Zwartbles - DK weight yarn

This yarn was meant to be spun to a certain weight for my current W.I.P. The Non-British Sheep Breeds Project and it was going great until I washed it.  It bloomed big time.  What appeared to be spinning and plying to be a yarn that measured about 16wpi, and perfect for my project, puffed up to 11wpi once it was washed and dried.  Some wools will do that and its all to do with the amount of crimp the wool has and this varies from breed to breed, some breeds don't have crimp in the wool, some have a little, some have a lot.  Not all wools are the same and crimp is just one of many factors to take into consideration.  This is one of the reasons why we have so many different breeds of wool producing sheep, all the different factors and possible combinations that affect the wool - crimp, staple length, fibre diameters, soft or scratchy, hardwearing or cuddly, matte or lustrous or something in-between, and many more, and that is just about the wool side of things, never mind about the physical abilities of the sheep that farmer is interested in such as size, how many lambs they can have a one time, how often can they lamb, do they birth easy, good mothering skills, how much meat do they produce, are they prone to footrot or other diseases which will determine the kind of environment that is best for them, can they live on poor quality grazing, can they thrive at low altitudes, high altitudes, flat land, hills, windy areas, wet areas, dry areas.  The mind boggles at the things that have to be taken into consideration.  Anyway, I digress.

Yes, so this yarn that is now no longer destined to be used, or partially used, in my intended project.  I used two bumps of spinning fibre, from two different supplies.  I had a 100g bump that I bought in 2018 from World of Wool and I had a 50g bump that came in mixed breed box called "Viking Varieties" that I bought from Fibre Hut in 2020.  I decided to use the both together and make one "larger than usual" skein of yarn, knit the sample piece and still be left with enough to make something useful with what was left.  I split both lots in half and paired them together for 2 x 75g lots of fibre and pre-drafted them together so as to begin to mix and blend the fibres from the two different sources together and even out any differences in quality, colour, tone etc as there will always be differences, even between sheep from the same flock.

As I had already checked before spinning as to whether or not this was one of the wools that would bloom after spinning, and being armed with this information, I thought I had spun it fine enough to allow for any post-spinning blooming and for the yarn to still be within my target thickness.  It turns out that I was way off in my estimations of the amount that this would bloom.  

This yarn is 11wpi, making it a double-knit weight yarn and it is 147g/438m, which is equivalent to 100g/298m.   I started my spinning on 29th May and finished on 1st June and I know that I am only now blogging about this one today, 22nd June, but I had to know for sure what was happening with this skein before I wrote about it.

Luckily, I had another 100g bump of Zwartbles fibre in my stash that I got from yet another different fibre supplier and so I spun that up, taking even more time and care to get it extra extra fine and, although that one has bounced up a lot as well, it is close enough to my target thickness and so I will be using that one to knit the project piece and I will complete the Zwartbles breed blog post, with all the information of the history of that breeds, once I have knitted the project piece up.

Icelandic - Iceland

The Icelandic sheep belongs to the Northern European Short-Tailed group of sheep and, as the name suggests, come from Iceland.  Introduced by the Vikings between 870 and 930CE when they made settlements in Iceland, with some more added a few years later.  Since then, it has been illegal to import more sheep into Iceland and so this breed has developed in almost total isolation, without any genetic input from any other sheep breeds, making the Icelandic breed one of the world's purest livestock  populations.  They are grown primarily for meat in Iceland and the breed is best known elsewhere for its fleece and there are established successful and distinctive markets for their wool. These sheep provide 25% of the island nation's agricultural revenue. 

The Icelandic is larger than most other breeds in the Northern European Short-Tailed group but it is generally short-legged and stocky, slender and light-boned, and usually horned, although polled and polycerate (many horned) animals can occur.  The face and legs are free of wool. The ewes are highly prolific with the chance of twins being very high and there is a gene that is carried by some ewes called the þoka (Thoka) that can result in the birth of multiple lambs at a time.

