For several days now, I’ve been thinking about today’s blog post and just drawing a blank. If you do any blogging or regular writing of any sort, I’m sure you understand. I finally decided that I would “interview” myself the way I interview pattern designers each month so that, if you are interested, you could learn a little more about the woman behind Purple Lamb. Don’t worry. I’m not developing any sort of multiple personality disorder, though it may seem like it from what follows.

Before I start interviewing myself, I did want to bring your attention to a new yarn base I have in the shop. It’s my Donegal yarn base. It has a really neat texture that looks like tweed. I have it in both Donegal Sock and Donegal DK. So far I have made the same colorways in both. It’s made of 85% superwash merino and 15% nylon nebs in black and brown and gray. The nebs don’t take the dye, which is what creates the really neat tweed effect. My favorite colorway so far has been Nebula.

So here goes—my interview with me.

Q: Carla, tell me about how you got started in fiber arts. How did you first learn to knit?

A: My mom taught me to knit when I was about 11 or 12. At the time, I honestly didn’t like it that much. I’d pick it up again now and then, but every time she had to show me how to purl all over again. I don’t think I ever actually finished anything. She also taught me how to needlepoint, and I liked that a lot more and made lots of people gifts of needlepoint sunglass cases over the next many years.

Honestly, I didn’t start knitting again until a couple years ago, and I’m still really just an advanced beginner. My fiber arts journey is sort of the reverse of a lot of people’s. Back in 2003 I decided I wanted to weave. I really don’t even know where the idea came from, and it was a big surprise to my family and very different from my other interests, which included foreign languages, literature, and singing among others. I got a big rigid heddle loom. I was told I would eventually tire of the rigid heddle loom and want a multi-harness loom. Well, I would love a multi-harness loom some day, but I’m still so in love with combining colors and textures that I feel like I could just keep weaving on my rigid heddle for many years to come.

Shortly after I began learning to weave, I learned to spin. Anna Barry, the wonderful owner of the White Rock Weaving Center, introduced me to spinning, and that’s when I really fell in love. To this day I love spinning so much. It’s just so peaceful and meditative once you get past the initial stage. I’ve been spinning for 15 years now.

Q: What led you from there to your business?

A: It was a journey of many years. I have a big family and a busy life, but from the time I started weaving and spinning, that was just a chance to step away from the joys and duties of being a mom and do something fun for myself. After I had been spinning and weaving as a hobby for about eight years and had given away lots and lots of fibery goodness, I decided I would open a shop on Etsy. At first I focused just on my handspun yarn because I was definitely making more yarn than I could use.

I started out spinning prepared top and eventually wanted to get a little more creative, so I started combining different fibers. Sometimes I would use pre-dyed merino, but other times I couldn’t find the color I wanted to use. Early on in my fiber arts journey, I took a class on hand-painting yarn, and I loved it. We were hand-painting our warps. In weaving, the warp threads are the ones that go up and down while the weft is the part that goes across. Anyway, I really enjoyed the dye process. I got more dyes and played around with them as the need arose, but to tell the truth I still preferred spinning and weaving over dyeing back then, and I just did it when I “had” to to create a colorway I couldn’t find.

As the years went on, I kept taking online classes and learning more and more. After I had been spinning for awhile, I got a drum carder so I could more easily combine fibers to make really cool art yarn with lots of wonderful texture. After I’d been selling my handspun for awhile, I decided to expand the business by selling art batts to fellow spinners and felters. My art batts continue to be a major portion of my business. I enjoy the process of combining color and texture to make what amounts to an abstract painting.

It was only after a few more years passed and I had done a lot more dyeing that I decided to dip my toes into selling hand-dyed millspun yarn. I’m not sure when that was. Maybe 2014 or 2015? At first I didn’t really like the results. Looking back, there was just too much contrast in my colorways and not enough subtlety. Gradually, though, through lots of practice and lots of study I learned to make more complex colorways. I get kind of a shiver down my spine when one of my colorways turns out really well.

The funny thing is that I always hated art in school. I was never able to draw or paint well, and my lack of ability bothered me, but now I see undyed yarn and unspun fiber as my own canvas on which to create something beautiful. The way I see it, everyone should be involved in work that lends itself toward goodness, truth, or beauty. Dostoevsky said, “Beauty will save the world.” It almost seems too exalted a phrase to apply to what I do, but I’m doing my little part to create beauty in the world.

