The month of the meadow, the grass is now growing at pace letting the animals grow bog and fat, and getting ready for the all important hay harvest later in the summer. This month runs from May 20th- June 18th. The air is often sweet with the small of honeysuckle at this time of year, it fills the hedges. The name come from gwŷdd meaning wood and bid meaning hedge. It's also known as llaeth y gaseg, which means mares milk.
Taking us from April 20th- May 19th this is the month of flowers. As the saying goes, ne'er cast a clout til may be out. This is a reminder of the fickleness of the weather, and a reminder to not start discarding your warm clothing too early no matter how tempting it might be in a match of May sunshine. The saying could refer to the month of May, or to the common name for Hawthorn, the flowers are also called May blossoms, and in places with lots of hedges for a brief period of time the countryside is blanketed in the white-pink flowers. The cymraeg is Draenen Wen, draenen means thorn which is why this plant is used so much for hedges, the sharp spikes make it very good for keeping animals in the right fields! aS with English there are lot of alternative names, "pren bara a chaws", bread and cheese wood "draenen blannu" thorn plant and "drain gweinion" white thorn. The fibre today is a bit of an unusual one as I don't normally use quite so many colours in one blend, but I wanted something altho reminded me of delicate spring flowers. This turns in to a lovely greyed-lilac as yarn with lots of hidden depths that look different under different light conditions.
Spare fibre is in the shop. Germinal the month of germination. After a long cold winter new green shoots are appearing. This month runs from March 21st to April 19th. The Primroses often accompany the violets beneath our hedges, In cymraeg these are briallen, which might be mutated to friallen. This doesn't really have a translation, but you will see it lots on place names and house names, especially as the singular form briallu. This is one of those slightly trickier words to say as that double ll is one of the ones that trips up English speakers, and the u at the end is a sound that's closer to an i. he fibre today is a bright vibrant green, reminiscent of the new shoots that are just starting to appear. As Paul it's all in the online shop until stocks run out.
Ventose the month of wind. This is the month from February 19th- March 20th. The 8th of the month is the day of the Violet, or in cymraeg, Fioled. It's pronounced in nearly the same way, a single f makes a hard f sound much like a v in english. These beautiful low growing purple flowers appear under hedges in early spring. he fibre today is an intense grey with streaks of green, here in Wales at least it's still a pretty dreary time of year. The spare fibre, should you need more of this variegated grey is in the shop until stocks run out.
Pluviose, the month of rain! In our modern calendar this runs from January 20th to February 18th. Hellebores are one of my favourite flowers, they look so beautiful at a time of year when there's very little else to enjoy . The cymraeg is Crafanc-yr-arth y grawys, grawys means lent, which is another name for these beautiful flowers, the lenten rose. Crafanc-yr-arth translates as bears claw, I suppose beacuse the leaves have a very claw like appearance. This is the limited edition fibre for today, and the spare stocks are available in the online shop, but as ever once this colour is sold out there won't be anymore.
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! A new blend that's heading your way at the start of the week... I felt that the range of fibres was missing something with a bit more tooth, the sort of thing you'd reach for to create things that are warm and durable rather than soft and cuddly. So I has a mess around with some welsh wools, creating something with a natural grey undertone to give the rich tonal effects that I love whilst dyeing. Black Welsh Mountain are most often kept as smaller scale flocks, often as more of a hobby, because the global wool market doesn't really value dark wool, so it's not priced very highly. They grow a fleece that's as close to true black as you get on a sheep, though the tips often end up sun bleached. It's nowhere near as coarse as white Welsh Mountain, and doesn't have any kemp. It's got a lovely open crimp and good staple length and is around 31 microns. Radnor sheep come from central Wales, along the border with England. It's another mountain the breed, though more accurately for the area it comes from it's more of a hill sheep! It's another crisp wool with a disorganised crimp that's great for trapping air. Again, the micron count of around 31. Then we have Lleyn, this is a longer staple length and a bit more open and wispy than then other two, with a more defined crimp. Possibly as a result of its probably parentage from crossing an extinct Irish long wool breed called the Roscommon with some native Welsh Mountain ewes. You only have to look at the position of the Lleyn peninsula, jutting out from north west Wales in to the the Irish sea to see how a connection with Ireland makes sense. To say Lleyn, btw imagine that you're saying the word "clean", but then don't quite make the hard "c" sound at the beginning, the "ll" letter sound is a bit different than that, but that's certainly closer than saying "Lin" which is the usual attempt people make! Then to all of those, just to add a bit of something special is the addition of some kid mohair. This has a long staple length to match these wool breeds, and just increases the shine. Some also say that you can use mohair as a strengthener in yarns, so you might want to experiment with this durable blend to create a non-nylon, non-superwash sock yarn. Here's some quick test skeins I spun. On the right is one that I chain plied, I was aiming for fingering weight but under estimated how much this yarn blooms when washed. On the right is a bulky 2-ply spun with a short forward draw which is nice, but in the middle is the one I spun from the fold with a supported long draw, and that's the real star of the show... so much loft and trapped air!
