Mergelland, Edition 2017

Last Tuesday they arrived, after nine long months of waiting: 12 cardboard boxes, each containing a series of sealed plastic bags, each of the bags containing 12 balls of Mergelland yarn.

We did hope to get them a few days earlier, right on time for the Slow Fashion Market at Tour & Taxis, but they got stuck in transport. No harm done, there’s still plenty of time to start knitting for the next winter season.

As with the previous clip, we sorted the fleece ourselves, put everything in bags and transported the whole lot to the mill in Cornwall. It’s quite a drive and this year there wasn’t that much time for sightseeing. What’s more, on the ride back home it did rain hard from the moment we left the mill until we got the car on the Shuttle!

This time we chose to use all of the black fleece for adding a darker shade to the series of natural colours we had from the 2016 clip and the remaining white for a first batch of dye colours. Choosing colours for the first time was rather stressy: how do you decide, not only on colours that you like, but also on colours that go nicely together and that will appeal to your customers? And once you’ve decided, how do you convey your wishes to the people at the mill and how can you be sure that the colours you will receive several months later are the ones you’ve requested? It’s actually almost as complex as running an IT project!

Obviously there was no reason to worry, I could have trusted the expert knowledge of the people at The Natural Fibre Company! The colours turned out really well!

We try to stick to hard materials when choosing names for the colours, so in order of appearance you’re looking at Dark Slate (okay, I didn’t do a lot of effort there), Rust, Gold, Emerald, Navy (sorry, there is no stone or metal in this colour) and Shingle. They’re all in the shop now.