Miss Babs Hand Dyed Yarns and Fiber

Tuesday on the YarnThing Podcast with Marly Bird: Miss Babs Ausherman of Miss Babs Hand Dyed Yarns and Fiber

In addition to all the awesome announcements for the great things coming from Marly (listen in below for all the details), Miss Babs joins Marly to talk about the company she started.

Babs comes from a very creative family; her siblings range from glassblowers to sculptors to potters (as well as an engineer for good measure). She herself is both a knitter and a crocheter.  She learned to knit from her mother, who also knit, and learned to crochet in her teens.  While she didn’t knit and crochet for many years, she always did some kind of handwork like needlework with her mother.  She and her family moved to Tennessee and Babs was no longer working 60 hours a week so she took knitting back up.  After a while she started to spin which lead to dying the yarn.  She took a class learning about natural dying and started dying everything.  At this point, she had too much yarn for herself and started selling it at local shops.  In 2005, she stopped working as an adjunct at a local college and made the yarn dying her full time business.

The business really started going in part due to necessity.  Babs’ husband became disabled in 2006 and Babs became the breadwinner for the family.  After a rough first few years and a lot of hard work, Miss Babs Hand Dyed Yarns and Fiber is the thriving business it is today.  Miss Babs started as a kitchen dying operation.  She took over the workshop area from her husband in around 2005 and they have recently expanded to double their space.

Now to talk about the yarns!  Miss Babs dyes and sells five yarn weights; lace, fingering, sport, DK, and worsted, and fiber.  Each yarn weight and fiber comes in several fiber contents including merino wool, alpaca, silk and bluefaced leicester wool.  And the best part is the colors!  Miss Babs does several repeatable monochromatic colors.  These are the same every time she dyes them.  Miss Babs also does what she calls Babettes.  Babettes are one-of-a-kind, unrepeatable color combinations that are different every time.  A few are somewhat repeatable in that she will use the same colors in a similar way to get a relatively repeatable result.  You can see just a taste below, go to the Miss Babs website to see every color available now!

Repeatable Plum                                        Uberraschung Babette

Naughty Fairy Babette

You can find Miss Babs on: their website MissBabs.com, Facebook, Ravelry, Twitter, and Pintrest.

And we can’t forget the Giveaway!  Leave a comment below that includes Miss Babs’ keyword for your chance to win!

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XRX Books, Knitter’s Magazine, STITCHES Expos
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Love of Knitting and Love of Crochet
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