Can you believe there are just five more days until Christmas? I can’t!

In our family, we wait to exchange gifts until the feast of Epiphany or as close to it as we can get, so I have to admit that I have not purchased one single Christmas present yet, though I do have a few things made.

In case you don’t have that luxury and you are still looking for that perfect gift for another fiber artist in your life, there are two things from Purple Lamb that I would like to ask you to consider.

Gift Certificates

First, I have gift certificates available ranging from stocking stuffers to enough for a couple sweaters’ worth of yarn. When you order it, I’ll email you a personalized certificate for the person you are giving it to. You can print it out to give in person or send it along by mail or email yourself. My gift certificates never expire or lose value, and they are good for everything in stock in my shop.

I’ll be on call to email these to you through the 23rd. I’ll be busy with my family on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.

Yarn and Fiber Clubs

The other great gift that you might consider is a subscription to one of my yarn or art batt clubs. Each month I draw my inspiration for the colorway from a famous painting. A few favorites have included Van Gogh’s “Starry Night,” Renoir’s “Vase of Roses,” and O’Keeffe’s “Flower of Life II.”

I have an art batt club for spinners as well as several yarn clubs to choose from. There’s one for DK-weight yarn, one where I alternate between a couple of different luxury fingering-weight bases, one with a great yarn base for socks, and there’s my cashmere sock club, which is both the newest and the most popular of late. Here’s a link to that one:

I absolute hate those clubs that hold subscribers hostage, so mine isn’t like that at all. You can sign up for one club, switch to a different one whenever you like, skip a month, and cancel whenever you choose, so you could opt to give a subscription lasting for a few months or for the whole year. It’s up to you.

And if you are the one hoping to receive either a Purple Lamb gift certificate or a club subscription, you have my official permission to forward this email to anyone you think needs to see it. 😉

January Club Colorway

Speaking of club colorways, I wanted to let you know what I have chosen for January. It’s Mondrian’s painting entitled, “The Red Tree.” Here it is:

It seems very appropriate as a winter colorway. I find Mondrian fascinating. About fifteen years ago, I got to go see an exhibit of his work at the Kimball Museum in Fort Worth. He started out as a post-impressionist and moved gradually into cubism. The exhibit specifically showed his paintings of trees going from one genre to the other with many stages in between. I must admit that I am not a fan of cubism, but the exhibit of his work certainly helped me to understand it better.

Looking Forward to 2020

I am really excited to see what 2020 brings to Purple Lamb, and I’m already in the process of making a bunch of small tweaks and improvements with that in mind.

If you follow me on Facebook, you’ll know that I made some small changes to my shop website earlier this week. As always, you can find absolutely everything in my shop using the menu on the left, but the links with photos are probably a little more obvious. I decided to change the photo links from yarn bases to yarn weights.

Today I made another couple of tweaks. I added another set of collections where you can search by type of inspiration and photo links for those as well. If you love great literature as I do, you can see what colorways were inspired by great works of literature. Love art? Well, me too. There’s a collection for all the yarn and fiber inspired by great works of art. There’s also one for music, landscapes, gardens, and one that I decided to call the creative collection. That one is for more ethereal names like Dreams of the Sea and Delight.

There’s one more that many of you might be especially interested in. That’s the Semi-Solid Collection. I have a nice selection of semi-solid and tonal colorways, and I’m hoping this will make it easier for you to find yarn of a mostly single colorway when that’s what you need.

I also finally did something I have been wanting to do for ages–change my byline to include the fact that most of my colorways are inspired by the classics.

New Bands

One other change for 2020 is switching from yarn tags to yarn bands. This has been something I’ve debated for a really long time before finally taking the plunge. I had the bands printed and received them just in time to use them for the December club colorways. My goal is to have all my yarn switched over to bands by mid-January, so if you receive an order with some bands and some tags over the next few weeks, you’ll understand why.

If you have a moment in the midst of this busy holiday season, I would love to hear what I can do to serve you better.

In the meantime, I hope you have a very merry Christmas full of peace and joy and a little crafting time too.