Supporting Canterbury small business

I've started a small temporary blog, putting together a list of Canterbury small businesses that it would be good to support post the quake. So far lots of gorgeous crafts and craft supplies, lovely seeds and plants, and more.

It'll be in blog format for a while, then when I find out about a few more businesses, I'll convert it to a categorised list,  and try and promote it a wee bit more widely.

The blog is here - http://chchsmallbusinesses.blogspot.com/

If nothing else, I'm enjoying discovering more exciting small businesses and businesspeople through putting this list together.

I'm not in any way saying people should drop all support for their own local businesses to support the Canterbury businesses, but I know that if a disaster hit that impacted my own business, I'd porbably be keen for a bit of extra buyer support while things got up and running again! :)

If you know of any Canterbury businesses you'd like to see get some extra buyer support from round the country, please let me know!

Scented yarn and beads for sale!

I've just taken the leap into selling handmade craft supplies. So far I've got a very small range of handspun yarn and beads available -  all scented one way or another with beautiful quality essential oils, absolutes, and extracts. (All natural botanicals - no synthetic fragrances).

I sold my first skein of wool and packet of beads at a small craft fair in the Wairarapa on the weekend, and other items are available at my new blog - Argot Bazaar ...

I'm in the throes of setting up a shop on Felt.

What I hope for is to have lots of fun experimenting with and learning new things in spinning and bead-making and fragrance - and to produce some appealing raw materials that others will see potential in for their own creations - and for it all to somewhat pay its way! (Well, okay, maybe the paying its own way bit is kinda over optimistic ...) I'll be adding new things to the site often.

Eco-houses, spinning wheels, and family pride

I can't resist. My mum and my sister have been doing some cool things - and I really want to link to them.

My sister and her partner are building a gorgeous eco-house in a suburb near us, and my sister has just a started a series of blogposts that explain some of the issues around the build and the choices they've made. Here's her first post on that - exploring timber treatments.  I for one am a lot more enlightened about the ins and outs of treated wood now!

Meanwhile my mother is marketing her book and website about New Zealand spinning wheels, and was interviewed about it by Granny at http://www.grannygcrafts.com/  You can listen to the podcast there, or visit my mum's website.

Speaking of the passions and pastimes that drive us, I have been bursting to write a series of posts about natural fragrance ... I hope to do it soon!

Yarn winners announced

This whole giveaway thing has been very exciting and a lot of fun. I haven't won anything, but it's been nice to see some people I know or know of winning stuff! And of course I'm thrilled to bits with all the comments here, and very happy to announce yarn winners!

Thank you so much to everyone who entered, and to SewMamaSew for running it.

My daughter and I printed  the comments out, cut them up, and put them in her accordion case. She scrummaged them around and then drew them ...


Here are the winners:

No 1. Deeply Green
Nikki at Tales of the red headed devil child
(Cue squeak of delight, as I've been a reader of Nikki's blog for a while)

No 2. Stripy and Bouncy
Penelope at Many sudden enthusiasms
(Penelope - you actually won twice - we drew out both your comments! I'll send a bonus!!!)

No 3. Coloured Wool Overdyed
Kelly at Reclaiming Me
(Kelly - I know you don't knit and were going to give the wool away if you won! I hope you can swap it for something good, and I'll put in a small extra thing too.)

No 4. Purply Blue with Bits
Ruby Star at How Bizarre Ruby Star
(It's been nice to find Ruby's blog - and if you read it you will see she has been on a bit of a winning streak lately!!!)

I'll be emailing you guys for postal addresses soon!

I'm also very happy to have got a couple of great swap offers from Cally and Sharon. Definitely would love to take you both up on them.  And Ruth - I'd be a starter for lemon balm ...

8 more hours to go

I'm closing the giveaway at 5pm today New Zealand time, and first thing tomorrow, my daughter and I will do the draw.

Handspun yarn giveaway

Okay, here goes with the SewMamaSew Giveaway. Above are the yarns I'm giving away, all made with a new spinner's ... er, exuberance!

