Woolyspider.com

So I've been busy, busy.
I was asked to design a website for an online yarn shop called The Wooly Spider -http://woolyspider.com
It sells wool and wool-silk yarns on the pound cone, -only all natural fibers and lots of lace and fingering weight wool, all you historic peeps! and because of me and my wonderful input, sometime in the near-future they will carry silk embroidery floss and threads, and other hard-to-find natual-fiber items for making period clothing. Like Linen- I WANT linen. And bone double pointed needles. Is that too much to ask for? It is very hard to find natural fibers without polyester and all other synthetics worming their way in.

But I digress, so I made the website- I think it has turned out well. I designed all the graphics, and put the whole thing together- and though it took me WAY too much time, I'm generally pleased with how it looks. I used Wordpress as the CMS. Wordpress is so easy to use!! I'm in love. This is the 2nd Yarny website that I've been asked to work on- the other one is my LYS (Local Yarn Shop for you not in on the yarny lingo) but I didn't design that one, I'm just helping the owner to update the site. That one uses CMS Made Simple, which is also a really nice CMS to work with, and is relatively user-friendly if you have computer skills. I love open-source!

So what I'm really excited about my contribution to The Wooly Spider is that I'm helping to put together Historical Patterns for the site. I also put together some information about historical yarn equivalences to help people make wise yarn choices when trying to duplicate a historical pattern. The Wooly Spider sells alot of yarn that would be really good choices to use in patterns that call for Single and Double Berlin wool, Fleecy and Zephyr, so I thought it would be nice to have the info as a guide. I also put together a guide for modern yarn weights so that when they see 2/20 lace-weight they can know what that means.

Also, sort of non-related but exciting to me, is that I came upon a historical reference from the 1840's (maybe 50's, I'm trying to do this off the top of my head) that defines Zephyr wool as a german merino wool, also known as Berlin wool. Zephyr wool can be sort of a vague, period term, so it's exciting to have that cross reference there!  I'll have to get the exact reference in here as a link for anyone who is interested in reading about that.

So, back to me putting together Historical Patterns for The Wooly Spider site. I envision patterns for knitting, crochet and netting, maybe tatting and embroidery as well as they expand their line to more types of yarn/thread. As I create them on the site there, I think I'll blog about them here, and create a link to them because, honestly, I only have so many hours in the day. lol
And when the end of August comes, and I'm back in school, I hope *fingers crossed* that I have the time to keep doing patterns and such. I'll do my best.