Advent Calendar 2024 Day 14 - Nutcracker

Today's theme is about nutcrackers and I never realised before that those little men in military type uniform ornaments were actually a practical tool for cracking nuts, I just assumed they were something to do with the ballet of The Nutcracker.  

Growing up the nutcracker in our house was a stainless steel hand held tool made of two pieces with ridged semi circle shapes cut into each one and fixed together at one end on a pivot and you would need brute strength to close the handles together and crack the nut.  I rarely managed it but my own nutcracker these days is a kind of thick walled wooden cup with a thick wooden screw that is turned to trap and crack the nut in the cup, so much easier. 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.

Such a pretty design featuring nature on todays package.  I am equally enthralled and interested in the packaging design as I am with the fibre.

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 isn't overly rough but its not gloriously soft either.  It is mostly grey-ish white with black but there are some subtle colours running through it too.

I've added this photo to show that there are actually colours running through this blend.

Advent Calendar 2023 Day 18

The Tradition

Day 18 is called Homemade Advent and the tradition comes from Switzerland.  Who doesn't enjoy getting in the festive spirit by decorating their homes. And what is more enjoyable than decorating it with things made by you, your family and friends?  Cookies are a popular thing to make and share and there are special flavours and shapes and all decorated with piped icing.  The Advent is usually celebrated with store-bought or home made advent calendars, just like in most other parts of the world that celebrate Christmas. 

Some small towns and villages take it one step further and organise an Adventfenster, otherwise known as Advent Windows. A window in 24 buildings (homes, schools or business) are decorated with a homemade Christmas design using black paper and colourful dragon paper that will let light shine through and show the design, so a bit like making a stained glass window of paper.  The designs are kept hidden by closing shutters over the window until the allocated date of reveal.  Every evening at a set time people gather outside the relevant house for that day and watch the shutters be opened to reveal the window design for that day. Music is played or a Christmas carol is sung and often cookies and a hot drink are offered too.  The windows will stay lit until at least Christmas eve and often for the last night, a tour is made of all of the previously revealed windows before gathering outside of the last one for the final reveal.

The Fibre

The actual fibre content is 50% Eider (White), 50% Wool blend (Neptune, a mixed wool space dyed blend using colours yellow, orange, sage green, blue, purple).  This is an Eider and wool blend.  This has got some lovely earthy tones in it.  Eider is a semi-lustrous and slightly bulky fibre and it is the white you can see in the blend. It has a nice rustic feel to it and whilst you can spin it fine if you want to it really does play best when you give it a nice bulky light spin with a lot of loft.  It helps trap all of the air in and so the bulkier the spin, the warmer your final garment is going to be.  The colour is brought by one of our space-dyed blends and you can see how the colour changes throughout the blend and that is lovely. That means that no two blends are going to be the same and it also means that every time you spin it and work with it you can get a different colour variation.  The eider really does pull this together nicely, not too bold, not too bright but lovely and rustic.

My Thoughts

The colour of this one does not get me excited at all, very dull and boring despite there being many colours within it and it's not soft, it's definitely one of the hardwearing wools that would be great for hats/scarves/gloves.  The camera on my phone captured most of the colours at the time but I think my proper Canon camera has done a better job.  Ooh, if only they had chosen to base the colours and tradition more on the Adventfenster, which they didn't actually mention in their description of the tradition, I found that information myself when trying to find out more from the internet.

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 for this one.  

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.