Thursday, August 16, 2012

Yarns from our place

 Our brand new colour scheme celebrates not only the re-opening of the Bruce Spinning Mill in Milton, Otago under new shared ownership, but also the arrival of the new season's yarns spun to our specifications and created from the luscious selected New Zealand grown alpaca fibre.
The theme of the colour range will reflect and be inspired by the places that we live, work and play here in Otago in the South of New Zealand. The landscape is rich and diverse from mountains, forests, tussock, beaches, lakes and cityscape.
Each skein is is born from 'our place' here in Otago, from the hands that grow, select, grade and handle the alpaca fibre, to the milling, hand dyeing, skeining and labelling and comes with a little flavour of this southern locality.
   'St Bathan's' - A mix of teal, deep blues with a dash of purple. Visit the 'bluest' lake and stay in the haunted hotel in this tiny but pretty historic village.
  'Kyeburn' - Has to have some gold of course mixed with sand, earth and tussock colours.

 I regularly pass the little School in the tiny place 'Flagswamp', a little patch of green sports field, cabbage trees and flax right by the main Highway.
                    'Miller's Flat, - undertones of greys with a warm blue across it.
    'Horse Gully' - Warm boysenberry shades with olive and earthy browns.
        'Opoho' - A hillside suburb in Dunedin - bordeaux, steel grey and reds.

  'Gimmerburn' - Ruddy faced farmers, weathered by hot summers, the wind and the cold winter tussock. Deep scarlet, orange and purple reds.

These are just a few of the colours with more to come. Most are dyed at 2 -3% colour saturation, your monitor may not reflect the true depth of the colours. The yarns shown here are the Aran weight alpaca and merino, and the 4ply alpaca with merino and nylon. The colours are repeatable and will be available across our yarn range.

Thursday, August 9, 2012

Drying alpaca skeins



 Rain, rain and more rain. So in desperation as these skeins just stayed wet I lit up our ancient stove which hides in the corner of the kitchen. It produced a surprising amount of heat and the skeins began to steam and dry nicely.
This is the first batch and there were 2 more rack loads to go. Then off to be reskeined and once I can get outside to photograph our new colourways I'll post them here.
Meanwhile a little crochet going on. The colour definitely doesn't reflect our grey rain laden skies.
Will post what it is soon.......