Nivose- December 25th

Nadolig Llawen!
Happy Christmas!
Each day there's going to be a post revealing the fibres in this years 12 Days of Christmas. 

As you already know this years theme is The French Revolutionary Calendar. Created as a way to remove all religious and royalist influences from the calendar it ran on a decimal system. With weeks of 10 days, and months of 30 days. Each day was no longer named after a saint from the Catholic tradition, but was instead given a name based on nature. Every 10th day was named after an agricultural tool, and every 5th day a common animal. The rest of the days were named after plants. 
The calendar year started in September, but I decided to align our months with the time of year when you open your first parcel, which is Nivose, the month of snow. This ran from December 21st to January 19th. It was the only month which didn't use plants as the day names, instead using minerals. 
So why, you may ask is there a picture of a flower up there... I was surprised as you when I pulled out the pack of watercolour sketches that my Mum has painted for us to enjoy this year... I nearly asked her to paint me another, but decided that we would instead enjoy a pretty flower rather than a picture of Lava. Because these are the perils of translations without context. I'd told her  to pick a flower for each month, given her a list of the French names and the English translations that I had pulled off the internet, and failed to mention that Nivose was minerals, so she picked the only one in the list that had been mistranslated as a flower!
6 Nivose is actually the day of Lava, but we actually have a painting of Lavateria, and the Cymraeg name is Lavaferia. 
I failed to take a photo of just the hand dyed braid of Superfine Merino, Pamela and Peduncle Silk by itself, but what I can tell you os that there are now lots of other ombre gradient braids in loads of other colours in the online shop as a special Christmas surprise!