Not only have we been dyeing up tons of gorgeous colors for Stitches West, but we’ve also been hard at work, preparing to launch the SkeinMinder! What is the SkeinMinder, you say? It’s a tool for indie dyers and production spinners that takes the fuss out of winding yarn.
The motorized skein winders that indie dyers use are made by other small businesses, and are pretty simple in design. The SkeinMinder automates them! Just set it to the number of rotations you want, and push the big red button. The SkeinMinder keeps track for you, and automatically stops your winder. It’ll even detect if your yarn has jammed and pause everything!
We recently launched the SkeinMinder website, and are busy preparing for our Kickstarter campaign. Why Kickstarter? Well, the SkeinMinder is a custom electronics product, and those are expensive to make. We need to build them in batches of 100 for it to be feasible. With Kickstarter, we can make sure there are at least 100 dyers who want one. With their orders, and the support of the fiber community, we can start up a production line and make the SkeinMinder a reality!
We’re also going to have plenty of beautiful yarn rewards – there will be Alpenglow Yarn of course, plus yarns from several of our indie dyer beta group! And what a group it is, there will be packages of yarn that include Sincere Sheep, Knitted Wit, Canon Hand Dyes, Pigeonroof Studios, Hazel Knits, and Teresa Ruch, just to name a few! Stay tuned here or through the SkeinMinder newsletter to find out when the Kickstarter kicks off!
We’ll also have SkeinMinder demos set up at Stitches West, come visit us in booths 936/938! We’ll also have a stunning array of naturally dyed yarn that we’ve dyed up just for the occasion. See you soon!