Ok, this one is different. I'm not entirely sure how I feel about this one. It's pretty enough and is Christmas coloured but how will those colours look once its spun up, will have to be careful not to muddy the colours. It's 100% Shetland Wool and is called Wreath.
Oooh the first fibre is pretty, reminds me a little bit of striped toothpaste. It's called Mistletoe & Wine and is 80% Falkland Merino (white), 10% Bamboo (green) and 10% Sari Silk (red).
Time to open the black box and see what's inside. This is the same type of box I used for my goodies when I send them to customers but in a different size and colour but I can't afford to have them embossed with my company name as that more than doubles the price of each box. One day, maybe, a girl can dream...
Right then, inside the box are lots of little black paper bags all sealed with staples and all have numbers on them written in gold pen, or do they... there is one that doesn't have a number on it and I have all the other packets in numerical order now and I didn't pay extra for a day 25 gift so this must be a free gift. There is also a large scratch card and a trolley token on a key ring with the WOW logo on it, which must be for scratching off the card each day and then you can use it to get a trolley when you go shopping.
It's firm, it's scented with something like citrus or limonene and I think it's some kind of soap or something inside the fluff. I have no idea what it is exactly or what it is used for, felting maybe, I don't know as I don't do felting.
This was the only free gift this year. Last year's was a little OTT with the bells, the plastic sheep, the bauble making kit and the free 50g of fibre. Actually, I think I'd like the 50g of free fibre more than this soap thing or whatever it is.
Several hours pass...
Ha, found out what it is. Apparently it is a felted soap and you use it to wash yourself using the fluff around the soap like a flannel and you can either just wash your hands/face or you can use it in the shower. Hmmm, I have really sensitive skin so its going nowhere near my face but I have tried washing my hands with it and I'm not impressed. Oh well, it was a free gift, just not my thing.
Back in September I dyed 427g of Jacob fleece a kind of Olive Green using Greener Shades dye at 1%, made up of 45% River Blue, 45% Sunshine Yellow and 10% Ruby Red. I have now combed that fleece and am left with 246g of fluff to do with what I want, most likely used in a blend.
As you can see from the photo showing a sample of the nests I got from it, it has created hand combed nests in a variety of shades but once its spun up or used in a blend and spun up it will all work well together to make something pretty and interesting.
It's here, it's here, it's here. Happy Christmas to me. Just a couple of weeks and I can start opening the packets.
I started making this back in January and then I must have put it to one side after completing the flowers for some reason before picking it up again last week and joining them all together with the main colour.
I have used Twilley's Goldfingering in shades WG4/004 light gold, WG31/031 black and a couple of different dye lots of WG38/038 red.
I didn't make any notes nor did I seem to take any work-in-progress photos other than a couple where I am preparing to add the fringing. My eldest daughter said that I had made the sofa look like a Christmas candy cane. I did run out of space and so I used the back of a couple of cushions on the floor. The reason I laid them out like this was because whilst I was able to use one dye lot for the shawl I had to use a couple of different dye lots of red when I got to the fringing part and so I cut the lengths and divided them across the number of tassels and then the other dye lots were cut and added in equal amounts to each tassel. This means that all of the tassels are made from mixed dye lots but it won't be obvious because they all contain mixed dye lots.
I think the final shawl looks a bit like a ladybird.
