The Tradition
Day 11 is called Black Cake and the tradition comes from Barbados. A lot like our traditional Christmas cake but made with browning, which is a caramel-like syrup made from sugar and water which darkens as the cake is cooked, giving it a deeper colour and a distinctive flavour. While our cakes can be soaked in whiskey, brandy or rum, the Black Cake is traditionally soaked in rum.
The Fibre
The actual fibre content is 40% Jacob (Black), 40% Shetland (Woodpecker and Tropic), 20% Bio-nylon (Bluebell). We have some beautiful blues because you can't think of Barbados without the blues but we also have some natural blacks in here. The natural black is brought to us by the Jacob and Shetland. Jacob has patches of black and white with grey in between. Shetlands come in a massive variety of colours but they do come in black so you get these lovely darker shades. We've popped some bio-nylon in which means that it has this lovely blue shade running through it and the great thing about the bio-nylon is it acts just like a wool, you don't get any squeak or sheen or anything like that, it looks matte, like a Merino blend would. This isn't a super soft blend, its got a nice handle to it which means it will behave itself when you're spinning, it won't try and run away with you. This is a really really versatile blend and it does have nice bit of bulk and squish to it so just like Barbados black cake I reckon this blend is going to be a bit moreish as well.
My Thoughts
I love the colour of this one. It's not as soft as I would expect from Jacob and Shetland and I know that bio-nylon is not a harsh fibre either, its really soft. I have found this though, that Jacob, especially, from suppliers is never as soft as what I get from raw fleece, and I think it might be because I comb all of the fleece that I get in and so all the coarsest fibres are removed to leave just the nicest, finest, softest fibres whilst fleece prepared for spinning by mills probably leave a lot of that in as they will want to get as much from a fleece as possible but my preference is always quality over quantity. With the bio-nylon in this one the yarn should be quite hardwearing. This one is so different to how the camera on my phone captured the colours and at the time I couldn't get it to show all the variation of colours and it came out quite bright and vivid but in reality it is much duller and it is even a little darker than what my Canon camera captured.
The information that has been printed on the bags is not always correct and there are no fibre content percentages, these have been provided on the chat boards. The percentages that they gave on the chat boards seem to be correct.
What I have done with my bags is to write the actual fibre content on the bag using a gold gel pen in the gap immediately below the printed details, pretty much the only thing that will show up on black are the metallic gel pens. This is why I have not taken "new" photos of the bags.
No comments:
Post a Comment