Victoria and I have been working hard during our current transition period. If you haven’t heard the news, Victoria was accepted for a Kiva small business loan! We’re hoping funding will happen soon, and are already in the process of getting her own workspace setup in her own home. This is an incredible opportunity for her, and for all of us really, because we expect this transition to mean lots more batts for everyone.

Victoria, seen here with the ever-trusty Cardzilla

Sunday, 10 December 2017, will mark one month since we relaunched production! What’s been particularly exciting for me about it all is that, whereas years ago, Victoria was my employee, now we’re an entrepreneurial partnership. With her having her own equipment and workspace, she’ll be earning more on each batt she makes, and getting to spread her designing wings as well with a range of Victoria’s Choice (well, we haven’t settled on a name for her product line yet) fibers from time to time in addition to her production work on my designs.

We have been testing logistics and all kind of internal things, including Victoria borrowing my trusty Cardzilla on a short-term basis! Victoria worked on Cardzilla for a year or so in the Stringtopia days, and has been working on Cardzilla since we started working together again. To say she’s familiar with Cardzilla is an understatement.

I didn’t want to loan Cardzilla out long term for multiple reasons (I admit: mostly because he’s kinda my baby and I’m on record as saying “I might grab Cardzilla on the way out the door if the house were on fire”) or I would have done so from the beginning, but when Victoria’s Kiva Small Business Loan became a reality, I decided a one month loan would be perfect. Not only will it give her the ability to produce more batts from her home and spend more time with family, but borrowing Cardzilla will allow her to figure out her own workspace logistically so the transition from Cardzilla to her own brand new carder will be seamless for us, and for our batt lovers.

As a result of this transition time the upcoming batt batch we wanted to release this week didn’t quite make our self-imposed Friday deadline. However, with us working hard over the weekend, the new batch will be listed on Monday, December 11, to kick off the second month of our re-launched batt production! The theme for our upcoming batt batch is Banned Books! We’ll have unique fiber blends in colorful tributes to some of our favorite banned books: The Color Purple, Leaves of Grass, Fahrenheit 451, and a few others. Do you have some colors or titles you’d love to see? Let us know — this might not be our last Banned Books tribute series!

Classic Abby Batts

Victoria will be working from home on Cardzilla over the weekend to finish up this batch, so make sure you stay tuned for all the updates on getting her getting her space up and ready for some mass production, along with sneak peeks of the blends in this batch!

We still have a few batts left from the beach cocktail series we did last week — check ’em out if you haven’t seen ’em yet!

Life’s A Beach is the blue with teal and green at left, but they looked so good side by side with Tequila Sunrise (orange, at right) that we couldn’t resist using this photo.
70% Superfine Merino
30% Hand-Dyed Tussah Silk
30 grams each
$9.95 ea
10 available