Reasons to love alpaca yarn and fibre: all your questions answered!
We love alpaca at ECY, but feel like it's perhaps underestimated, or a bit under-appreciated. We get asked lots of questions about it, so have put together what we hope is a helpful and insightful blog post answering as many questions as we can. The first section is quite long by the way, but does need to come first. If you're interested in things like the difference between baby alpaca and other alpaca types, please scroll on down! If you have any more questions that we've missed please do let us know. 🙂 Tell me about alpaca - where are...
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- Tags: alpaca, babyalpaca, eco, ECY, Eden Cottage Yarns, edencottageyarns, environment, fleece, naturalfibres, yarn
Why we love Polwarth sheep and wool!
We talk a lot about our love of merino and bluefaced Leicester yarn but we have been also using New Zealand Polwarth wool in our Oakworth yarns for years. To let you know why we love this fabulous breed we wanted to share some information about why they are so amazing. Breed Polwarth sheep originated in Australia in the 1800s (in fact it is their centenary year this year!) when Lincoln and Merino bloodlines were mixed. This combination was used to attempt to increase the hardiness of the Merino so that they could increase the areas that could be grazed. This...
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- Tags: DK, Eden Cottage Yarns, farming, fibre, fleece, naturalfibres, nature, Oakworth, Polwarth, sheep, wool, yarn
An Introduction to the Four Seasons Collection Subscription
An introduction to knitting lace from charts
Although lace knitting charts are not for everyone, they are very useful for providing a visual indication of what your knitting should look like, and so many people choose to use them. For example, if the chart looks like this: Then your knitting should look like this: It enables you to easily see that the yarn over holes on the top row sit centred above the ones on the row below (for example), which means that as soon as you hit one that isn’t sitting right you can go back and find where the problem is. ...
The story of colour development in a dye studio (shed)
I’ve spent quite a lot of time this week working on colour development and thought you might be interested to read about it - Claire and Debbie were, anyway, as they saw the work in progress and were wondering what on earth I was doing. They also had the unbridled joy of watching me flicking really slowly through my wildflower book to find the plants I was looking for and check their names. I do talk to myself whilst I'm doing this (yes, and I'm only 33) so I think they've learned to just ignore my ramblings. This week I was...
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