Helen picked up some of our laceweight silk yarn “Kiran” in Red and used some of it to create this stunning shawl!

How Beautiful! She’s looking thorough her pattern books for a couple more lace patterns to finish off the skein, but this one is from Victorian Lace Today called ‘Scarf with French trellis border from Weldon’s 1890 and bramble leaf centre’

One of those things happened to me last weekend… I received a notification e-mail from Google that my website was delivering malware and as such was flagged as suspect.

I had a look at the code, and yep, something suspect was going on. So, I ripped it out, saved and looked again. Ach! It came back! Which, if techy terms means that someone did an SQL code inject into the shop’s database so that the malicious code would put itself back if I took it out.

Now, I’m quite a tech savvy girl (You don’t be an IT support tech for 22 years, with lots of mucking about with websites in that without being a tech savvy person!) but finding and removing such an inject attack is beyond me.

So… Nuke it and start again is the best way. Luckily, that I both can do, and seeing as my database got rather mucked about with anyway when I did that upgrade back in October, it’s a good thing that I do it that way.

Apart from getting things clear and clean, it also means that I can re-order the way I show the yarns, categorising by yarn weight rather than by name, and using the “Variations” feature to save entries etc etc. This will make things easier to find, which is good for everyone.

It also makes a choice I’ve been putting off easier. As you might now, I also run Fluffenstuff, the website where I have various hand dyed chunky yarns and silver stitchmarkers for sale. I love dyeing, but maintaining 2 websites takes too much time… So, importing the Brand and Products into Fibres Exotica seems sensible.

So, the bones are almost back together, and I’ll be re-inputting stock over the weekend

If you are on my mailing list, well, I fancy a bit of a spring sale, so you’ll be getting a 20% discount coupon shortly.

If you have any ideas about how you’d like things categorised, or other suggestions, just let me know!

Right now though, it’s back to an older-fashioned way…

Here is a small list of the things people buy the most & the price.

Yarn
100g Recycled Sari Silk Yarn – Multicolour – £4.00
100g Recycled Sari Silk Yarn – Single colour – £4.50
100g Kohinoor – Multicolour Sari Weft Fibre Yarn – £6.00

Patterns
Hester – Long Gaultlet pattern – £3.00
Esther – Short Gaultlet pattern – £3.00
Fuji – Handbag – £3.00

To order, simply drop me an e-mail: enquiries@sarisilk.co.uk
Tell me what you want plus £2.50 P&P, your full name, address and your paypal compatible e-mail, so that I can send you an invoice.

I also have quite a few other lovely Spun silk sliver & reeled yarns in stock, lots of differing weights, and a myriad of colours!
If you have an idea of what you want, let me know!

If you have a wholesale enquiry, again, e-mail me and I’ll send you out my PDF wholesale pricelist ASAP!

Suzanne created  Twist in the tail for us  (a free pattern using the Recycled Sari-Silk and Kohinoor) back in 2010.

She loves working with the textures, colours and also the energetic nature of these single ply yarns.  She’d been working on this pattern piece for a while, getting it “just right”. So, when I got the sample piece I literally drooled a tiny bit as I held it. It is certainly something special.

Suzanne has worked more on the principles of weaving Kohinoor into knitted  Recycled Sari-Silk to create a flexible yet dense material, perfect for an occasion bag.

The pattern is called Fuji because it resembles a volcano & is now on sale in the shop, for £3.00

I can never quite believe how fast the time flies…

It’s been a challenging month, the day-job has been (too?) demanding on my time, I had lurgy from hell for 2 weeks, there’s been more home improvement works meaning I’m nearly living in a home rather than a building site (there’s a Laminate Floor down in the living room, kitchen floor tiles go down tommorow and the wall tiles nigh on finished, New sofa and bed coming in a week…), I’ve had a birthday & a lodger’s moved in.

All this means that this weekend is litterally the first chance I’ve had to do an after-show stock-take, and get the yarn I have that isn’t on the site photographed and up for sale!

I managed to get the web-shop fixed before the show, but I do want to rip things apart and put them back together at some point… Meantime, if people do notice anything “weird” happening, do drop me a line about it!

So, keep safe as the nights draw in…

So, the final preparations are going on to get all the yarn, fibres, bits, bobs & ourselves to Alexandra Palace again next week!

I’ll have about 60Kg of the finest Silk yarns & fibres as well as Surina Wood Knitting needles and printed copies of all our home brewed patterns with me on the slightly bigger Stand TGA13 in the top back corner of the Textile Galary.
I honestly have no wish to take any of it home again either!

Now, if any of you have visited the site recently, you will have seen that the webshop’s broken.

I did a database “upgrade” at the beginning of the month and it right royally messed thing up! However, I’ve managed to get the database fixed to a stage where I can re-activate the shop software after I go through all the pictures attached to posts (That was the bit that really messed up!) & sort them out! That’s this evening’s job…

However, what I’ve got on the site is only about 1/2 of what I have in stock, given the drastic amounts of “other life” that has happened this summer (house renovations were pretty much completed & took up all my available free time getting it done), Fibres Exotica has been very much in “Tick over” mode. One of the things I just didn’t have time to do was photography & upload of the new stock. Apart from the time, getting the yarn out into the dust of knocked down walls, with tiling adhesive, paint & plaster everywhere isn’t good for it!

