When researching new yarns for the shop, it is easy to be tempted by everything that I see. However, Laine des Iles is a small, one-person business, and although I’d love to buy every one of those beautiful yarns, I just don’t have the funds or the space to stock everything that I like! As a shop with a very specific theme of island-related yarn, I also find that many producers on islands are, like myself, also small businesses with small production runs, who are unable to provide large quantities of yarn on a regular basis. These are special, artisanal yarns which may be from a single flock, hand-dyed, from a rare breed or even all of these things.
We are therefore launching our Limited Editions category on the website. This will be an occasional series of one-off, special yarns that will be available on the website only once. By their nature, these yarns will be more expensive than our regular yarns which are produced in large production runs, but they are all high-quality, exceptional yarns – something for a special project or treat. A yarn chosen for this category may be a limited edition, one-off yarn or colour palette from one of our existing brands, a hand-dyed yarn with unique colours or just a batch of something special from a small supplier that we’d like to share with our customers.
We start the series with this year’s beautiful birthday yarn from Blacker Yarns.
Every year Blacker Yarns produces a limited edition Birthday Yarn, choosing particularly rare or special fibres to create unique blends that will be spun once only. For their 14th birthday, Blacker have combined 40% soft, fine and rare English merino with 17% Shetland and 26% Bluefaced Leicester as well as 17% recycled noils (noils are the short, fine fibres that are left after wool has been combed for the worsted spinning process) to create a beautifully soft and bouncy woollen-spun yarn. The natural white and fawn merino and the fawn and grey Shetland provide bulk and natural colour, while the Bluefaced Leicester adds lustre to enhance the dyed shades, as well as improving the drape. The noils add texture and interest, and the addition of these recycled fibres also enhances the yarn’s sustainability and environmental impact. The resulting undyed yarn is a warm pale fawn-grey, with a dyed dark grey and 4 cheerful colours.
Blacker always choose a Cornish theme for their birthday yarns, and this year they have chosen Cornish gardens. Each colour is named after one of Cornwall’s many wonderful gardens.
Cornish garden is a woollen spun yarn, and as this method of spinning produces bulky yarns, especially with this particular fibre composition, the 3-Ply weight will also work to make a looser fabric for most 4-Ply (Fingering) designs and the sport weight will also work for DK designs. We only have a very limited quantity of this yarn, just one sweater quantity of each colour in each weight. So don’t miss out as it will not be repeated!
Leave a comment