Within the breed there is a strain that is called Leadersheep, which carries a hereditary ability or predisposition to be especially intelligent and these sheep play important roles in the flock and can lead other sheep safely over dangerous ground and alert others to hazards like predators and storms.  These sheep are specially identified and bred.  In 2000, the Leadersheep Society of Iceland was founded to conserve them.

Until the 1940s it was the predominant milk producing animal in Iceland.  In the 21st century it is reared principally for meat, which accounts for more than 80% of the total income derived from sheep farming.  In 1978 there were approximately 891,000, or about four sheep for every inhabitant of Iceland.  By 2007, the total number had fallen to about 450,000.  In 2018 numbers fell again to around 432,000.

Icelandic sheep can be found in a whole range of colours, white, tan, brown, grey, black and mixed colours too.  Colour inheritance is similar to that of other sheep but these display more variety and pattern than other breeds and some of the variations are unique to the Icelandic.

Icelandic sheep grow double-coated fleece. The finer undercoat is called þel, in English spelt as thel (the initial letter is a character known as thorn, pronounced with a th sound) and this insulates the animal against the cold.  The outercoat is called tog and this gives protection from windy, wet and cold weather and is not as coarse as other outercoats in similar breeds, in fact, it can be a bit more like mohair and sometimes more of a silky quality.  They have the ability to naturally shed their fleece but most often they are sheared.

Fleece weights are generally 1.8kg-3.2kg and aren't very greasy and have yields in a wide range from 50%-90%, with the highest figure being where both types of fibre have been used. The outer coat can be 28-40 microns and 4-18 inches in length (10cm-45.7cm).The inner coat has a diameter of 19-22 microns and 2-4 inches in length (5c-10cm).  The two types may be used separately or spun into a single yarn.  The coats are easiest to separate after they have been washed by catching the sheared end of the lock on a carder or comb and just tug on the long outercoat fibres. If you want to spin both coats together it may be easier to card the fibres, rather than comb them which will separate the fibre types, and be really careful when drafting to ensure both coats are taken up at the same rate.  Maybe the outercoat could be spun worsted and the undercoat spun woollen and then ply them together?  There are no hard fast rules in spinning, just make sure the singles are spun in the same direction though.

Commercially prepared Icelandic spinning fibre will usually contain both coats, as will commercially spun yarn.  The undercoat is an obvious choice for knitting and crocheting, while the outercoat lends itself easily to weaving, needle point and other stitchery or maybe making a knitted or crochet tote bag.

If you plan to dye the wool, whites will produce clear colours, overdyeing natural colours results in interestingly subtle shades. 

I bought this breed in as part of a breed exploration box featuring four "Viking breeds" in February 2020.  50g of commercially prepared fibre for spinning.

I spun both singles and plied them together on 29th May 2025 and made a 16wpi yarn, light fingering weight, that was 53g/183m.  This one is softer than I expected too with a very slight crispness to it.

I test knit this up using the design that I had originally created that was initial capitals and lowercase but I couldn't read the lettering so I ended up undoing it and re-knitting it after I changed all of the designs to just uppercase letters, like I did for the British Sheep Breeds Project. I also knit a sample square for my scrapbook and I will be doing that for all of the breeds.

Hopefully you can see that it says Icelandic with Iceland underneath

Norsk Spælsau (modern) - Norway

The Norsk Spælsau, also known as Spælsau, are a Norwegian breed of sheep that have been developed during the 19th century by cross breeding the original small Gammelnorsk Sau (The Old Norwegian Sheep) with Icelandic, Faroese and Finnsheep breeds to produce a much larger sheep that produces much more meat.

In 1912, the state bought 60 purebred Old Norwegian Sheep from isolated mountain flocks and flocks on a couple of islands and shared them equally between two breeding stations.  There, the breeding was planned and managed and the sheep were better fed which resulted in a significant increase in their weight.  To increase their size further, in 1920, Faroese rams were crossed with them and then later on Icelandic rams were also used.  There were also sporadic crossings with Finn, Leicester, Blackface and Gotland but these had little influence on the size of the lambs produced.

