Advent Calendar 2023 Day 11

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.

The big experiment is finished - almost!

I have taken a deep breath and just got on and finished up something that I started months and months and months ago.  I got sick of looking at it, sat there in a bag staring at me, pulling faces at me.  That's what it felt like at times.  It was one of those projects that I wanted to do but then couldn't bring myself to finish what I started.  Lockdown hasn't helped at all.

So, I finished all six skeins as intended earlier this year.   Now that I have finished it I do actually like the way it looks as it is but I still also want to know what it will look like if I over-dye it blue so I will keep 3 skeins as it is and dye 3 skeins blue.

I had about 85g of spun single left over from the lightest grey part of this project at the end so what I decided to do was to put together some odds and ends and spin another single and ply them together and then add the finished skein to the dye pot when I dye the other 3 skeins blue.  The beige-yellow part that I used in this blend is from the same fleece as the rest of the Jacob and is what I had tried to dye using Marigolds in this post here.  The other bits and pieces were all from a lap waste bag.  It all went through my blending hackle to produce the bump of fluff in the biggest photo below.

I spun it up and plied with the left over and then there was still a small amount of leftover, which I just plied back on itself to produce a tiny little skein of pure Jacob wool.  In the photo of the two bobbins, the darker one is the new blend I just created and the light one is the last of the Jacob.

The new large skein works out at approx 64.5% Jacob wool, 15% Corriedale wool, 11% Merino wool, 7% Icelandic wool, 2.5% Mulberry Silk.  The small skein is 100% Jacob wool.

Another new design - W529

This is another new design, its a simple granny square shawl, nothing spectacular about the design but simplistic enough to show off slightly more "fancy" yarns without the pattern being totally obscured and overshadowed by the yarn or the fancifulness of the yarn getting buried by too much pattern.  I see, all too often, photos of knitted or crochet lace in complex designs and made with a really colourful patterned yarn and its just too much for the eyes to take in.  You need to think about balance and choose one or the other, what do you want to show off, the complex design or the complex colours of the yarn, putting both together in one project does not work in my opinion.

This is made with some Jacob wool that I spun way back in 2013 and you can read all about how I made the yarn by scrolling to the bottom of the blog post linked here, its the last yarn made from that particular fleece. I used both skeins to make this shawl.

In the final product photos, the colourful parts look almost luminous but as you can see from the last set of photos, it really isn't at all.

Design SB188 in natural black Jacob wool

One more shawl of this design before I move onto something else.  This time I have chosen some natural black Jacob wool that I spun 4 years ago.  The fleece for it was sourced locally and you can read more about that here.  

This time, when I finished the shawl I had a lot of yarn remaining and so instead of finishing and then making a brooch, I lay it to one side, made the brooch and then came back to the shawl and added extra rows of pattern to the bottom edge so as to be able to use up all of this lovely handspun yarn.  This means that this shawl is slightly longer than the ones made in acrylic yarn.  Also, because this shawl is made from pure wool which has been processed carefully by hand for spinning and then spun by me it does mean that this shawl will be a lot more expensive than those made from acrylic yarn as there is an element of labour charges involved, as well as the price of the buying the fleece.

I use long strong cable ties to help form scallops when I am blocking any shawl that has a scalloped bottom edge.  Obviously I still need to use pins to keep it in shape and place but the cable ties mean I can use less pins and help create a smoother line.

A Big Experiment

Back on 6th June I announced on my Facebook page I was combing some Jacob fleece in preparation for a large spinning job. The first part of the fleece was combed back in March and was the darker grey fibres of the fleece and I got 183g of combed fibre from it. The second part of the fleece was combed at the beginning of June and was the lighter grey fibres of the fleece but I selected the darkest of these fibres in the first instance so that I could make the bag of darker fibres up to a nice round 200g and the lighter grey fibres produced about 320g of combed fibre. Keep reading to discover my reasoning for doing that.

I've made no secret of my dislike of a couple of the fibre braids from the monthly fibre club that I was once part of. I did ask other members of the group if anyone wanted to buy the braids from me on the sale/trade page but despite several of them saying previously that they loved the colours of these braids there were no takers for my braids of fibre. I brushed it off the cold shoulder and I came up with the idea of spinning it in a similar way to a yarn I spun way back in 2013, the last skein in this post but this time using grey rather than black.

