Not a Snow Day

I bet I don't have to say it, but here it is - everything is up in the air right now.

I'm still showing up to work, because it's pretty much the same as working from home. My husband and I run our businesses out of our big warehouse building. It's just us and one employee, so social distancing and sanitizing the surfaces we touch are all pretty easy. Or not easy, but very, very possible.  We don't have many visitors and have shut down our normal "open to the public hours" for now.

I'm lucky that I still feel like I have somewhere to go, but everything is topsy turvy. Like a lot of other folks, I've had at least one event cancelled due to COVID-19, and there's the possibility that more will be canceled. It's really hard to tell how much of an impact this is having on my business, since this is the first year I signed up to do fiber festivals.

Instead of doing my normal dye runs last week, I decided to experiment instead. I was gifted a bunch of "worms," or offcuts from Pendleton blankets. These are a by-product of the industrial weaving process, and people can buy them for weaving, rug hooking, and more. I have a big stash of them, but they weren't really in colors that were exciting to me, so I decided to see what would happen if I overdyed them.

Usually when I dye, I'm using pretty exact formulas to get exactly the colors I want. But with these, I eyeballed everything. When the pink was getting *too pink,* I threw in a handful of unspun BFL locks to absorb the extra dye, a tip I learned from Suzy Brown of Fibery Goodness.

There's still a huge pile of braids waiting for labels and to be listed on my website. I also have a couple of new products to photograph and list, so those will be coming soon. But for now, I'm trying to do as much offline as I can, so I don't fall down the rabbit hole of reading headlines.

​How are you staying busy?