This is one of those stories that I want to do a signal boost for. I know many of my friends are knitters/crocheters or other kinds of yarnies and crafters. This is a story about what happens when a popular Big Box Store wants to bully small artisan shops.
I know that for a long time many folks have purchased yarn and needles from Knit Picks and its other sister companies that carry Quilting supplies and Art supplies. I used to occasionally purchase yarn and needles from them too, that is until I met Tom Diak and learned about his experience having his intellectual property stolen by Knit Picks. Tom and his wife run Dyakcraft, previously known as Grafton Fibers. Tom makes beautiful hand-crafted knitting needles, crochet hooks, Harmony lap looms and drop spindles. Linda blends beautiful bats of spinning fiber; if you’ve ever been to my house and seen the gorgeous bundles of brightly colored fiber – almost all of them have come from DyakCraft.
Girl from Auntie has a really good post summing up the current situation between DyakCraft and Knitpicks with some legal commentary (her forte). For many years Tom Diak hand-made colorful wood laminate needles called “Darn Pretty Needles”, he was contacted by Craft Americana (Knit picks parent company), about purchasing the rights to make the same kind of needle. When Tom refused permission they went ahead and produced them anyway, calling them Harmony Needles (if you’ll notice above the Diak’s already had a product called Harmony). Now Knit Picks didn’t hand-make their needles, they had them mass produced, and as such significantly undercut Tom’s prices. All in all this was pretty shitty and made a noticeable dent in the sales of Darn Pretty Needles, and being that Knit Picks is such a large company with such a large presence many people eventually started thinking that Tom was stealing the idea from Knit Picks!!
Now Craft Americana has gone ahead and filed for trademark and patent rights on the name Harmony and the style of needles. HELLO!!!!! WTF!!!! This would prevent the Diaks from using the name Harmony on their looms and from making the needles they invented! So now Tom and Linda have started legal action against Craft Americana attempting to protect their products.
In any case Knit picks is apparently well known to steal/knock-off yarns and knitting tools from other companies and then undercut them. And I understand that for folks on a budget their price points are pretty alluring. But for me I can’t face giving money to a company who behaves this way in the market place.
ETA: I got an email from the Diak’s with a clairification: “Petkun said he wanted to sell our needles. And then he never contacted the distributor. That was in 2007. In March, he offered us the trade agreement you can see in the USPTO files. He never offered to buy our rights in 2007 and we never refused.”
This holiday season was pretty hectic over at our house, including at least one event where the house was as full as I have seen it for big house concerts, and one where are few people slept over.
Those of you who have been to my house, can attest to its petiteness. I *do* have 3 bedrooms, but I wouldn’t really want to put more than a double bed in two of them. Of course those bedrooms have multiple personality disorders, being asked to function as guest bedrooms, craft storage, music room, library, adjunct closet, attic extension and an emergency cleaning dump location.
Let me remind you that these are 2 fairly small rooms.
Considering that both rooms needed to be availble for guests to sleep in, they had to largely cease to do most of their “dumping ground” functions. At Christmas my yarn storage cubes had foothills of unsorted, unorganized yarn. Much of it was in random boxes and bag (sometimes even the box or bag it came in). The fiber was mixed up with the yarn and much of it was jammed into corners or piled sort of haphazardly at the base of the yarn cubes like some sort of pagan sacrifice.
Enter many storage cubes, Jill the cube constructor and Evan the whirlwind cleaner. By year end all of it was up off the floor and in at least moderately organized cubes.
Obviously there is much organizing that still needs to happen. But it is very nice to have the stash up and at least mostly visible.
I can’t tell you how many times I found yarn and fiber that I had completely forgotten that i had. It was like instant new yarn that I didn’t have to pay for. There ended up being quite a bit more fiber than I thought there was. It is quite clear that I am going to have to start spinning a LOT more to keep up.
And you can just see a little bit of the setup I use for dyeing yarn on the left in the lower picture.
I know I have mentioned this to a few people in person, but I haven’t gotten around to mentioning this here. Helen, Maria and I had a little run in with insanity last month. There is a really long and fairly amusing story – but the long and short of it is that we are running a KAL (Knit-along.) It is a Lace knit along, not based around a specific pattern, just based around knitting lace for the summer.
We got started organizing it a little over a month ago, and already we have a pile of sponsors and prizes (Helen has done an awesome job procuring these for us.) We have a Ravelry group and a Blog and I am pretty excited about how it is all coming together. Its called Seasons of Lace – and if you are interested you are welcome to join us!
Even though I am Mod there, I am really quite the lace newbie. I have 2 lace projects on the needles right now. One of them I am doing in my own made up pattern – but I am not very far along on that one. This one is someone else’s pattern and is the one that i am working on primarily.
