{"id":142,"date":"2007-07-26T13:00:38","date_gmt":"2007-07-26T18:00:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.abbysyarns.com\/wordpress\/?p=142"},"modified":"2007-07-26T13:00:38","modified_gmt":"2007-07-26T18:00:38","slug":"wow-its-almost-like-i-did-something","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/abbysyarns.com\/webshop\/2007\/07\/26\/wow-its-almost-like-i-did-something\/","title":{"rendered":"Wow, it&#8217;s almost like I did something!"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Thanks to each and every one of you for the really delightful comments yesterday! I owe several of you email replies, too, and hopefully I&#8217;m even going to *get* to them soon. I&#8217;ve been having no luck keeping up on email the past couple of months. Again, I blame  the summer.<\/p>\n<p>Oh, and as far as what kind of beer we have on tap&#8230; well, <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Boddingtons\">Boddington&#8217;s<\/a> is a staple. Mmmmm that stuff is good. I also like stouts, such as the well-known Guinness, and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.murphys.com\/about\/products\/detail.asp?ID=103\">Murphy&#8217;s Stout<\/a>. And in the summertime, I like to drink all those beers that everyone says taste like nothing at all. Ice cold, outside. <\/p>\n<p>Marcy asks why there aren&#8217;t sheep in the huge pasture you can see in the photos I take on the deck, like this one.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/farm2.static.flickr.com\/1210\/894464433_d1b8a2c87a.jpg?w=395\" data-recalc-dims=\"1\" \/><\/p>\n<p>The short answer is there aren&#8217;t any sheep there because instead, there are horses there. Related to that, it&#8217;s not our pasture! But we do get to socialize with the yearlings that usually live in that paddock. We live back behind a horse farm &#8212; there are lots of horse farms around here. However, our property isn&#8217;t zoned for livestock. Which is really just as well &#8212; I&#8217;ve got a family and a small business, and the last thing I really need is livestock!  Bear in mind I grew up largely rural, so I&#8217;m familiar with the workload&#8230; and the never getting to go out of town&#8230; and so on. I have my hands full as it is. <\/p>\n<p>I did manage to get a few blends done this week, blends I&#8217;ve been wanting to get done for a while. Not that I got to the whole list, mind you! But, like this:<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/abbysyarns.com\/albums\/sale\/orchid.sized.jpg?w=395\" data-recalc-dims=\"1\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Merino\/Tussah\/Camel batts, baby! Aww yeah. There&#8217;s still a green and a blue left to do, after which I&#8217;ve got to salvage some cashmere (that sounds worse than it is, I swear), but I got the purple and the peach done, and geeze, they&#8217;re nice. Really nice. I stole a peach one to sample.<\/p>\n<p>I also made a minimal amount of progress on setting up something new: First Dibs Sales! From now on, I&#8217;m going to give all of you loyal blog readers a crack at stuff <i>before<\/i> it hits eBay.  So far, I&#8217;ve thrown together <a href= http:\/\/www.abbysyarns.com\/wordpress\/?page_id=141\">Batts<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.abbysyarns.com\/wordpress\/?page_id=140\">Silks<\/a>, and the latter includes a handful of production colours of hand-dyed tussah, and will let you order as much as you want &#8212; but there&#8217;s a week turnaround on those. If you order more than 8 ounces custom dyed in a production colour, however, you will be eligible for a discount &#8212; drop me a line and I&#8217;ll let you know more about it, if you&#8217;re interested in that.  Eventually, the production run colours will move someplace where you can just order &#8217;em, but I haven&#8217;t gotten there yet. Oh, and one other convenience with the First Dibs pages is that you can pay with a credit card directly with the paypal shopping cart, even if you don&#8217;t have a paypal account. <\/p>\n<p>So, well, I guess all of that is something. I&#8217;ve still got to get the page with handpainted wool tops and the like put together. It&#8217;s time-consuming, though, compared to the eBay listings, which is a major appeal to just using that store &#8212; more time for production, less fiddly overhead in time spent on putting pictures to cart items and so forth. Plus, I can easily do things like say &#8220;All yarn is now 20% off for the next week, and all fiber is 10% off,&#8221; with the <a href=\"http:\/\/stores.ebay.com\/franquemont-fibers\">eBay store<\/a>. Why yes &#8212; in fact, I did just do that. If there&#8217;s something you&#8217;ve been considering buying, now&#8217;s a good time! There isn&#8217;t going to be a lot of new production of diverse things for a bit, because I&#8217;m about to start in on production for round 2 of Batt Club. Which reminds me: I&#8217;ve gone over all the numbers and for the remaining 2 months of this first (and maybe only) Batt Club run, I can squeeze in 4 more people with a prorated deal &#8212; $60 for the final 2 months. First 4 to email me about it (abby at abbysyarns dot com, naturally) will be the lucky ones.<\/p>\n<p>Batt Club has been really interesting for me so far, and I hope for those of you who&#8217;ve signed up. Every one of you should have your fibers by now, and I&#8217;ve heard from some of you and seen pictures of what you&#8217;ve been doing with your sock blend, and it&#8217;s really a thrill! August&#8217;s blends start coming off Cardzilla on Monday and are slated to ship Friday, 3 August. <\/p>\n<p>As it stands right now, I am leaning towards doing it again, with signups in September, for October, November, and December. If you&#8217;re signed up now, you&#8217;ll have first dibs on a renewal spot, and renewal will come up the second week in September, and be open for a week or so. Then, once I know how many renewals there are and how many slots are open as a result, I&#8217;ll announce when new signups will be open, and we can take it from there. <\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;d love to get a show of hands (or something) from folks who might be interested in either a Batt Club Yahoo group  or Flickr group  (and which you&#8217;d prefer) to share your experiences with other Batt Club members. If there&#8217;s sufficient interest, I&#8217;ll create one (or both). <\/p>\n<p>Whew, is it the weekend yet? No? Scandalous. It should be; then I might have beer on tap again, sheesh! Not that it&#8217;s beer o&#8217;clock yet, alas. But soon&#8230; soon. It&#8217;s too muggy today to think about doing much more fiber work. I&#8217;d think about dinner, but it might be too hot for that too. <\/p>\n<p>Man, is anybody else having problems with bloglines today, or is it just me? Most of my feeds are just no updating. Grrr!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Thanks to each and every one of you for the really delightful comments yesterday! I owe several of you email replies, too, and hopefully I&#8217;m even going to *get* to them soon. I&#8217;ve been having no luck keeping up on email the past couple of months. Again, I blame the summer. Oh, and as far [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pmpro_default_level":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"footnotes":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[37,48],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9Duui-2i","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/abbysyarns.com\/webshop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/142"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/abbysyarns.com\/webshop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/abbysyarns.com\/webshop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abbysyarns.com\/webshop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abbysyarns.com\/webshop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=142"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/abbysyarns.com\/webshop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/142\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/abbysyarns.com\/webshop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=142"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abbysyarns.com\/webshop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=142"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abbysyarns.com\/webshop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=142"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}