Below - a closer look at each of them and a few details

But first how to enter: Just leave a comment here and say which yarns would be your 1st, 2nd, and 3rd choices, and tell me how to contact you. If you prefer, you can send your contact details to me at my email - johanna dot knox at gmail.com.

To have a 2nd entry, add that you'd like to hear if and when I get a little shop up and running selling odd bits and pieces. I promise that if this happens, it will just be a one-off email to let you know the details. I won't send you any more spam than that single email.

My daughter will draw the names of the winners randomly out of a hat.

For the moment I'll only post within New Zealand or to Australia.


1. Deeply Green
This is approximately 60 metres or slightly over - spun two ply, mainly from dyed Romney, with some other green things thrown in - like sparkly Angelina.

2. Stripy and Bouncy
Around 75 metres here - in one larger skein and one smaller one. This is white wool plied with blue and pink wool and the odd sparkle of Angelina. I can't remember what breed the white is - but it's extremely bouncy! Most of the thicks and thins were deliberate but I will confess that sometimes the bounce got away from me, and I got some slightly-thicker-than-intendeds. But I still like it.

3. Coloured Wool Overdyed
Two skeins - all up around 270 metres. This was coloured Romney, which I spun and then cold water dyed with some red and a little green. Each skein is about half red and half green. The red is nice, but the green is very faint over the brown of the wool. This photo makes it look a bit shiny, which it isn't really.

4. Purply Blue with Bits
Just 28 metres here, but I especially like this one. It's quite a dark dyed wool, spun with some extra shiny things thrown in.

Have fun with the giveaway! On the left, I've linked to some other NZers doing the Giveaway, and you can find more from all round the world at SewMamaSew.

Giving away handspun soon ...

Dimly I had been thinking, what am I going to do with all this newly spun yarn? I don't knit or crochet. I just love spinning, and I'm building up great purposeless yarn mounds in a corner of the living room. 

Then on Friday I read about the SewMamaSew May Giveaway. So I'm going to participate and give away two or three skeins. If you come back tomorrow or the next day, they'll be up. (The US 17 May being the NZ 18 May...)

It's kinda nerve-wracking. What if no one wants them? What if I can't even give them away? Well, I guess at least I will have tried to find a good home for them.

 I've been searching around on the internet to find other New Zealanders who are joining the May Giveaway. There's Highway Cottage Weblog. And I'd love to hear of any others if you know of them (or are them).

[Update 9.40 am Monday: Here is another NZer doing it - MakeItGiveIt - a really nice idea for a blog too.

9.45 am: Oooh - and another - Cat Taylor Design. This is exciting!

9.51 am: And another! Seaside Siblings. My daughter would love a ragdoll like that .... Oh, and she handily has a link list of several other NZers doing it!]

Oh, and speaking of giving things away - look at this new initiative in Wellington! What an awesome idea. I wonder if they take yarn as well as veges.

New blog for vintage textiles fans

If you love vintage textiles, have a look at Glory Box. They are keen for contributions too ....

Surfacing ...

Months since I have blogged here, and at last life seems to be re-settling into some sort of happy pattern. We moved house twice over spring/summer - the 2nd time unexpectedly ... long story!

People said it would take a while to recover and get back to routines, but I didn't believe them. (Kind of like when you have your first baby and you think you will be back at work again straight away!)

All sorts of things didn't go as planned last year. I didn't even do any solar cooking. Not sure if that was the unpredictable weather, the moving, or both.

As for my grand plan to go fridgeless last winter ... The youngest member of the family experienced her first big hail storm and fell in love. She gathered 3 big bowlfuls of hail to keep forever. How was I supposed to turn the fridge/freezer off after that? :)

Some good things that happened last year, and that I somehow managed to crowbar in around moving ...

For the second half of 2009 I worked on the writing of a pretty disturbing exhibition at Taranaki's Puke Ariki - about the Taranaki Wars. Maybe I'll write a separate blog post on my thoughts about that.