Now, the reason for me wanting to make the dark fibre bag up too 200g is because if I add that amount to one of the 100g of braids it makes 300g and then I have about 320g in the other bag with the light grey fibres and these two amounts will make two separate plies to then be spun together. So this would give me a total of around 600g broken down into 6 skeins of approximately 100g each with a fibre content of approximately 66% Jacob wool/34% Merino wool.

I split the braid up into 6 equal parts and then the dark grey into 6 equal parts and put each set into their own little bag. I then took one bag and broke the two lots of fibres down even further into the same number of little bumps, although the dark grey bumps were twice the weight of the rainbow bumps. I then spun it finely one part rainbow followed by two parts grey, rainbow, grey, rainbow, grey, rainbow... and this made one ply.

The light grey I didn't split up or weigh out into 6 parts as this will make up the other ply and I will just use it with each 100g of the grey/rainbow mix until it runs out and it makes for a very interesting barber-pole effect even in just the grey on grey sections.

I've not finished this spinning project yet but I have spun two skeins so far, each approx 100g, but the heat got the better of me last week and I felt it was too hot to be handling fluffy fibres that could felt in my hot hands.

I have another 4 skeins worth to spin and I am surprised by how much I like it. Its not nowhere near as garish as I thought it would be when I planned the project with the view of over-dying it blue, in the knowledge of how the blue dye would react with the original colours so the grey Jacob would become mottled and the yellows would become green, the pinks would become purple etc etc just like mixing paint. I need to do a bit of a test knit to see how it knits up before I decide whether to over-dye it blue or not. It may be that I decide to over-dye half of it blue and leave half as it is as this would supply me with enough yarn in each colourway to make something substantial.

Combing the darker Jacob fibres

I've combed some of the darker fibres from the same Jacob fleece that I've been working on lately.  I've made a couple of yarns already from the lighter coloured fibres that I dyed using Logwood and Carrot tops dyes.  I'm trying to reduce the space that my fleece takes up so that I have more space for yarns and fibre.  I'm not sure its working that well so far but it has to reduce the overall bulk and weight eventually.

Anyway, I'm waffling so I grabbed a bag of 372g of fleece and got combing it.  At the end I was left with 180g of hand combed top ready to spin or blend with other stuff.  I'm not 100% sure what I will do with this yet.  It may well become a gradient but not necessarily left as a natural coloured gradient, I may decide to dye it and, because of the coloured fibres, it should produce a gradient in whatever shade I decide to dye it.  There are also other options too like blending the lightest and darkest nests together to even out the colours to produce a more even coloured grey yarn.  I will most likely go with the dyed gradient option.

Spinning the yellow Jacob Wool

I don't know why I have sat on this blended fibre for a couple of weeks before spinning it but I've spun it now and I'm really happy with the results.  The final fibre content figures are: 48% Jacob Wool, 41% Merino Wool, 6% Hemp, 4% Trilobal Nylon, 1% Angelina.  Adding the Merino has given it a much softer hand and its is gorgeously soft and shimmery, although my photography is struggling to show off the shimmers and glitters.  There is 147g of double knit weight yarn here but I've yet to decide what it will end up being knitted into exactly.

Blending again

A few days ago I combed some yellow Jacob wool and today I have finally made my choices using colour choice tools to help me make that decision and blended some extra bits and pieces into it.

Main photo is Jacob Wool with sunshine yellow merino, a blend of four greens merino and purple angelina underneath and then Elderberry merino, Saffron hemp and Caiprinha trilobal nylon (firestar) down the right hand side.

 I've not worked out the final fibre content just yet, would be pretty high on the Jacob and Merino though.  I didn't use all of the trilobal nylon in this as a little goes a long way and that is what is giving the fibre the shimmery glow.

Spinning up Slate & Chalk

Last week I had a bit of fun with the blending hackle and I have finally finished spinning it.  Its pretty, not as pretty and sparkly as I'd hoped for but there is colour in there amongst all that dark slate grey-blue.

The final fibre content is 65% Jacob Wool, 19% Merino Wool, 10% Corriedale Wool, 3.5% Other Fibres, 1.5% Silk, 1% Trilobal Nylon.  Its a Double Knit weight and there is 161g/371m of it and its lovely, not overly soft like Merino but its not really scratchy either.  I've not yet decided what to make with this but it won't take me long to decide.

