lion of a month.

March has been pure chaos, in both good and terrible ways.

The good:  I found out that I'm going to meet many of my online spinning friends and customers at MDSW!  Esther of Jazzturtle is organizing a spinny gathering to take place in the lobby of the Hilton in Columbia, where many of us are staying.  I am so excited to finally meet so many of you in person, and I'm also anxious to take Jazzturtle's Nunofelting workshop.

Also, I've managed to have a great week with the dye-pots, turning out some of the following colorways which are available in my shop:

I feel like I'm really bonding nicely with this new dyeing venture, and the Merino/tencel top is my absolute favorite base in the universe.  If if if, some genius of a mill could come up with BFL/tencel, I'd probably explode with happiness. 

This weekend's update also included a fresh assortment of one-of-a-kind batts.  I'm nearly finished with the one-of-a-kinds, however, since my Spring line will start to take shape this coming week.

The terrible:  Earlier this month, we lost hundreds of Ingrid's baby photos when a hard-drive crashed.  We attempted data recovery twice, but the memory was heat damaged and I'm still kicking myself for not backing up the images.  Fortunately, we had low resolution copies saved in email accounts and facebook, so all is not lost, but it was still heartbreaking (and a wake-up call about data back-up!).

Compared with the destruction that tens of thousands of people in Japan are facing, my loss seems so tiny, and while I'm still feeling really sad about losing so many images, I'm feeling very blessed and over-privileged.  I used the money that I would have spent on albums and printing hundreds of pictures to send a donation to the Red Cross's relief efforts in Japan.  I wish I could do more with my limited budget, which is why I'm also donating 10% of all orders of the April HobbledeCLUB "Old Lace" to relief efforts.  I've already donated from the orders I have received as well as percentages from 3 month subscriptions, and will have the listing available for purchase until 4/4.  When my Spring batt line launches, I will also be selecting one of the batt sets to be a fund-raising set, and will use a poll to have my customers help me decide which one.