One of our big goals for Sweet Paprika this year was to source a new line of Canadian wool yarns. We started contacting farms and mills last January, researching options, connecting with farmers, and collecting samples.
Eventually we settled on working with wool from Circle R Livestock, a family farm in southern Ontario. Over the spring we worked out the details to have the wool milled in New Brunswick, and we then spent the summer doing dye tests and creating colour recipes for our new Winfield (worsted) and Sutton (bulky) yarn lines.
It's been quite a while since either Elizabeth or I have had a moment to record our weekly accomplishments here on the blog. I think it's a fun way to share a bit more about ourselves and our projects so I've decided to revisit it this month. I'm not sure we'll try to make it a weekly thing again though, maybe we should change it to "Accomplishments of the Month" instead?
About six months ago, a knitting friend who had just returned to Montreal from a trip to St John's mentioned to me the work that Christine LeGrow and Shirley Scott are doing to document and preserve the Newfoundland tradition of knitting "trigger mitts". I was intrigued by what I heard, and became further interested last December when one of our aunts sent me and Elizabeth the link to a short documentary piece on CBC's the Sunday Edition about their new book. I still hadn't yet gotten my hands on a copy of the it when the lovely folks at Boulder Publications contacted us a month or so ago and asked if we would be interested in carrying Saltwater Mittens From the Island of Newfoundland. But by then we had heard such good things about it already that we happily said "yes"!
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 fromCarshare 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!
One of the things I'm most excited about getting done this week is setting up a new bee hive. We've had hives in our backyard for the past few summers, but I haven't been really involved in taking care of them too much (it's been more my boyfriend and his brother's project). Unfortunately this year none of them made it through the winter, so we decided to do a bit of a re-set, with my boyfriend and I taking on more of the responsibility for them, and moving the hive up onto the roof of our building so we'd be less likely to get stung while gardening.
Both the festivals we've attended this spring (the Knitter's Frolic in Toronto and the PEC Fibrefest last weekend in Picton) have been great - a chance to get our yarns and patterns out in the world, and to connect with friends both new and old. But preparing for them keeps me incredibly busy, and I was missing out on getting to spend time gardening, which is one of my favourite things to do at this time of year.
I've been spending some time this spring working on developing new gradient sets in ourCrescendoyarn for a couple of different projects, and I thought it would be fun (and hopefully interesting!) to document the process here.
We're right in the middle of the darkest time of the year here in Montreal, with the sun setting just after 4pm these days. Elizabeth and I have both been doing some decorative crafting lately, which helps to brighten things up as we prepare for the holidays and anxiously await the solstice...
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.
I've been wanting to learn to spin yarn for the longest time, and over the past few years I've picked up a couple of spindles and tried my hand at it a few times. I kept trying to learn in different ways, from books, from online videos, and even did a short introductory workshop. And although I was progressing and getting better it seemed like an awfully slow process.
I still have a copy of the very first knitting magazine I ever bought: Interweave Knits Spring 2004. It was an eye-opener for me, since I had spent most of my teenage years knitting from pattern booklets inherited from my grandmother, leftovers from the 1970s and 80s. Here was a whole magazine full of fresh, contemporary patterns, for garments that I would actually wear!
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.
Sweet Paprika Designs offers high-quality materials for knitters and crocheters, with a focus on locally-sourced and sustainable products. Co-owners (and sisters) Debbie and Elizabeth create their own hand-dyed yarns, knitting kits and patterns in their Montreal dye studio and organize knitting and dyeing events in the community.