So, again, if you are coming to the show, that means you get to see the yummy yarn, needles & dye kits before the rest of the world does!

I look forward to seeing some of you there, in the Textile Gallery, Stand TGA13.

Which is really rather annoying!

Normal service will be resumed as soon as I can get things sorted again…

Good things:

• Olympia and Uttoxeter. Very much enjoyed both those shows, met half-a-tonne of good peoples and really enjoyed the teaching I did at both.  Definitely want to expand into the teaching about dyeing more!
• House Renovation cracking on. My partner took voluntary redundancy in February, so we used some of that money to work to push for completing renovations. Which eventually means an office in the little bedroom, more storage for yarn and far less chaos in life.
• Confirmed the booking for Knitting and Stitching 2011, and got the form for Knit Nation that I really do have to send back ASAP before they run out of space!

Bad things:

• My partner broke up with me at the end of March. Was a 5 year old relationship, so as you can imagine, was a major life bump. That chaos (along with the house renovation chaos as well) meant that all the inventory and photography I needed to do between and after the two shows hasn’t yet happened…
• Supply problems caused massive delays to my expected yarn shipments.
• The Day job has taken a turn for the tedious. My heart’s with Yarn, but IT Security is what pays the bills right now! Makes me even more determinted to make that carreer track change than ever!

So, more shows on the horizon is good, my heart will heal, as it always does, my yarn is due to arrive in two lots, this week and next and the day-job won’t be forever.

I’ve got non-busy weeks the next two, and a long weekend to play with yarn and websites in, so it’s intensive photography and uploading time!

Just a quick one, To say hi to all the lovely new people I’ve met in the last few days. Lovely to meet you all!

Response for some of my new stock items has been great and I’m nearly sold out of sarisilk! Re-ordering muchly required!

So, yummy nummy new yarn, fibre, dyes, needles and other frippery uploads coming your way after the show, in the next 10 days to 2 weeks.

I’ve also got my shade book, so I’ll be uploading the shades so that any yarn in any colour or colour combination can be ordered with certainty (Photography and monitor variation permitting)!

The nice thing about the shade cards is that as well as a standard dye number, they have also included the Pantone Number. So, if you know the Pantone Number of the colour you want, I can look that up and sort it out for you.

See some of you tomorrow or Sunday I hope!

Well, it’s nearly here! Stitch and Craft 2011 is next week! Can’t believe that the show I started planning to attend back in November is finally here! This time in a fortnight, it will all be over, and I’ll be moving on to gearing up for the plans around getting everything to Embroidery and Quilts in Uttoxeter!

But I’m not quite there yet. Final approach plans are go.

Part of the prep is naturally contacting you all and telling you all about what I’m doing…
Which, as I’m typing it all seems to be quite a bit, so you might want grab a cup of tea!

First things first, thank you to you all for inspiring me to carry on.
You never know what’s going to happen when you start something up, but you guys have very effectively reassured me that my heart is in the right place, people want silk as much as I do and so I’ve got a valid & sustainable business for products that people want to use and love.

I’ve also had to make the hard decision to charge shipping on top of the yarn costs.
I did some maths around the yarn pricing with the new VAT rate and the latest exchange rates, and although I can still keep it keenly priced (in fact, I can drop the price of a few of the yarns now!), if I want to be able to grow the business, I wasn’t charging enough to support the shipping costs going forward.

So, I looked around other yarn sellers for a reasonable flat-rate price and picked £2.50, however big your order.

I’ve also changed the software set-up, so that you don’t have to log-in to purchase anything. I know that some people were having problems with that!

For S&C2011 and also E&Q2011, I’ve been busy organising; getting the yarn into the country (HMRC can definitely give you some entertaining hoops to jump through!), getting samples made up of free internet patterns and also commisioning patterns created specifically for silk. As you will know from the last newsletter, I’ve also found a surina wood needle & hook supplier and I’ve also recently found some good&cheap “child-safe” dyestuffs.

Happy to say that everything in the “buying it in” department is sorted and either with me or on it’s way.

I’m really happy that I’ve found a supplier of “industrial” food dye powders in small quantities, even if right now he can’t do me blue. My demonstration at S&C is based around using Kool-Aid sachets for fun dyeing with the children… But, although they are fun to use every now and then, they are an incredibly expensive way to dye if you want solid blocks of colours in any sort of quantity.
One packet of Kool-Aid only does 25g of yarn!

Most people would want to dye a project’s worth of yarn at a time, and as 1x100g skein means 4 packs of Kool-Aid, it’s going to cost you around £2.40 in the UK (the sachets tend to be ~60p each on eBay) to get the Kool-Aid in. Which, unless your project only going to be that 1 skein can make the dyeing up really add to the cost in these money pinched times.

Most food colourings you get in supermarkets give about the same dye yield also, depending on the brand, you get between 25ml and 38ml in a bottle, which is going to do between 25 and 75g of fibre. Again, around 80p-£1.20 for a bottle means expensive dyeing if you want to do it on even a semi-regular basis.

