July's Fibre Club Letter

About 1pm today I had an e-mail come through that I got really excited about.  Yep, the e-mail from the Fibre Club with the letter giving details of the theme and clues about the colour.

The letter reads:

July 18th is the 100th anniversary of the birth of Nelson Mandela, so we’re going to South Africa for our colour inspiration this month. 

Your fibre has been inspired by the modern-day South African flag. In 1994 apartheid ended, free elections were held, and Nelson Mandela was elected president. A new flag was required, to signal a new beginning for the country. At the time it was the only national flag to use 6 colours in its design, it was described as being a Rainbow Flag for the Rainbow Nation, a term used by Archbishop Desmond Tutu to describe post-apartheid South Africa. 

The current flag contains elements of many of the previous flags of south Africa and was designed to represent all of the people of South Africa. It was originally only an interim flag and a competition was held to design the new flag for the country, however no designs found favour (New Zealand also had a public competition to suggest new flag designs, some of the entries are spectacular!). 

Use of the previous pre-apartheid flag is still causing racial divisions. Those who choose to fly it often use it to signal a desire to return to the previous conditions under apartheid where black people were second-class citizens. 

The design of the new flag contains elements of previous South African flags. The blue band at the bottom and the chilli red at the top are from the old pre-apartheid flag, which itself is based on the British flag, and the Dutch flag. The remaining green, gold and black come from the colours used by the ANC (African National Congress), the political party of Nelson Mandela, and other anti-apartheid political parties. The green shape represents the coming together of both sides of South African politics, and that they are now one nation. 

I can't wait to see what this one will look like, it will be interesting to see when it arrives as the South African flag, below, is very colourful and I don't usually like overly colourful braids of fibre, they scare me a little as I struggle to envisage what they might look like when they are spun.

I am hoping that the gold is represented by sparkly gold strands within the braid as this will give interest and light to what could be quite a dark braid of spinning fibre.