I would lay awake at night (okay, I still do) figuring out ways to make a colorway that I had an idea for. Many of my colorways require several dye layers and some pretty unique techniques to make them possible, but I love the challenge of pushing the limits of what is possible.

To continue with that thought, the fiber arts are unique in the world so far as I know because it takes many hands to create a single item. There’s the person who creates the yarn, the person who dyes the yarn, the person who creates the pattern or plan for the finished object, and the person who knits or crochets or weaves with the yarn, so my part is just one step on the journey. Isn’t that wonderful how connected we all are through a simple strand of yarn?

Q: Now, you have a big family. How do you manage to run Purple Lamb at the same time?

A: We do have a big family. My husband and I have seven children ranging in age from 23 down to 2. He is a realtor, and he also teaches Catholic theology classes online. We had 5 children in 10 years and then a big gap and then we were able to have 2 more. We have homeschooled almost the whole time, so juggling homeschooling and my business is a daily challenge. Our oldest three are in college now. We also have two teenagers at home, and then we have our two little guys. I have pretty much always done some sort of work from home though. I did medical transcription for eight years. That was really interesting, and I learned a lot, but what I’m doing now is a better fit for my family because I can talk to the children while I’m working whereas when I was doing medical transcription, I couldn’t do that very easily. My order of priorities is homeschooling, business, and house in that order. As a result, the house is never as tidy as I would like. Someday.

Here’s a photo of our wonderful children.

Q: Are any of your family members involved in Purple Lamb?

A: Everyone is to the degree he or she wants to be. Our 2-year-old goes around saying, “Pretty yarn.” That’s his contribution. Our 4-year-old loves to turn the handle of my drum carder for me, pick rosemary when people want it in their packages, and “help” me push down the tape when I’m packaging up orders. Our 13-year-old enjoys coming up with new art batt colorways. In fact, he is responsible for Scandinavia and Bright Sunshiny Day and a few other fabulous colorways. He is also a wonderful listening ear when I’m working out a problem out loud. Our 16-year-old daughter also makes art batts on occasion, and she is the one I go to for advice on color combinations when I need a second set of eyes. She has a true artistic eye and often saves me from doing something outrageous. She also acts as my proofreader from time to time when I’ve read over something so many times I can’t do it any more, and she’s a great model. Our 19-year-old son has a good business mind, so I talk to him about new ideas for how to expand or cut back various yarn and fiber lines and how to market them well. Our 21-year-old son has helped out with programming tasks from time to time on my website. Our 23-year-old daughter is a much better knitter than I am. She’s done a bit of sample knitting for me, and she has also helped out at fiber festivals. She is our resident expert on The Lord of the Rings, and as you probably know I draw quite a bit of inspiration from The Lord of the Rings, so when I need help finding exactly which chapter the balrog is in or the the description of Lothlorien, she’s the one I ask.

Last but certainly not least is my husband of almost 25 years. He recently created a whole fiber room for me complete with counter and shelves, which has made everything so much easier. He has helped put up and take down all the grid-wall and easy-ups and figure out how to make all of that work at fiber festivals and farmers’ markets countless times. He has taken time off from his own business when I needed time to concentrate on mine. Above all, though, he has been there to listen and come up with ideas when I needed to work out some problem. He has always been supportive of my business, and he is always in favor of buying whatever fiber tools I think I need.

Q: What has been the hardest part of running Purple Lamb?

A: I think the hardest thing has been marketing. It’s funny–for years no one in my town or at my parish even knew I had this business. I didn’t want to be pushy. I finally realized that nobody else was going to talk about this thing I am so passionate about if I didn’t. I’m also a little too old to be a social media native, so I’ve had to work hard to understand how to use Facebook and Instagram and Pinterest well. I’m getting there, but I still have a lot to learn. Creating my own website has been a challenge too. I’m too stubborn to give up and too cheap to pay someone else to do it, so I figure it out.

Q: When you’re looking for inspiration for a new colorway, where do you find it?

