The Custom Order is Finished

So I've finished my first custom order for a bride and she is very happy with it.  I can now send this off to the USA and hope that it does actually match her wedding colours when its in the flesh as it were.

My first custom order for a bride

I am so excited by this but it is also really nerve wracking.  I've been asked if I can recreate one of the shawls in my shop, pictured below, but in a golden yellow colour for her wedding in October. 

I do have some yarn in the right thickness and the exact colour that she wants but I don't have enough so I looked to buy more online only to discover that they don't make this colour anymore and I can't find any of that shade available to buy online nor can I find an alternative yarn to use either that is the same colour, the same thickness and around the right price to fit within her budget.  Drat!  OK, let's have a go at dying some of my own hand spun white that would be perfect for the job and fits the budget.

Voila!  Think I've hit the mark pretty good looking at the colour swatch she sent me, and that is with me mixing the Greener Shades dyes to achieve just the right shade, keeping in mind that the chemicals in the water and the wool itself can alter the final shade.  The customer is happy and has placed the order.  I now have to make this quickly as it has to go all the way to the USA for mid-September as she needs it for the final fitting etc.

Ultramarine Wool Shawl - Design S122

Following on the tail of the black and magenta shawl that I just made I am straight into the next one of the same design but using an ultramarine blue yarn that I spun back in 2014 from a Hampshire Down x Dorset Horn cross breed.

I started knitting on 7th February and finished on 10th February 2017, taking a little longer this time as I had hospital appointments to attend.

I got to play yarn chicken with this one but luckily there was enough after all with just a few grams of yarn left over.  I wasn't panicking at all, honest!

Hampshire Down X Dorset Horn Part II

Following on from my earlier post, this is what I did with the rest of the fleece.

Type II

Longer, straighter locks and free of any black fibres.

This was so nice and clean and really white that I left it white.  I started out with 615g of this and by the time I had combed it and spun it I made 2 skeins of Double-Knit weight yarn both weighing 134g each, one with 361m and the other with 342m.  That's only a yield of 43.5% but look how nice the yarn is.

Type III

This was the longer, dark section of the fleece, containing a mixture of black short kemp like fibres and longer finer black fibres too.  I split this further still into a piles of the cleanest, whitest of this part of the fleece and piles of the dirtiest (having the most dark fibres), darkest parts of the fleece.  These will make two different yarns.

I firstly tackled the darkest parts of this fleece and started with 155g, ending with a Double-Knit Weight 2ply yarn that was 68g/240m.  A yield of 43.8%.

I dyed this yarn with ColourCraft All in One Dye in shade Ultramarine, and then used the left over dye on the Part I of the fleece, detailed in a previous post.

The lightest parts of this section weighed 315g and by the time I combed it I was left with 135g of combed top, a yield of just 42.8%.  I spun this into a Sport Weight 2ply yarn of 135g/437m and dyed it with ColourCraft All in One Dye in shade Light Brown but I call it Toffee Apple.

That is all of the yarns made from this fleece.  I hope you like them all.

Hampshire Down X Dorset Horn Part I

Every now and then you come across a fleece that is a cross-breed, in this case Hampshire Down crossed with a Dorset Horn.  The Hampshire Down is quite a dominant breed of sheep in terms of numbers, around the world.  The Dorset Horn, however, is a Conservation Breed.

This one I got for the princely sum of 99p plus postage, which was significantly higher due to weight and bulk.  Yeah, go on, laugh and ask "What's wrong with it?".  I thought that when my bid wasn't challenged only to be surprised when it arrived at how relatively nice it felt for my bargain price, although worried about that yellowish line half-way up the staple.  This was from Ebay and came from Chandlers Ford, Eastleigh, Hampshire and was sheared in June 2012.

It arrived at 2kg and after a quick sort and washing weighed 1.35kg.  I discovered that this fleece had 3 distinct qualities to it and separated the fleece based on these qualities.

Type I

Short curly locks, very much like Shetland, but with a lot of short black kemp like fibres in it.

These are pretty much combing out but those that don't fall out can probably be picked out later.  This part of the fleece weighed 265g and after combing and spinning I made a Double-Knit 2ply yarn of 114g/390m.  This was a yield of 43%.

It turned out that I couldn't pick all the black hairs out and so I wasn't happy with this and decided to dye it.  For some strange reason I picked the Lime Green shade ColourCraft All in One Dye.  I was initially horrified at the colour as I lifted the yarn out of the dye pot but then as the excess water ran out it lightened to quite a nice pastel shade of Lime, which made me quite happy.  That happiness didn't last though.  As I added the skein to some plain warm rinse water, most of the dye went for a swim in the water and I was left with a very sickly yellowish colour.  It couldn't be left in that state but I wasn't sure what colour to over-dye it with.  Whilst I deliberated that, I dyed the next lot of fleece Ultramarine Blue and then decided that I would add this skein to the dye that was left over from that dye pot.  Hey presto, a beautiful colour I think you would agree.