Raised primarily for meat and wool production, it also produces good quality milk.   Individuals are usually polled with just 10% occurrence of horns in either sex. The adult ewes reach a weight of 65kg-70kg, about double the size of The Old Norwegian.  The fleece that is produces is also about twice the weight of the original breed at 2kg-3kg.  It still produces a double coated fleece, like the old breed, but with all the cross breeding the quality of the wool has declined significantly.  The length of the two coats are no longer about the same length as they were with the old breed, the outercoat is now much longer and can be twice as long as the undercoat or even longer and is really coarse so the fibre diameters are recorded separately for the different coats.  The undercoat is about 31.5 microns whilst the outercoat is 57.1 microns.  It protects the sheep from the weather and can be spun tightly for weaving but is not good for spinning into yarn for knitting.  The undercoat is still quite fine and soft.  Most of the new Spælsau are white, although their ancestors black, grey and brown colours still appear.

I bought this breed in as 100g of pre-washed fleece in May 2022 but I decided to re-wash this as a precaution, even though it was from a completely different source to where I have bought lots of fleece sample amounts from that weren't as clean as I would expect.  After washing I was left with 91g of clean fleece.

There is a lot of really coarse white guard hairs in this fleece.  I combed it in January 2024 anyway in the hope that I will  have enough of the soft black wool for my project.

It gave me just 31g of hand combed medium soft wool top with just a little bit of the hair left in for texture.  I have been looking for more of these fleece on and off since I prepared this one but I have never found any except for one person who wants over £70 for a small bit of fleece and that doesn't include the sales tax or international delivery, which pushes the cost to well over £100 and is a ridiculous price.   This small amount of fibre might not make enough yarn for my project so my only option is to spin it as fine as I can and hope for the best.

I spun both singles and plied them on 28th May 2025 and managed to make a 16wpi yarn, light fingering weight, of about 30g/102m.  It is softer than I expected and is really nice.

Over the past month or so I had created and printed out all of the charted designs for all of the breeds that I have acquired for this project.  I knit the first piece for my project, and there was enough yarn for the piece with a small amount of leftovers, but I couldn't read the lettering.  So not being sure if it was because its an almost black yarn or because I didn't use all uppercase lettering for this project, I put it aside and made the next project piece using the yarn I spun from the next breed.  I couldn't read the lettering on that one either, and that is a white wool, so I took the decision to undo both pieces of knitting and re-do all of the designs for the entire project again but in all uppercase, just like the first breed project that I did a few years ago.

Somehow, most of the designs work out a few less rows and a few less stitches now that they are all in uppercase and yet it is the same font and same size.  I re-knit this one and this time was left with enough yarn to knit a little sample square for a scrapbook that I am doing for my spinning.  By the time I had finished there was such a small amount left that it wasn't worth keeping it.

It's not very clear in the photo but it does say Norsk Spælsau on the top line and Norway underneath it.

Spinning some John Arbon fibre - Wooden Bobbin - multicoloured version

As I mentioned in my last post I had bought some fibre in May 2022 from another spinner that was de-stashing.  

This is an interesting blend, both in in terms of fibre content and colour combination.  The fibre content is 40% Corriedale, 30% Merino, 10% Exmoor Blueface, 10% Zwartbles, 5% Bluefaced Leicester, 5% Wensleydale.

Having spun up the first braid and whilst being happy with that yarn I decided that I would spin up the second braid in a completely different way.  There are a few options available to me. 1) Pull apart the colours and create some kind of gradient yarn but I can't see this working as I can probably isolate the green and the white but the rest, nope. 2) Fibonacci Spin, this has potential as I can isolate the green and the white and then the rest would probably have to be blended together to make one browny-grey shade.  I don't think I want to make a Fibonacci Yarn. 3) Pull off chunks and spin-over-the-fold to keep the colours together and then I have two options: a) spin two singles like this and ply them together for a barber-pole yarn or b) spin one long single and then chain ply to make a 3 ply yarn but pay attention to the colours coming through and adjust the loop lengths each time to try and keep the colours clean and together. 