The yield on the powders is a teaspoon (~2.5g) of power does ~100g of yarn!
The supplier does the dyes in 25g packets, as well as citric acid in small packs as well…
It’s just about a kilo of yarn per pack of dye.

(On that point, look out for the dyeing tutorial that I need to put together from one such dyeing session where I took pictures of my partner and his kids as we did lots of dyeing experiements a few weeks ago!)

I’m very excited about the silk that arrived. Apart from the undyed I ordered, the rest is mostly dyed in colourways that I don’t have in stock already, so that compliments the existing stocks perfectly. (as well as being wonderfully happy making as I unpacked and audited it)
There are packets and packets of sari-fibre that look so “sweetie-colour edible” and the pulled sari-fibre looks like clouds of multicolour candyfloss.

The latest batch of Recycled SariSilk is exceptionally vibrant, and the sari ribbon yarn is a treat on the eye indeed.

The silk “string” bunches I ordered for the embroiderers are oh-so vibrant, they are basically ~1cmx~1m strips of dyed unwound cocoon. So, they are a little stiffer than I expected them to be, but I can see them being used in “multimedia” style projects, embroidery embellishment as well as adding to felt and paper-making projects.

I’ve actually got the worry that what I have isn’t enough… I’m sure I’m wrong though! Hopefully I’ve got “Just enough!” Although, I also know that I don’t have time to get any of it online before the show, so look for it to hit the website around the 3rd weekend of March. If you want to see all the goodies sooner, well, come to Stitch and Craft!

I’m also excited about the meetings I’ve been having in the last few weeks. I’ve been hooking up with piecework knitters/crocheters and also designers so that I can bring you an ever growing collection of patterns as sparks for your inspiration.

Everyone I’ve met has been wonderful, supportive and very inspirational to me in their own right, both about the silk itself, where they can see it taking them on their creative journey and also about where I want to take the company working with them.

So, this coming weekend is dedicated to getting all the patterns formatted and up-loaded. Most of this batch will be free, although I think there are a couple of “pay-for” patterns as well in the pipework. All will be naturally be PDF download available from the site and of course, on paper at the show.

So, patterns as well as yarn and needles and hooks all in one place?
Also undyed yarn, dyes and citric acid?
Can only mean one thing really… lots of inspiration and lots of kits.

Yep, at the show, I’ll have a discounted “Needles/Hook+Yarn+Pattern” kit price for about 10 Patterns as well as dye-kits. Again, these will hit the website after the show, so if you want to see it first, Stitch and Craft is where it’s at!

Inspiration – It’s definitely becoming my byword. See you all somewhere soon I hope.

I started Fibres Exotica because I love silk. Don’t get me wrong, I love working with and using merino, wensleydale, alpaca & cashmere for knitting and dyeing, but there is just something about working silk that is luscious.

It’s not soft like cashmere, buttery like alpaca, or smooth like wensleydale fibres – the reason I love silk so much is because of the the way it takes  colour. Dyed silk is vibrant, it looks almost alive! Undyed silk is even better, it has a lustre and shine that is virtually unbeatable.

This is because of the way silk reflects light. Because the fibre is extruded by the Bombyx mori silkworm as a triangular fibre with rounded corners,  it is effectively a crystal prism.

So, you can just imagine the anticipation I’m having right now, and the joy I will get when I open the 40Kg parcel that’s due to arrive on Wednesday!

Hopefully, as it will mostly be yarns and colours I’ve already had, I can get the majority of it up on the site rather quickly, as it will just be working the numbers.

I’ve got a few new treats coming through as well… decorative silk “strings”, sari ribbon yarn,  sari ribbons and (next month) 4 types of silk fabric.

Why have I been able to order 40Kg of yarn with the utmost confidence that I can and will sell it, and almost certainly need to order more in the summer? Well, apart from my having put myself up for doing 3 yarn shows this year (and hopefully 4 if Knit Nation reply to me as well!) it is all to do with getting the word out there.

After Knitting and Stitching, I worked to take on board the feedback I was given. In amongst some small advertising I took out with a couple of magazines, I did some community outreach work & I got my mailing list in order and so started the conversation rolling again. It all seemed a little quiet, and then suddenly, lots of lovely people started ordering via the website and also eBay. (Thank you!)

I also started a conversation via Stitch London – A call out to Designers and Sample piece workers.

One thing that the Fibres Exotica Stand lacked at Knitting and Stitching was sample knits from freely available patterns that I could display. We also had no patterns of our own either, so there was no “spark of inspiration” available for people.

So, I did a call-out piece with Stitch London 10 days ago and I’m now happily inundated with people like me; people that love silk, that are inspired by its properties and are either wanting to work with silk and knit a free pattern that will help inspire others for me to display, or just dying to get started with designing patterns that work for Fibres Exotica yarn.

All these people want to share their passion for silk with you via me. And I love that because it means that not only do I get to meet a whole new bunch of inspiring people myself, I then get show and inspire even more people with our shared love of silk.

It’s a whole silky little circle of life!