Shelridge Farm!

(Picture intensive. Do not scroll if you can't handle pictures of yarn.)

I've died and gone to knitter heaven.

On Thursday, I failed to go to all the knitterly places I had planned to go to. I didn't have an alarm and woke up with a "crap! what time is it?" feeling. I looked at my laptop. 8am, perfectly reasonable time. Except that I'm in a time zone 3 hours ahead. Whoops! There went the plans for Romni and the Textile Museum. Instead, I took a leisurely shower and picked up Lisa. Like a good knitter, she ditched work for a trip out to Shelridge Farm, and boy was she glad that she did.

We met up with Denise at a Tim Horton's in I-forget-which-town-along-the-way. Lisa and I each grabbed a combo which included my first Tim Horton's donut ever, a maple one of course. We got to Buffy's at about 3pm. I'm sure I've mentioned this before, but Buffy is one of the nicest people I've ever met. Kristi and I first met her at Stitches West where I bought the yarn I used for Pomatomus. Somehow it came about that she was from near Toronto, and I mentioned that I was getting married in three months in Toronto. And that somehow led to the idea that all the knitters who would be at the wedding (I believe there were five of us) should take a trip out to visit Buffy the day after the wedding. It sounded like a fantastic plan, but somehow things ended up getting too busy with that whole wedding thing, and we never made it.

Fast forward a year. I met Buffy again at the next Stitches West where I brought The Leg and the p-sock and casually said "Oh hey, do you want this leg for the show?" She remembered me as the one who wanted to visit for my wedding. Teehee. We talked about how I couldn't make it, how unfortunate that was, and how I'd probably go back to Toronto someday. Well, Thursday was that day.

So as I was saying, we arrived at about 3 in the afternoon, and it was non-stop fun from there on out. We looked around a bit at the yarn. There was a LOT.

This is really just the tip of the iceberg.

There was also undyed yarn.

It was EVERYWHERE.

After fondling all the yarns, we broke open a bottle of wine and started in on the dyeing. Buffy had soaked 80 (!!!) skeins of sock weight yarn for us because she didn't know how many we wanted. She said that we could dye as many as we wanted and whatever we didn't want at the end she would manage to sell off. Let me tell you, I've dyed yarn before, but this was the most fun I've ever had dyeing yarn EVER. I think this was due to several reasons:
(1) The place was made for dyeing, so mess wasn't an issue.
(2) There wasn't any pressure to get the perfect colors.
(3) There was SO MUCH YARN everywhere.
(4) When in doubt, we could drink a bit of wine and reflect upon our choices.

The first colors we each did took the longest. We were thinking too hard. But after that was out of the way, we really started zooming along and dyed 8 skeins at a time instead of 4. The next thing I knew, we were done dyeing ALL EIGHTY SKEINS. I think we could have dyed a couple hundred easily. It was awesome.

Here's Lisa and me dyeing yarn (I wore my sheeeeeeep shirt!):

It was interesting how we all had very different color sense. Lisa and I were at the same table:

Here is Denise's last dye job:

Here's all 80 skeins. See, that's not so much at all. Click to see who dyed which ones.

Of course, knitbloggers have to take pics of the yarn. Denise and Lisa whip out their cameras:

While all the yarn was steaming, we got a tour of the house and the yarn barn. The yarn barn was chock full of yarn. Somehow they fit a tractor in too, but it was mostly yarn and little bit of stray roving here and there. I managed to pick these up for Kristi:

And some color cards made their way into my bag:

Don, Buffy's DH, cooked while we dyed, and we ate a delicious supper together. We were amazed by their hospitality. Here we were, three random knitters at their door, and they let us dye 80 (!) skeins of yarn, drink wine, pet their animals, tour their home, and they fed us roast pork with crackle. It was fantastic. We finally left a little after 9, after spending the most wonderful 6 hours I've had in a long time. On the ride back, we kept saying "That was so much fun! I know we've already said that, but it really was so much fun!" about every 5 minutes.

We didn't have time to rinse the yarn and dry it so we packed it up wet. After Denise dropped us off at the car at Tim Horton's, Lisa and I went back to her place, and I had a little bit of fun with the yarn in the shower. Look at these beautiful shots.

We theorized that you could probably gain insight into someone's personality just by the colors they chose to dye their yarn. These are mine. I went for the greens / teals / plums / blacks / browns. Oh! I forgot to say what we got. Each of us dyed 4 different colorways, and we each took 8 skeins of yarn home. I took a pair of each of the ones I dyed, and so did Lisa. Denise doubled up on one colorway. I thought it was great that we all really liked the colors we dyed. I don't think I've ever had that much success dyeing before.

And here are Lisa's. She definitely went more for the reds in general, with one skein of blues / greens.

And then I squeezed them out and hung them up to dry.

The beautiful end product. I am in love with every single one of these. The first one was teals, greens and browns:

For the second one, I tried to channel Kristi and her love for orange. I was going for a more modern 70s feel with orange, grassy green, purple, brown, and teal.

The third one reminds me of lotus blossoms. There is leaf green, pinks, mauve and black.

The last skeins we dyed were the "use up the rest of the dye skeins", but I think this turned out really nice and dark.

Since, we each dyed extras of all of the colorways, these are available through Shelridge Farm, but only in the quantities that we dyed (a few pairs of each). You can probably email Buffy or call her (info on her website) if you really want to order some. She is the sweetest person, and definitely makes my top 10 Favorite Things About Canada list. Buffy doesn't do repeat colorways, so if you ever see a Shelridge Farm handpaint color that you really like, snatch it!

How do I feel about my Canadian adventures? Thumbs up! (I can't tell if I look really small in this picture or if my head looks ginormous. Probably a combination of both.)

Next post will be about my trip to the Textile Museum of Canada. It was awesome! And did I mention that I'm going to visit Blue Moon Fiber Arts next weekend? I must be in knitter heaven.