Ready to Ship skeins in each colorway will be available while supplies last starting at 12pm CDT on May 19th (1pm EDT/10a PDT). Due to recent changes to the shop's theme, our Coming Soon type of product listing is temporarily out of commission but you can preview all 5 on our Home page just above the News section.
As summer approaches my mind turns to lazy mornings, trips to the pool, and late nights enjoying the lengthened day. When my youngest kiddo is out of school, I like to take advantage of the extra time by indulging in loads of pleasure reading and more knitting. We take more trips to the library and I borrow more books from my Kindle Unlimited account. It is heaven! I love getting lost in a great read and can loose many happy hours to a book but reading wasn't always so pleasurable for me. When I was first learning, I didn't like it, in fact, I hated it! My eldest brother was such a bookworm that I assumed I would be one too but reading didn't come so easily for me. It was hard! I struggled to make sense of letters joining together to become words and words stringing together to become sentences. Many an evening was spent crying over homework and reading assignments until sometime in the second grade when it finally 'clicked' for me. However, for the rest of that year and even into the next, I still really didn't like reading. Sure I could do it pretty easily but spending my free time with a book certainly wasn't on my top 10 favorite-thing-to-do list but that all changed with one book, C.S. Lewis' The Lion, the Witch & the Wardrobe, book one of The Chronicles of Narnia series. This book changed my life! I devoured it then reread it once more before begging my Mom to get me the second book and eventually the whole series. Over the next several years my love of reading grew and grew and I inhaled books from almost every genre but I would still drift back to Narnia from time to time and, of course, I have given a set to each of my children; you never forget your first love. So as summer approaches, my Kindle reading list grows, my knitting basket fills, and it seems like the perfect time to share these loves with you in something I am calling The Great Reads collection. This will be an on going collection that will have series of new colorways added periodically. Each series will be offered one time only as Dye to Order.
Our first series is based on five of my favorite "magical" books/series! Let me tell you a little bit about each one...
The first colorway, Not a Tame Lion, is inspired by my first love, The Lion, the Witch & the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis! My first batch did not turn out like I wanted and so you can find it here at a deeply discounted price under an alternate/seconds name, Narnia Business (say it out loud). I went back to the drawing board and the second batch was spot on and I think you will really love it! Not a Tame Lion has character based stripes of equal width with a much larger (4x!) handpainted Aslan stripe.
The second colorway, The Boy Who Lived is inspired by the Olly Moss bookcovers for the Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling. I thought it would look interesting to make each stripe the color of each book cover and correspond to the approximate width. I discovered the Harry Potter series as an adult in my twenties and fell in love! I read aloud (with voice inflection) the first three books to my elementary school age children. By the time we got to the fourth book, thankfully both of my older kiddos could read it to themselves!
The third colorway, Practically Perfect is inspired by Mary Poppins by P.L. Travers and more specifically the book cover featuring an umbrella-borne Mary drifting over the London skyline. Mary Poppins the movie is very different from the book and I loved each iteration at different times in my life. As a young child, I loved the movie best and even owned the soundtrack, however, the first time I attempted to read the book, I was so disappointed in this sour and strict Mary that I closed the book only a few chapters in. I finished the book as a teenager and could appreciate her characters' complexities.
The fourth colorway, Over the Rainbow is inspired by The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by Frank Baum. Who doesn't love this story! When I was a kiddo, the movie played each Thanksgiving and it was a family tradition to stuff ourselves with leftovers and pie and watch. As you may remember, once again there is a huge difference between the movie and the book with the book being darker indeed but both stories have a special place in my heart. The colorway is character driven mostly with the unlikely quartet of Lion, Scarecrow, Tinman & Dorothy with Ruby Slippers which appear first just over the Blue Skies stripe and the Rainbow segment. After the Dorothy stripe is the Yellow Brick Road, the Emerald City and the stormy Skies stripe and then it's back to the Rainbow segment.
And the final and fifth self striping colorway, Not All Who Wander Are Lost is inspired by The Fellowship of the Ring, book one of The Lord of Rings trilogy by J.R.R. Tolkien. This is such an epic story and I would say that the movies only enhanced my love of the series! I took my inspiration from a movie still and based each character stripe on the color of their garment in this photo except Aragorn and Boromir who are both wearing extremely boring black and so they were changed to Navy and Charcoal respectively. The final stripe of the colorway is as you may have suspected, The Ring itself. 
As mentioned earlier, each colorway will be offered Dye to Order for one week each individually and not all at once. I will put one colorway per week and I would like your help to decide on the order of appearance. Cast your vote in the following poll! ETA: polling is closed
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