Playing with the blending hackle again

Back in September I dyed some Jacob fleece using Logwood and the result was a mix of dark blue and dark grey.  I've combed that wool over the past couple of days and ended up with blue fingers and a lot of mess.  I discovered that an amount of it had felted or partially felted in the dye pot and so some of it was unusable but I still managed to get 111g of combed fibre out of the 247g.  It was a mixture of dark blue and dark grey, and me being me, I totally forgot to take photos of the combed fibre before I put it through the blending hackle today.  I did think about leaving as it was and spinning a plain-ish yarn but it really needed something, at the very least the grey and blue needed blending together again to even it out.

Using a colour grid tool that I have to help identify what colours work together I had a rummage through my "ingredients box" and picked out a number of small bumps of fibre that I felt would work with my Jacob and its mostly Corriedale and Merino fibres, I have no idea what the fibre is in the top middle.

Whilst I was loading up the blending hackle I had a couple of moments of doubt about my colour selections but once I dizzed it off the hackle and looked at it my doubts disappeared and I came up with a great name for it, Slate & Chalk, given that its a kind of slate grey, I used chalk in the dye-pot and the other colours look a like chalk on a blackboard .

Jacobs Gold

I am thrilled with how this has turned out and I am having trouble capturing the sparkles and shimmers that this yarn contains.  It positively glows in real life due to the Angelina and the Firestar (Trilobal Nylon) content in this yarn.

I blended it just a few days ago and now it is finished, soaked, snapped and dried.  I have 95g/246m of double knit weight yarn and its lovely and soft.  The final fibre content is: 75.5% Jacob Wool, 10.5% Trilobal Nylon, 5% Corriedale Wool, 5% Silk, 2% Merino, 2% Stellina/Angelina.

Blending some black Jacob fibres

Today I have got my blending hackle out and finally taken to task the small bag of Jacob fibre that I combed back in the first week of July last year.  It was from a fleece I got back in 2014.  This is the fleece it has come from, fleece 2 from Home Farm in Elford, Tamworth.  Its a lovely fleece but mostly white.  I am using the black fibres from this one.

I started out with 127g of black fleece last year but after it was combed this was reduced to just 77g of beautiful combed top.  I did forget to take any photos of the combed top but I have borrowed one from another Jacob fleece I prepared and spun a while ago to give an idea of what it looked like before I blended it with all the other bits and pieces, although the dark fibres from this fleece are less brown and more grey-black.

Top Row: Jacob, Yellow Silk, A sparkly white and gold blend
Bottom Row: Yellow Corriedale, Firestar (Tri-lobal Nylon), Bronze Angelina

 All the other bits and pieces have come from either one of the HilltopCloud Ingredients boxes that I've bought or from a big bag of lap waste that I got from World of Wool.

 I will be spinning this over the weekend and I can't wait to see the finished yarn as it is ever so slightly sparkly all over.

Trying more plant based dyes

After harvesting the homegrown carrots, I have once again made some dye using the carrot tops but this time I am not waiting to use it at a later date, I am using it straight away.  I am also going to try a couple of dried goods for dyeing that I bought from a supplier, marigolds and logwood.

I mordanted the entirety of the white parts of a Jacob fleece in Bichromate of Potash first.  Its not a safe chemical and certainly not eco-friendly, which is a shame as by using plant material for dyes you would think that the whole process would be more eco-friendly than other dyes, but sadly not.  For plant dyes to take effectively you need to mordant the fibre and it is the various mordants that are not eco-friendly.

The fleece came from a friend of an ex-work colleague, you can read about that here.  This one was fleece No.5.

The first thing I dyed with was the carrot top dye that I had just made.  The tops had been chopped and soaked for 3 days, boiled up and simmered for about an hour.  I strained the greenery from the dye, which went into our compost bin, and put the dye liquid back into the dye pot and added 160g of mordanted fleece into it.  I don't think this is as vibrant as last time I used carrot top dyes but I am using a different fibre as well as maybe different strength of plant material relative to the amount of water.  I don't know, its often guesswork with me.

The next thing to go in the dye pot was some dried logwood which had been soaked in a little container of water for 12 hours.  This then had to be simmered for about an hour to obtain the dye.  Logwood produces dark grey dye but interestingly the water turned red when it was simmering.  I had read that if you add about a tablespoon of powdered chalk to the prepared logwood dye before you add the fibre then this produces blue fibres, rather than dark grey.  I gave this a go and put 247g of mordanted fleece into the dye pot.