Anyway, as you can see it's a versatile blend, and one that I think you're going to like! There will be lots of colours heading to the shop on Monday. A note on the name, Cymreig is the word used to describe anything from Wales, Cymru. If it's to do with the language it's Cymraeg, but for objects it's more correct to use Cymreig.... So welsh wool is gwlan cymreig. It's been a while since there were some new colour in the Pigments collection... but but I've just added some new ones, and a couple of them are a bit more unusual so I thought a bit of an explanation about the colour might be fun. This one is Cobalt Titanate, it mostly seems to pop up as a watercolour paint in various colours that are all in the Teal-Turquoise sort of area. The exact colour varies depending on the manufacturer, but if you watch this video you can maybe see why I chose to go with the grey hints in this one. Manganese Violet was one of the colours that Monet used instead of black. He used it to create shadows in the extensive series of paintings he did of Rouen cathedral. Here's how it's made- And then after a couple of inorganic compounds we have Woad... which I don't know how it's taken me so long to add this to the palette! This was the source of blue in Europe before Indigo. It's actually the same chemical compound within the leaves as it is in Indigo, but Woad plants produce much less of it. It was also supposedly the colour that the Picts covered themselves with before battling the Romans.
Julius Caesar write in Commentarii de Bello Gallico that the Britanni used to colour their bodies blue with vitrum, a word that means primarily 'glass', but was also used for woad. But modern translations and historians are questioning this, and that maybe the translation has been adapted to fit the idea.... It's unlikely it would have been used as a pigment for tattoos. People have tried it in modern times (of course they have!), and apparently it doesn't produce a good tattoo, is caustic, and tends to produce scarring. There were better tattoo pigments available. It also doesn't produce blue when used as body paint mixed with a binder. It's more likely they used iron or copper earth pigments. https://dunsgathan.net/essays/woad.htm All the Pigments are here- https://hilltopcloudshop.co.uk/collections/pigment I have fallen down a weaving rabbit hole... in part because someone contacted me about custom drying some warps and sent me a link to the work of Natalie Drummond. Now I only have a 4 shaft loom so some of the more complicated patterns aren't possible, but it's still a weave structure that's possible, and I love the peep hole effect and the way it works with hand dyed warps. So in the spirit of jumping in at the deep end I grabbed some Tussah Silk I'd wound off to finish a cone of yarn, and chucked some dye on and set to work. The draft was one originally designed to be wool cushion covers from a back edition of Handwoven, but I did some maths and sett the 2/20 Tussah at 24epi. The weft was some hand dyed BFL, Camel and Silk in the same thickness that I dyed in a co-ordinating green and blue. The information in Handwoven suggested to use a very light beat, but as I wove off the warp I found that I like a firmer beat better, and it produced a better looking cloth. In essence it's plain weave with alternating floats that then spread out, so the plain weave sections do actually need to be pretty firm or the whole thing opens up far too much. Spurred on by that success I then used some of the Corriedale Singles from the shop and adapted this draft. I wanted to leave space for the yarn to close up during fulling so it was sett at 18epi. Below are before and after shots. The finished fabric is light and fluffy, drapes really nicely, but is still firmed up enough to feel like cloth.
As I drove home a couple of evenings ago the swallows were perching on the phone lines... a sure sign that summer is on the way out, and after such a lovely start it's been wet, windy and cold. I feel I am entirely to blame because I bought a reflective sheet to go over my car to use during scentwork competitions. Nellie has continued to be a sniffing superstar. Coming 3rd at her first trial in a new venue, and then wining another rosette for coming 3rd place in a Nosework Game set up in which we'd previously had a disaster. Then she only went and won her first ever Level 2 competion, and won all her badges at a National Nosework Competition. We are having such a lovely time playing our sniffing games, and are off out and about doing more competitions this autumn. We've had our garden open to the public for the first time this summer as part of the National Garden Scheme and have raised over £300 for the good causes and charities supported by the scheme. I went off to the Guild of Weavers, Spinners and Dyers Summer School and spent a week learning how to make baskets out of all sorts of materials. The trade fair at the end of the event was incredibly busy, so once back home I've been dyeing like mad, and re-ordering stock. The next event I'm at is the All Wales Guild Gathering (which I'm also organising!), this is open to everyone, even if you're not a guild member. It's only £3 admission, there will be a small number of traders, displays of work by the guilds, and also a talk in the afternoon by Tereshina Roberts on The Story of Silk. As ever at these small events I won't be taking all the stock with me, so if you want anything in particular it's best to email in advance, or you can purchase for collection and remove the postage costs with the code ALLWALES. Later this year, on November 26th I shall be back up at Tecstiliau in North Wales, I'm teaching a workshop called Spinning for the Festive Season. We'll be learning some new skills and using them to create decorations and gifts. The final part of my planning for the next few months is to get things organised for this years 12 Days of Christmas. As a price guide it will be around the same as last year £40 (ex VAT), £48 (inc VAT). Content will be the same a 100g braid of hand dyed 60% 18.5 micron Merino, 20% Baby Camel, 20% Tussah Silk for Christmas Day, and then 11 co-ordinating colours of Superfine Merino & Silk, which will be available to purchase as 50g bumps afterwards until stocks run out at which point the colours are discontinued. Everyone who wanted to purchase one last year got one, but it's really helpful to get an idea of numbers so I can order supplies all in one go. I don't take advance payment on these, because doing pre-orders is something I've never chosen to do, so no need to leave a comment with your name. I just keep making parcels until no more are needed! If you've already voted on The Fellowship of Yarn please don't vote again here. |
Archives
September 2024
Categories
All
|
Hilltop CloudHilltop Cloud- Spin Different
Beautiful fibre you'll love to work with. Established 2011 VAT Reg- 209 4066 19 Dugoed Bach, Mallwyd, Machynlleth,
Powys, SY20 9HR |