that community, documenting our similarities, differences, and ultimate interconnectedness.

As designers and yarn dyers, much of our knitting time is spent swatching rather than working on projects. In fact we have boxes of swatches!

Many knitters avoid swatching and I admit that I used to be one of those knitters. I was always impatient to get to the good part of starting a project instead of wasting time swatching. "I'm usually close enough to gauge, right? I'm sure it will be fine."

Earlier this spring I got an email from Pop Montreal with a call-out for vendors for the Marché des Possibles, which they organize on summer weekends in the Mile End neighbourhood. I happened to mention to my wonderful dye studio interns that I would love to do it but didn't think I had time to deal with organizing it. "We'll do it!" they said, and so I booked us a booth for the weekend of July 16 and 17.