For this braid I decided to spin it over-the-fold, as per option 3, but I didn't initially decide on which option to take for the plying so I halved the braid in length to give me options and started with the first smaller length.  Once I saw how it spun up I was able to make a decision on the next step.

I liked the way the colours were isolating and into various shades of the brown so I decided to continue and spin one long single and then chain ply it.  I spun it quite finely, like the first yarn, but as I was making a chain ply 3ply this yarn was going to spin up thicker than the first yarn.  I had to adjust the length of the loops when plying to accommodate the colour changes as best as I could.

The finished yarn is double knit weight, 106g/262m, and it's nice and soft.  It has turned out really nice and interesting with lots of colour blocks but there are also some sections that are a bit barber-poled but this couldn't be helped and I don't mind it.  I am glad I went this way and not with the option of spinning it over-the-fold and then making a 2ply barber-pole yarn.

Spinning some John Arbon fibre - Wooden Bobbin - blended version

I bought some fibre in May 2022 from another spinner that was de-stashing.  She had got this fibre from an Open Mill Weekend event held in June 2020 by John Arbon Textiles who are based in South Molton, Devon, which is about 180 miles away from where I live.  They hold this event every year and they also sell online, I've bought some fibres directly from them, most are still waiting to be spun but I have spun a couple of them.

This is an interesting blend, both in in terms of fibre content and colour combination.  The fibre content is 40% Corriedale, 30% Merino, 10% Exmoor Blueface, 10% Zwartbles, 5% Bluefaced Leicester, 5% Wensleydale.

Before I started spinning I had an idea that I may want to spin each of the braids in a different way, handle the colours in a different way for each yarn, but I wanted to see how the first one turned out before I made a final decision on making two different yarns or making them both in the same way and having a larger amount of yarn that could be used on one project.

For this first one I undone one of the braids and put the two ends together and run it through my hands to find the middle and broke the length at this point to make two shorter lengths. I pre-drafted each of these shorter lengths before spinning and I tried to make sure that a little bit of each colour was pulled into the draft each time I pulled on it.  I forgot to take photos of my basket full of pre-drafted fluff but it was a kind of mousey grey-brown with a hint of green, the colours have blended together and the white has completely disappeared.

I spun each single from the end of the pre-drafted fibre using the short forward draw/short backward draw method, spinning quite finely, and I plied the two singles together. A simple and straight forward spin.

The finished yarn is sport weight, 106g/410m, and it's nice and soft.  It has turned out quite a drab mousey-brown-grey colour, lifted by the tinges of green.  I do like it but I have decided that I want to try and make something a little more exciting, colourful, different with the second braid of fibre.  I have a few options and I need to think about which way to go with the second braid.

A Mermaids Tale - my own blend

I had a crazy idea, quite some time ago now, to spin a yarn that was lime green and turquoise with sparkles and texture going on and to use some of the left over bits and pieces of Twilley's Goldfingering in the yarn if I could as one time I accidentally miscounted and cut far too many lengths for the fringing on one of the shawls and I don't want to just throw it away.  It just so happens to be turquoise.  I get lots of left overs of Goldfingering that can't really be used to make anything much so if I can incorporate it into my own handspun yarns that means less wastage and less going into landfill.

I already had a braid of merino fibre that was mostly lime green with a bit of turquoise but I bought a braid of turquoise merino fibre from the Wool Show that I went to just before Christmas.  I also had some Trilobal Nylon in Colbalt and Tussah Silk in a lime green that I bought in years ago and then some Tussah Silk Noil in pale blue and Hemp in Tropical Green that I dyed myself a couple of years ago.  I put these 6 fibres through my blending hackle in 4 equal lots, one lot for each ply of a skein and I am making 2 skeins.  I can't put the lengths of Twilley's Goldfingering through the blending hackle, they will have to be added in as I go.  My fingers did turn blue though and this was to do with excess dye in the turquoise merino braid, which was also ever so slightly felted in parts, not enough to throw anything away, it did all come loose eventually, but it was harder work putting it on the blending hackle than it should have been.  I didn't have any problems with the other braid of merino, that just pulled apart as easily as would be expected.

