As I mentioned in my last post, I've been making an effort to turn over my stash, and trying use up more yarn than I usually do before making another purchase. I've gotten to the point, now, where I'm down to a few colors of my stock tabi yarn, and I'm trying to decide how to proceed.

I've been trying to fill my shop for the holiday season, but it's tough to feel motivated to do that when things are soooo sloooow during the anti-knit season. I've been sticking with it, making breaks for my own projects and experiments, trying not to burn out, and have made pretty good progress. I'd hoped to have more listings, but I still did better than I expected.

It's now to the point where I should start ordering more yarn, but I'm a bit stuck on colors, even after looking at color and fashion predictions for the fall. I know I need some more traditionally feminine colors (purples, pinks), and came to realize that I need more greens (which I'm totally not feeling), earthy tones, blues, and yellows.  

I just need to shake up the whole set, and that's tough for me. I've spent the past few weeks poking at the Pantone Fall Color Report, and it really gave me a place to jump off, and I encourage anyone currently struggling with color to check it out. What colors are looking for this winter and fall?

I've been holding off on buying yarn, recently, in an attempt to work through my stash.  As a result, I've found myself stagnated and avoiding knitting for my shop; new colors and textures are what keeps me going.  It has been pretty productive, this avoidance, because I've been working on projects for me, my family, and finishing up things that have been hanging around for awhile.

But...I know I need to work on building up more stock!  I'm already starting to get a trickle of custom orders for the holidays, and I was dreadfully unprepared last year for my etsy sales.  Breaking down and buying yarn currently isn't in the cards, so I decided to whip out my bag of scraps and pull a couple of skeins of yarn out and see if I could come up with anything that suited my fancy.  My goal was to use up some of my scraps and to use up an idle skein.  

Last night in the HAF critique chat, someone mentioned 'sunset colors' in relation to my orange and pink ribbed socks.  I had about 5 yards of each of those colors in my scrap bag, so I pulled them out on the table and saw that a winey red looked quite nice with them.  I also had about 5 yards of that, so I wound off bobbins and have them paired with a skein of cream yarn.

When I finish the pair of socks I'm working on now (for me!), I'm going to get started.  I'm actually excited about it!  Maybe this'll keep me from splurging on supplies for a tiny bit. :)

As I mentioned in my last post, I'm working on knitting up some wayward yarn from my stash.  I just finished a pair of gray tabi (size L) out of the wool/acrylic blend, and my mind just took the gray and wandered the entire time I worked on them.  I wanted so badly to pick up and knit another pair of socks that it made it very difficult to finish.  

It's not that common that I finish a pair and immediately, like within two minutes, dash to pick out yarn for a new pair, but that's what happened today.  The new pair will be gray with a few hot pink stripes.  I hate to list two gray pairs in a row, but I can't let this one go!

As you might have noticed, I did a bit of tweaking on the website.  I changed the layout and color scheme to something a bit less stark.  

I liked the 'clean' look it had, but I realized that wide expanses of white with a touch of black and orange probably wasn't the most welcoming.  I hope the red and gray is somewhat warmer.  I still need to go back and redo the colors of some of the text to make them match the new color scheme better, but that can wait a little while.

The Shop section also now has a full range of custom listings, where you're able to pre-purchase a pair of socks and then communicate with me on the colors.  I have a few other ideas for making that slightly more user friendly, but it'll do for now.  Depending on how well I'm able to maintain stocking my etsy, 1000markets shops, and consignment sales, I'll probably add some pre-knit items there, as well.  More organized than it currently is, hopefully!