I'm happy with the results of this one, I have a wonderful mix of dark blue and blue-grey fibres, this will be interesting once its combed.

Logwood can also be used on non-mordanted fibres and it is supposed to take.  The dye bath was clearly not exhausted so I ran and fetched some mohair fleece that I had had sitting around for some time.  I didn't dye all of the mohair but I did grab and good amount, 184g actually, and dumped it into the dye pot.  It didn't seem to be taking any of the dye at all until I added a good glug of citric acid to the dye pot, where it suddenly turned a mushroom kind of colour.  Not the best but not really nasty, I can use this, but I was hoping for some kind of blue-grey like the Jacob wool produced.

The final batch of dye was made using dried marigold flowers, which I followed the instructions for and soaked them for about an hour before simmering them for an hour.  I put 64g of mordanted fleece into the dye pot and hoped that it turned out the colour I had read about and that I hoped for.  No such luck.  Its quite boring to be honest and certainly does not have any orange colouration to it that my natural dye book said it produces with this mordant, as different mordants can affect the final colour produced and this is why I chose to mordant with Bichromate of Potash.

Parcel of Fibre from World of Wool

I have treated myself to a range of commercial ready-to-spin fibres from World of Wool.

I've bought a couple with the intention of spinning these as they are, a sample pack of British Breeds because I've heard a lot about some of those included in this pack but not sure if they're right for me and my needs and I don't want to fork out on buying a whole or part fleece only to discover its not for me, and the rest I've bought with the intention of using as ingredients with other fibres to create my own blends, although this means that I will have to look at buying dyes specifically for plant based fibres because I only have dyes for animal protein fibres.

The first one is 100g of 50% Polwarth, 25% Alpaca, 25% Silk and the last one is 100g of Zwartbles combed top as I wanted to try Zwartbles again following the poor quality fleece I had the unfortunate opportunity of processing previously.  The samples of British Breeds contain 25g each of Dorset Horn, Whitefaced Woodland, Moorit Shetland, Brown Bluefaced Leicester, Light Grey Herdwick, Light Grey Swaledale, Black Welsh and Black Jacob.

Dorset Horn I have only tried previously as a cross breed fleece I had.  Shetland I have had a few times but never in the Moorit colour.  Bluefaced Leicester I have spun once before, back in my early days of spinning and Black Jacob, well, I've spun lots of Jacob fleece, I've probably spun more Jacob than anything else.  The other breeds, Whitefaced Woodland, Herdwck, Swaledale and Black Welsh I have never spun before so it will be interesting to see how they handle.

The Merino/Suri Alpaca blend I might spin that and then dye it afterwards, not sure yet exactly what I will do with that.  The other fibres are all plant fibres and can be used blended with each other or I can blend them with any of the fleece as I process them.  These will become part of an "ingredients box" along with the various colours of Angelina that I have.

"50 shades of grey" lace shawlette - Design F201

I've been waiting to make this pretty little shawlette for a while but I've been working through all the various patterns that I have.  This is the third and final yarn that I made with first Jacob fleece that I ever bought and processed myself.  You can read about the yarn and fleece here.

I named this yarn "50 shades of Grey", because it does seem to have so many shades within the skein.  This is another "single ply" yarn and is of fingering weight, a tad thicker than the black and the white yarns.

The varied shades in the yarn made it difficult to see the pattern and I had to rely heavily on the stitch markers between each pattern repeat to keep me on track.

I didn't notice until I had completely finished knitting this shawlette and cast off that the two garter stitch sections along the bottom edge of the shawl are darker grey than the main section of shawl and darker than the section of lace between them and so creating natural "outlines".  How amazing is that, I could not have planned that in a million years and it all occurred naturally too.

I have to make one of these in a plain colour, maybe a white or ivory...

Elford Jacob Fleece No.9 Part II

Around mid-September I started work on combing the black/white mixed fibres from the Jacob fleece that I'd been working on for most of the year and I ended up with a bag full of hand-combed nests in various shades of browny-grey totalling 382g.

I could have spent more time and wasted more fibres by blending the darkest with the lightest and trying to achieve a bag of hand-combed nests that was pretty much an even shade throughout but I decided to make another gradient yarn, or two.