This is the Strangling Vine Lace Scarf. I got off to a rocky start, there is a bit of a discrepancy between the written pattern, and the chart. But once I worked it all out and put some stitch markers in everything smoothed right out.
I am knitting it in Elsebeth Lavold Silky Wool – which I love love love! I bought this yarn to be Aibhlinn, but after I started knitting, it really was just about the most boring thing ever – and you needed to pay just enough attention to it that it wasn’t even “mindless” knitting. So Riiiiip! Its been a few thing in between, but now its found its happy match.
So I snagged the bosses camera (an EOS!!! – now I am totally spoiled) and took some pics of my recent playing with hand-dyeing. I was a bit in a rush so haven’t edited the pictures much, but the colors are pretty accurate as is. For all of these there are more pics on the tab labeled Hand Dyeing at the top of the page.
[singlepic=41,320,240,left] The first pic here is of one of the 2 skeins of Knit Picks Bare sock weight merino/tencel yarn I dyed this way. It is incredibly squishy and feels great. At the risk of sounding conceited, I am very pleased and a bit surprised at how the colors turned out. Right now I am not hand-painting the yarns, but using my own version of kettle-dyeing. The results are turning out very cool, and not at all regular and stripey which is exactly what I want. I have 1 skein from the earliest dye batches (my test skein) that I am currently knitting into mittens. It ends up knitting up with a sort of watery heathery affect. I hope to get these in front of the camera soon.
The next two pictures are of over-dyed skeins. This one was the last one I dyed from the holiday batch and really – I think [singlepic=44,320,240,right] my inspiration had sort of temporarily burned out. There were two skeins of a merino-silk blend that ended up sort of this sad sickly pink with dullish purple splotches. So I decided that seeing as they were already sort of miserable, I would use them as my test skeins for trying out the warping board. I reskeined them in these big long skeins and then over dyed them. I do have to admit that once I reskeined them and then soaked them to prep them for dyeing, they looked very pretty – all sorts of multilayerd grapey colors that just didn’t show up when dry. So they got over dyed, and I tried very very hard for a nice multilayered color spread – but mostly ended up with 2 colors. I am not sure I am able to create the same color subtlety over-dyeing that I can when I start bare.
[singlepic=40,320,240,left] This yarn was a fabulous freebie give-away yarn and has a whole long story behind it. But mostly for our purposes here, the important part was that it was ugly. Inho REALLY ugly. Sort of a dull, pastel, but still olive and not sage green. It is 100% Alpaca and wonderfully soft. And I didn’t want to let it go to waste, so I took it and knew that someday I would over-dye it. I was a little paranoid dyeing it, because a lot of what i dye is Superwash and I don’t have to be too careful about it felting. I KNOW this yarn felts and so I had to be v.v. careful to prevent ending up with a beautifully dyed lump of useless fiber. Once again I didn’t quite get the color depth that I wanted. But it is still about 500% better than it was when it started, and now I am trying to dream up what I can do with 1lb of DK weight 100% Dark green alpaca.
this is one of those times i REALLY wish I had a camera – so i could show you some of the awesomeness that I created this weekend.
Over the holidays I dyed some yarn for gifts, and got a really good response. This has been the first weekend since then that I really had time to play again.
A few weeks ago, I was talking about some of my future dyeing plans to a friend of mine. I was waxing rhapsodic about all the ways I could experiment once I made myself a warping board type thing to wind yarn on.
“You know i have a warping board in the basement? Right?”
“Huh?” (I am very cogent when surprised 
)
“Ya know, from when I used to weave. Do you want it?”
“!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”
I spent some time this week reading up on warping boards (there isn’t a lot of info out there) and then went to town. Up until now skeining yarn has been a bit of a pain. Winding on to my umbrella swift hasn’t been thrilling me – it is ungainly and my inner mechanical engineer (who is a 2nd grader) can tell that it is wildly inefficient. The warping board, while having its own amount of inefficiencies, is WAY better and much easier to use. As far as I am concerned it is a total win.
I had 2 skeins of KnitPicks Bare merino/silk fingering yarn that I had dyed at the end of my holiday dyeing and had ended up a drab pink and dull purple. They got reskeined and over dyed. They are now still pink and purple, but now its more of a deeper purple with some pink glowing out of it. It still isn’t my favorite, but my roommate, is trying to steal it while my back is turned.
I had 2 skeins of KnitPicks merino/tencel sock yarn – they are now a fiery blend of light golden yellows, deep oranges, and burnt chestnut.
7 skeins of puke light olive Plymouth Baby Alpaca DK got completely re-skeined and over dyed. They are now drip drying in the bathroom, I am hoping that they are a a dark green/teal with light green overtones when dry. This was my first attempt to make 2 separate pots of yarn turn out the same, when they are dry I’ll be able to judge better – but I think I did a pretty good job.