Baa Baa Black, White, Brown and Grey Sheep

Shetland Fun

It has been a fun fibre filled weekend! Today I had the great pleasure to visit Derwent Shetlands. I was able to pick out some fantastic, soft, crimpy fleeces with some of the previous owners in attendance.

Obviously with my problems resisting fibre (or chocolate) related temptation, I could not return home empty handed - well that would have been just rude! Unlike Baa Baa Black sheep in the nursery rhyme, I did not come home with 3 bags full, only 1 and a half bags full.

Sue from Derwent Shetlands was very helpful and passionate about her gorgeous flock. I am really looking forward to washing this little lot up, and combing those fantastically crimpy locks to make some fine laceweight from each coloured fleece to make into a large naturally multi-coloured shawl. That should keep me out of trouble for a while!

I may even do some comparisons between combing and carding these fibres (which are between 3-4 inches in length) I will keep you updated with my experimentation / progress over the summer.

Also, since the sun did decide to shine this weekend, I have started to take pretty photographs of some of the fibre blends for the etsy shop, which will (I hope) be opening on 25th July.

Steely Yak, a 50:50 blend of yak and silk that when spun up looks like steel (I think anyway)

Whitecroft Roses, a well blended mixture of different shades of merino, tussah silk and rose fibre.

One of my all time favourite blends, merino, cashmere and tussah silk. The cashmere feels divine and gives the yarn a warmth and soft halo, whereas the silk gives a strength and an ease of spinning with its longer staple length. I have this in a number of colours, and have loved spinning and knitting this up into some of my favourite shawls - like this one. My take on Boo Knits pattern Cobweb. Using the merino, cashmere, tussah silk blend in duck egg blue.

Sadly the light started to fail before I could get any of my hand blends in front of the camera.

My newest shawl that I pinned out on Saturday evening is Ashputtel by Nim Teasdale. Stupidly I did not weigh the cake of yarn before I cast off. I only used 213m of my 400m, leaving much of the beautiful Fybrespates pure silk 4 ply yarn unused.

This means that the remaining yarn obviously cannot be wasted, so it has already been cast on to be made into part of a two yarn shawl called Dicentra by Rahymah.

Happy Crafting until next time

Carol :-)