I'm so grateful for the experiences and insights I gained on this job. I felt as if I had been gathering pieces to a jigsaw puzzle for years, not realising they were all part of the same picture. Then working on this exhibition suddenly I saw that they were.

Colonisation, along with industrialisation, capitalism, and the different facets of human nature ... that's the picture I mean. I know the total interconnectedness of these things has been obvious to lots of other people for a long time, but not so for me.

Less unsettlingly, in spring I helped on the organising committee of Spinning Gold - the first children's writers and illustrators conference held in NZ for many years.

The culmination of the committee's work was an intense, amazing, unforgettable weekend. I came home on Sunday evening in a euphoric daze. People involved in children's literature are, as a group, just so darn supportive and lovely. And a live-in conference venue full of over 100 of them is almost too much support and loveliness to be true.

(Sorry, it's nearly midnight; I tend to gush when I'm tired.)

Oh - and I also learned to spin for real - not just metaphorically.

For about 5 months now, under the expert tutelage of my mother, I've been working at trying to acquire and improve various spinning skills - at times feverishly and to the detriment of my sleep patterns.

Whew. Still a long way to go. I wrote about the embryonic beginnings of my spinning obsession in the final issue of the late, lamented World Sweet World.

I have another new hobby too, but that's whole other story.

Next, I'm hoping to find a way to bring all my scattered passions together into one overarching project, before my head explodes. Preferably in a way that might add the odd extra dollar to the family coffers. I think I have hit upon it, but there's a load of prep to do.

Right now I'm looking forward to getting back into reading some of my favourite blogs again.

What materials do you have an affinity with? (Or not?)

A few weeks ago, I started thinking about the relationships people have with the materials they work with.

It started when I did a weekend letterpress course with Sydney Shep at Victoria University's Wai-te-ata Press. It was one of the best things I've done in a long time, and I was buzzing for days afterwards.

On the first day, I was talking to one of the other women on the course about why she was doing it. She said she 'loved all things paper'.

I thought a lot about that, and wondered if I loved paper too. I felt like I should love paper. It is an integral part of my life. I live with it and use it in a multitude of ways every day. Sometimes paper threatens to take over every space in my house.

But I don't feel an active adoration for it. No quickening of the heart when I think about it.

The next day on the course I was talking to another woman about how using wood type feels very different from using lead type. Without thinking why it was so, I told her I was enjoying working with the lead type a lot more. She said she was the opposite; she was naturally attracted to working with wood type - and loved its comparative warmth and smoothness.

After the course was over, I wondered more about why I had fallen in love with working with lead type (because that's how it did feel), and why for days afterwards all I wanted to do was hop back into that studio and get my fingers into those lead type cases again.

I began to remember other times when I had enjoyed working with metal in one way or another. For a time, when I was about 19, I even spent several days a week at a metalwork school in Warkworth, before coming back to Wellington and spending a year trying to launch a career as a craft jeweller. For reasons that seem hazy now, I gave it up before I got properly off the ground. I think I got sidetracked by writing.

As I remembered all this I found myself hankering to start metalwork again. My memories of working with metal are powerful and visceral: the gentle roar of the gas torch, the way the solder almost seems to burst before it runs, the satisfying work of filing and sanding away seams.

I realise I simply love metal. And it fascinates me that other people seem to have similar affinities for other materials - paper, wood, clay, fibre, stone, ...

And you don't know until you work with something how you will feel about it. I once thought I would love glass. But then I did a leadlight course and found that I despised it; its cold, brittle nature, and the splinters that invaded my body and life.

If materials were humans, my relationships with them would be along these lines:

Paper would be a familiar old friend that I have grown up with, that I rely on, but probably take for granted too much.

Glass would be the alluring individual who turned out to be a *&%$# when I got to know it.

And metal would be - inexplicably really - my beloved one.

What about you? I'd love to hear what sorts of relationships with materials you have.