The blue goldfingering was already cut into lengths and there was 15g of that.  I then cut the lime green goldfingering into the same sized lengths but because there was only 6g of it I didn't get many pieces so what I did with the lime green was to then cut those lengths in half to give me more instances of when the green will be in the yarn.  I split the number of the lengths of each colour into two, for each skein, and then split them again into two for each ply.  I then put them into pairs of one blue and one green and then when I ran out of green I made pairs of the remaining blue.  In total I had 30 pairs

I worked out that the total length of Goldfingering for each ply was around 60ft.  The first fibre that I dizzed off the blending hackle measured roughly 30ft in length and the ones I dizzed off after that didn't quite measure that length but all I had to do was to work my way along pulling it out a bit thinner to get it up to 30ft in length.  The reason for doing this is that I can then break off lengths that match the longer blue pieces and I can add in the two lengths of Goldfingering, whatever colours they may be, randomly whilst spinning the woolly blend and at least they will then be distributed throughout the yarn as evenly as possible whilst still being random, if that makes sense. 

I did have a little trouble getting the ends of the Goldfingering to embed themselves into the fibres so that they wouldn't stick out or unravel but there were a few times that I had to go back and add a bit of fibre specifically over the join to try to help keep the ends in place.  Plying has helped this even more but I have noticed that there are still one or two that are sticking out.  I will leave them alone until I actually use the finished yarn to make something and assess what is happening with the those ends at the time of making something, because knitting or crocheting may bury any stray ends in anyway.  It was a bit tricky and a little time consuming but I love the finished yarn.

My fingers kept turning blue throughout the spinning process due to the excess dye having not been washed out thoroughly enough from the braid of blue Merino that I purchased.  When I soaked the finished yarn the water turned blue because of this and the finished skeins are now not as bright turquoise as I had hoped for but they are still nice.  I was initially a little disappointed but these things happen sometimes, especially with blues and reds, you can rinse and rinse and rinse and think its all done but then someone with a different water supply with different salts and minerals in the water and a different pH level comes along and puts your fibre or yarn in their water and it can start leaking dye again.  The vendors at the Wool Show had come from all over the UK so this is a possible reason, although it still shouldn't have gotten all over my hands.

So, the finished yarn?  It is Double Knit weight with one skein being 119g/313m and the other being 114g/270m.  The final fibre contents, rounded to the nearest half a percent is 79.5% Merino, 6.5% Metallised Polyester, 3.5% Trilobal Nylon, 3.5% Tussah Silk, 3.5% Hemp, 2% Tussah Silk Noil, 1.5% Viscose.

Advent Calendar 2024 Day 25 - Merry Christmas Yoo-hoo

Well, I am one of those people in the world who have never seen Frozen.  I know of that infernal, annoying song, Let it Go, that an adult neighbour caterwauled along to at the top of her awful shrieking voice over and over and over for hours at a time for almost a month none stop before she moved onto another song and ruined that too.  Thankfully she was evicted almost 6 years ago, thankfully a year before Covid-19 lockdown, could you imagine being forced to stay inside with a neighbour like that for that amount of time?   

As soon as I started reading the description out to my family my husband started laughing because, apparently, he does know who this character is and he is immensely funny.  I had to find a clip online and watch to find out who he is and I like him.

All the information can be found in the first photo and if you click on the photo you can zoom in if you need to.

There isn't a string of lights in the clip that features Oaken and obviously they can't use images from the film due to Copyright Law so this is a fitting pattern to use.

I have undone the tightly wrapped little bundles and made them into braids to take any pressures off the fibres and also so that I can see the colours properly and feel the texture too.  This one is interesting.  Yes, there are lots of colours and there are other times when there are the same amount of colours in other blends and I go "eesh, no thank you" but these colours work together for me, although I think I might pair this with 50g of the dark teal Shetland that I just got from the Wool Show last week.