The Tradition
Day 21 is called Roller Blades and the tradition comes from Venezuela, the capital Caracas to be exact. It is thought that because Venezuela is a melting pot of migrants, including German and other European settlers along with Portuguese, Spanish, Brazilian and other South American countries and, of course, Caribbean, that for some the traditional sledding and ice-skating at Christmas time was replaced with roller skating as there is no ice in the southern hemisphere country where temperatures are usually in the high thirties in December. Skating to Mass became so popular that the Government closes the streets until 8am in the morning so that families can skate safely together and this happens on the 9 days in the run up to Christmas with a Mass being held in the churches at 5am or 6am, the Mass of the Cockerel, which was the tradition from Spain on Day 14, so this is another influence from the migrants into Venezuela. After the morning Mass families gather in the street or each others homes to share food, play music and dance.
The Fibre
The actual fibre content is 80% Superfine Merino (Damson, Violet, Cerulean), 20% Suri Alpaca (White). In Venezuela some people skate to mass so between the 16th and 24th it's not uncommon for roads to be closed so that people can skate about in their roller blades and basically enjoy being outside during this time. This has got Superfine Merino and Suri Alpaca so it's going to be very soft and the last time I saw colours like this was probably on a pair of roller blades. A colour theme that is quite popular with skating. All of the colours come from the Superfine Merino and Superfine is 18.5 microns which means it has a comfort factor of 99% and I would challenge anybody to find an itch in this. The Suri Alpaca is the white that you see and because of the locks it has got a little bit more drape to it and there' not a huge amount in here but there is enough just to add a little bit of colour and also a little bit of texture to the blend as well. In terms of spinning this will spin very quickly and it will make a very fine laceweight but if you do spin it to laceweight there is a chance you will loose all these colours so I'd probably suggest a slightly heavier yarn so you don't get everything mixed and muddied up.
My Thoughts
This is very nice and my kind of colours. It's fine and soft and I am thinking that it there are not enough colours in this one to make an interesting Fibonacci spin so I might go with an over the fold spin to have splodges of colour or I may just draft it out and spin it and mix up the colours a little bit more. I may work some other blue and purple Merino with this one to bulk it out a bit, I just don't know at this stage. The camera on my phone struggled to capture all of the colours at the time and the colours came out too vivid but my proper Canon camera has done a great job.
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.
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