The Fairy GodKnitter

One!!!

The Cupcake Fiber Company turned one today. 

My dear friend Cookie is also celebrating today.

Shop wise, things are terrific.  I had set what I thought were ambitious goals for the first year and then exceeded all of them.  I have raised the bar a bit for the coming year because I like a challenge and I have learned so much about how to work smarter.

Thank you for all your support.  I would never have gotten off the ground without your well wishes and purchases from familiar names.  Once I started to ship to strangers, I found myself with new friends. 

Shipping to other countries and seeing my cupcakes discussed in Finnish or German on Ravelry, has been a super huge big deal for me. 

Even a bigger deal is seeing yarn made from fiber I dyed, it is so validating.

I am not the person I was a year ago, much less the one I was two years ago when Connor was ill or the one who started blogging in 06 or the one who received the cancer diagnosis in 04.  This year has healed me and transformed me.

And it's also toughened me up.  I never really imagined that I would have to spend so much of my time looking over my shoulder at other vendors who would call something that looks like dryer lint a cupcake batt or big name dyers who would favorite an item in my shop and then use the same color way name, or field the numerous requests for freebies from reviewers with no audience or have people ask me step by step to explain my process. 

Perhaps the strangest/funniest incident was the couple who approached me while I was vendoring at the festival.  He claimed that she had a successful Etsy shop (I could not find it under any variation of the name he used) and she worked out of a corner of his mother's kitchen, stored product in a shed that needed a new roof and still his goal was to find other fiber sellers who would agree to drop ship to customers once he set up "the worlds largest online fiber store" because he knew a little about code from hacking video games.  As if!  Really, the weird is a timesuck that I could do without.

I was never going to call anyone out on anything, but Cookie said today would be a good time to just let the weird know that I'm on to them.  Cookie listens to me vent all the time and probably won't be completely satisfied with this post, but it's hard to be anything but happy today.

 

 

"Hello Snow!"

That's what Miss S. said when she got off the bus this afternoon.

It's also what Luna may have been thinking:

She really likes the snow, but she hates having to sit on the mat until someone decides she is dry enough to wander the house.

I spent a few hours on snow removal since Gary was working and I needed to drive over to school.

I think that we received about 6 or 8 inches of fluffy heavy snow:

                               (this was at 3 inches)

And the weatherpeople promise more almost everyday this week.

The roads were crappy when I headed out, mostly because it was snowing sideways. 

The first ride across the southbound bridge was fine, but the return northbound on the newly rebuilt bridge was dicey. 

When they redecked and replaced the side railings of the bridge, they built the inner lane with a solid concrete wall that the railing now connects to.  The other bridge (and this one before the 8 months of pain) has the railing connected to the bridge deck and the space below the railing is open. This means that snow, ice, old shoes, truck parts and weird debris just slide between the railing and fall into the river below. 

While I'm not advocating putting anything in the river that doesn't belong, leaving all that stuff trapped on a bridge with nowhere to go may cause big problems.

And for the record, I did e-mail the state DOT about this months ago.  And again today when I saw that each lane of the bridge had about a foot of slurge* shrinking the traffic lanes.

If we get snow everyday this week and if it stays cold enough that the slurge ices over the drains in the deck of the bridge, people will start driving in each others lanes and someone will be one old shoe away from an accident. 

So that's my rant for today, tomorrow I'll have old knitting (any guesses?) to share and maybe a bit of the new.

 

* slurge is too a word