Remember to be gentle with yourself

A color story and love letter to the month of October

Me, holding a batch of freshly-dry cashmere blend yarn. It as soft as my beagle’s ears, and a great reminder that we all deserve gentleness and ease, not for what we do, but just because we are.

I’m sharing the color story of this beautiful russet red yarn (above) a little earlier than I’d usually send it. You see, this yarn is currently in my studio, where the teen and I are in the midst of reskeining, twisting and shipping it out to Kindred Spirits subscribers. It’s the October club installment, and it’s later than I’d prefer.

But, I had promised the color story to subscribers this week, and it occurs to me that sharing the story now is a reminder—to me and maybe to you, too—to be gentle with ourselves.

It’s a reminder that things don’t always happen in the “right” order, and sometimes there isn’t a right order at all. Life can give us a jumble of experiences to sort through, some joyful, some painful, some sad, and some glorious. Through all of it, my wish is that we can all be gentle with ourselves. To feel what we need to, and to soak up the beauty (and sometimes the pain) of it all.

About this colorway

This colorway is named A World of Octobers, and, like all my club colorways, it’s inspired by Anne of Green Gables, who loved October with a passion.

“OCTOBER was a beautiful month at Green Gables, when the birches in the hollow turned as golden as sunshine and the maples behind the orchard were royal crimson and the wild cherry trees along the lane put on the loveliest shades of dark red and bronzy green, while the fields sunned themselves in aftermaths.

Anne reveled in the world of color about her.”

—L.M. Montgomery (Chapter 16; Anne of Green Gables)

I first dyed this colorway in October 2019, and it’s the prettiest, most apropos, most October colorway I’ve ever made. It’s a perfect russet red, with layers of taupe and pinky-brown, maroon and burgundy, with the itsy-bitsy-est speckles of bark brown and moss green. The dye likes to strike (or, bind to the yarn) at different rates, so some skeins in a single pot will become more brown, and some will become more ruby. I like to think of these differences as ripening leaves on an autumnal tree—all different shades and tones of the same russet red.

To freshen my offering for 2022, I created an autumnal gold to pair with it, with layers of toffee brown, rock sugar candy, and just the slightest hint of marmalade. Subscribers who were with me in 2019 will get the golden shade, named Davy & Dora. When I took photographs yesterday, Davy & Dora was still drying, but you can see a wee peek of it at the very top of the photo below.

I dry all of my yarn outside, on wooden drying racks, and I like to think that doing this imbues my yarn with a bit of San Francisco’s ocean freshness, surrounded as we are by water on three sides

I’ve been dyeing my Kindred Spirits club for about five years, and I have a pretty fine sense of how long each step of the process takes. Until 2020, it was a very routine and predictable cycle, but we all know how life has been upended in ways large and small by the Covid-19 pandemic.

While things have been more predictable over the past six months, for a small business at least, they’re no where near what they used to be. Most mills no longer have abject yarn shortages, but things still just take … longer. Every mill I order from seems to need a bit longer lead time to pack orders, and I suspect that’s because staff are falling ill with Covid-19. (I’m so grateful that people aren’t filling up hospitals the way we saw in 2020 and 2021.) Orders seem to take longer in transit (maybe the shipping companies also have staff shortages?). The now and the in-between seems to linger a little bit, no longer moving quite as fast as in the before-times.

And so, this cycle of Kindred Spirits took longer.

I, also, am taking time to pause in the now. Rather than fight the urge to check on a shipment multiple times a day, I’m pausing to remember what this season of life is about for me, and I hope for you, too. It’s about well-being. It’s about pausing to notice the warm, golden afternoon autumn light. It’s about pausing to make a cozy drink, and then also taking the time to sip it. It’s about deep breaths of fresh ocean air, and it’s about rich, autumnal yarn on my needles.

The afternoon light was spectacular this week, and I loved taking a moment to set up my camera gear and snap all of the photographs for today’s color story. Be gentle with yourself

One of my favorite things to say to a friend is: be gentle with yourself. I tell myself this a lot, too. We all deserve gentleness, not because we’ve worked hard, or because something difficult has happened, but simply because we exist. The systems and structures we live within might try to tell us that we have to work first, be productive first, create value for others first. But, honestly, I haven’t found that way of thinking to be either satisfying or helpful. So, in this season of looking inward, and of making things more slowly, I prefer instead to think of myself (and of you) just as I do my precious family. I love them because they are, not because of what they do.

And so, this Sunday morning, I wish for you: Be gentle with yourself.