The Tradition
Day 24 is called Christmas Crackers and the tradition comes from the United Kingdom. A Christmas staple for us that were invented in 1847 by Tom Smith when sales of his bonbons, a small chocolate confection filled with liqueur or other sweet alcoholic ingredients and sold wrapped in brightly coloured foil, slumped and he tried ways to get people to buying them again. He first tried inserting love messages inside of the foil wrapping, much like a fortune cookie. After hearing the crackle of a log on the fire, he was inspired to incorporate the banger and changed the size and design of the wrapping to allow for this. Eventually the chocolate was replaced with a trinket such as a fan, jewellery or other item and later the hat, gifts and varied designs were introduced by his son, Walter Smith.
Christmas Crackers are now used as a table decoration in the UK, Ireland and Commonwealth countries such as Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and more. They are basically a segmented cardboard tube wrapped in bright paper with a gift, paper hat and a joke in the centre section and the look like oversized wrapped sweets. The cracker is pulled from each end by two people, each holding an outer chamber, it will split unevenly with one person holding the centre section with the prize and a slight "bang" when it splits. They come in various sizes and various price points depending on the quality of the gifts inside, from cheap and cheerful sold in boxes of 6 or 12 in supermarkets for an average of £10 to £40 right through to really luxurious crackers sold at places like Fortnum & Mason where you can buy a set of 6 crackers for £5,000 where the prizes are contained in golden envelopes inside the cracker and can be luxurious hampers, elegant china, afternoon tea experiences and such like and obviously have to be claimed afterwards using the enclosed ticket/voucher.
The Fibre
The actual fibre content is 40% Merino (Pearl), 45% Sari Silk (Lagoon, Orb & Punch), 15% Cashmere. This blend has Merino, Cashmere and Sari Silk in it and it has a lot of colours. Christmas Crackers have always been bright, they weren't dull, ever, they were always meant to be bright and beautiful, just like this blend. It's so so soft, that will be the Merino and the Cashmere, because we haven't featured Cashmere yet in this box and we have to put it in somewhere, The Sari Silk brings all these streaks of colour and if you've ever fought over the colour of Christmas Crackers with your siblings you'll know the excitement of getting the shade you want. This is not a spin for the feint of heart, it requires concentration because as you draft it out the cashmere is going to want to zoom ahead and the Sari Silk is going to try to hold it all together and give you a really textured spin.
My Thoughts
OMG this is ugly. This is my reaction to this one. I really do not like this one! Some people have spun this one up already and I still don't like it and others are like me and will either dye it or tear it up into different colours and use it in other blends. For me, this one will either be split up by colour and used in my own blends or I may do a similar thing to what I did with the "Stonewall" braid. This one is so different to how the camera on my phone captured the colours at the time, which looks more blue than it is but thankfully my Canon camera has come through and got it captured perfectly.
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 were initially incorrect as they only added up to 85% but we got there in the end.
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.