A: I find inspiration in the beauty of nature around me, in music, and in art, but above all I find inspiration in great works of literature. I have been a lifelong lover of great books. When I’m designing a literary colorway, I think about the character. What is he or she like? What virtues and vices does the character have? How can these be represented through color and combinations of color? When I was designing my Jane Austen collection last spring, I asked all those questions about each character, and I sort of created a symbolic color set. I wanted all the different colorways in the set to work together, so I used the same yellow for the characters who were cheerful, the same soft pink for the more romantic characters, the same blue for the long-suffering characters, and of course if you have read Jane Austen then you know that no character is one-dimensional. They all have a complexity to them that makes them believable 200 years later, so each character had all the colors belonging to her. When I created my Odyssey collection last summer, I did the same, and earlier this fall, I actually turned to a group of alumni from the liberal arts college I went to. We all read Moby-Dick, and I needed help figuring out Queequeg. They were a huge help, and it was a lot of fun.

 

Q: Which comes first? The yarn or the pattern?

A: Yes.

Q: What’s your favorite weight of yarn to work with?

A: It depends on what I’m doing with it. I actually tend to like quick knits, so I tend to use DK or above. I use a lot of my handspun yarn in both knitting and weaving. If I’m weaving, I’m usually most concerned with the drape and the use of the item and choose the weight of yarn based on that.

Q: What’s your favorite fiber to work with, and what do you like about it?

A: The important thing is that it has to be soft. I only use soft yarn, and I only sell soft yarn. Whether it’s handspun or hand-dyed, I love to use merino, silk in all its glorious forms, alpaca, and Polwarth. Oh, and kid mohair locks and camel down.

Q: What is your own personal favorite design that you have made so far?

A: I think I would say it’s a vest that I have woven twice now. Here’s a link to a blog post I made about it a few months ago, and here’s a photo of my lovely daughter wearing the vest I wove out of my Black Butterfly Sparkly Merino Sock yarn:

Now, if we’re talking about yarn colorways, then my favorites (please don’t make me pick just one) are probably Smaug’s Treasure from my Tolkien collection, Lizzie from my Jane Austen Collection, and November in My Soul from my Moby-Dick collection. If you had asked me a year ago, my answers probably would have been completely different.

A: Where did the name Purple Lamb come from?

Q: When I started my shop on Etsy, I called it Monet’s Garden Art Yarns, but the name was both too limiting and too crazy long. I decided I wanted to change it, but I wasn’t sure what to change it to, so I made a big list of possible names and kept adding to it. There were a lot of good ideas on that list, but purple has always been my favorite color, and I thought that an adorable little lamb would give a sense of softness, which has always been a big focus of my business.

Q: Where can we find your yarn?

A: Now that’s a silly question, Carla. If you’re reading this, you already know that my yarn can be found at www.purplelambfiberarts.com.

Q: Are there other places around the web where we can find you and your work?

A: You can find me on Facebook at www.facebook.com/purplelambfiberarts. I’m also on Instagram and Pinterest as purplelambfiberarts. Regarding Pinterest, I set up a group board called Indie-Dyed Yarn where lots of indie dyers post their beautiful work. It is so neat to see what my fellow dyers are making. I’m part of a great group of indie dyers, and we really help and support one another from all around the world.

If you want to reach me directly, the best way is through the contact form on my website. That goes right to my email address, and I respond several times a day.

Q: What upcoming plans do you have for your business?

A: Over the years, there have been a lot of things I have wanted to do when the kids got older. I’ve thought about singing on some sort of professional level. I’ve thought about becoming a speech-language pathologist. I’ve thought of going back and getting a masters in English so I could teach literature and writing at a community college. Some of those are still on the table, but lately I have been thinking a lot about how much I love what I’m doing now. My plans are just to keep growing. Every year I’ve doubled or tripled my sales, and while it’s still a very small business, if I can double it again next year, it will be enough to be a real help to my family, and with three in college, well, we need all the help we can get. I can’t even tell you how wonderful it is to get to do what I love and help my family at the same time.

Q: It’s been a pleasure speaking with you, Carla.

A: You too, Carla.

Now, if you’re still reading and you don’t think I’m completely bonkers by now, I just want to remind you that my yarn giveaway is still going on through Sunday. If you haven’t already signed up, you should, and if you know other yarnie friends who would love a free skein of luxury hand-dyed yarn, please let them know about it too. Here’s the link to choose your favorite skein and enter to win: https://www.shop.purplelambfiberarts.com/pages/yarn-giveaway

Until next week, happy fiber artistry!