I sorted the hand-combed nests as best I could from lightest to darkest and took every-other-one and threaded them onto a wrapping paper cardboard tube centre and then done the same for the remaining nests, spinning every other one from each set for the first ply and the remaining for the second ply and then plying them together, so technically each single ply is made from every fourth nest out of the original line up.  I'm having déjà-vu here, I've done this before!

I made two different thickness of yarns, a fingering weight (left) that is 112g/440m and a sport weight (right) that is 116g/360m and both are lovely and squishy.

Let there be Dragonflies - Design LF199

Its been a few weeks since I made a shawl with some black Jacob wool and this time I am using the white wool from the same fleece.  This shawl is pretty but I have a new favourite hate, bead shunting.  The way the beads are placed in this design calls for the beads to be threaded onto the yarn before you start knitting as opposed to being placed individually over the stitch as you work, which means that the beads have to keep being pushed along the yarn as you work until you are ready to use them.

I threaded 1,205 size 6 Toho beads in shade 179: Trans-Rainbow Emerald Green onto the yarn, that was a tiring job to start with but bead shunting, that takes it to a whole new level.  Who would have thought that that would make your shoulders ache like you wouldn't believe!

The yarn is another single ply yarn of light fingering weight and you can read about the yarn and the fleece it came from here.

The little dragonflies are only depicted in beads along the outer edges of the shawl and the bottom of the shawl has a "double-point" rather than a single point.  In the beginning I actually spent more time shunting beads along than I did knitting.  It got a little quicker as I progressed up the shawl and beads were used up.  I'm very happy with my colour choice for the beads as they are not a solid colour but have that iridescent rainbow effect just like a dragonfly.

The whole thing took me about 3 weeks to make and the beaded cast off was a bit confusing to begin with in terms of where exactly the bead should be placed on the stitch but I figured it out and it was a whopping 4 1/2 hours before I reached the end.

I'm really happy with the way this one turned out, despite me getting fed up with the bead shunting.  There is no other way to do this design without shunting beads but I wouldn't mind making another of these sometime in the future.

Black Jacob Wool Laced Edged Shawlette - Design LF195

I'm making another shawlette in the same design as the cornflower blue one I just finished.  I've chosen to use some Jacob wool that I spun in the early days of my spinning experience.  You can read about the fleece and how the yarn was prepared here.  Its a "single" yarn, as opposed to a "plied" yarn and is light fingering weight.

The problem with knitting with dark wool is that it is really hard to see exactly what you are doing and how the pattern is coming along so you need to work in good light and preferably wear light coloured clothes or have a light coloured piece of fabric that you can use as a backdrop to your knitting so you can see the pattern.

I got this one done over a few days, again the picot cast off edge took a good few hours to complete.

Elford Jacob Fleece No.9

Way back in 2014 I helped a friend of a friend out by taking a number of Jacob fleece off her hands, see this post for more details on that.

I numbered all the fleece and kept fleece's 2, 5, 9 and 16 for myself, along with a rubbish one that was only good for binning or making into a rug.  This is what I did with fleece No.9, a predominantly white fleece with very little black, a large section of cotted fleece in the middle and weighing 2.1kg but the rest is very long stapled and lanolin rich, a spinners dream.

It washed up really nice and I began combing this fleece in January 2017.  After combing I have 816g of lovely hand-combed white fibre waiting to be spun.  I will get to the black fibres at a later date.

I worked on the white parts of this fleece on and off between January and August, finishing off with the dyeing in August.  Its a large amount of fleece to work on and I've had a lot going on this year with various hospital appointments and major surgery.

I spun one bobbin up in February and this got put to one side until I had time over the Easter break to get back to spinning and then I completed two skeins in less than a week.  In total, I made 4 skeins of yarn from the white part of the fleece in different yarn weights and I after I cooked some homegrown beetroot I transferred the liquid from my cooking pot to my dye pot and dyed all four skeins at the same time, the same colour.  They have all turned out a variegated yellow colour which I am reasonably pleased with.

Grey Jacob Shawl - Design S207

After making four shawls in Twilley's Goldfingering I need a break and work with something else.  I picked some nice, soft and squishy Jacob wool that I blended and spun myself back in 2014.

Revisiting a design that I made twice last year, first in Shetland wool and then in Alpaca, I stared knitting this on 26th January and was done and dusted by 31st January 2017.

It does have a tendency to roll but is smoothed out with a soak and block.