Sunsets and Showers – Yarn

After gathering all my photographic inspiration of the wintry sunsets and showers of West Kilbride, my next task was to find yarn.

This is the fun bit in weaving as it means scouring through shade cards and websites, and then squishing lots of yarns.

The choice of yarns is really important to me as I wanted to use Scottish or British sourced yarns as we have a fantastic woollen heritage in the UK and I want to encourage in any way I can the businesses that continue to grow in this market. The other important factor for the yarns was the colours as I wanted to get the intense colours that shone through in my inspiration.

Jamiesons of Shetland was the obvious first port of call as their yarn is grown, sheared, dyed, and spun by them on Shetland. They also have an amazing range of colours which in a weird way made it hard to choose which ones to use as there were too many options. I’ve also used their yarns for other projects in the past and know that the yarns are of great quality.

Some of you who came to my stand at Edinburgh Yarn Festival may recognise some of these colours as they were the warp on one of my demo looms. When I got back from there I did some sampling to see how the colours and the cloth worked. The colours do work together, but there just was something not quite right with the feel and the texture of the samples for the scarves I was thinking of. However, I will be using these yarns for various projects along the Sunset and Showers and other weathery themes.

Living and working in West Kilbride, Craft Town Scotland, does have it’s advantages when you need to find some deeply coloured yarn that is British in origin as my lovely friend Lilith at Old Maiden Aunt Yarns is just down the street. I know her yarns really well from having shop sat for her over the years, and since then I’ve always keep an eye on what new colours she’s brewing.

With a bit of Liliths expert knowledge and lots of cuddling of yarn I finally came up with these colour combinations.

Now, there will be some of you thinking British Merino? It does exist and Old Maiden Aunt Merino is from the Falkland Islands, which at the moment is still British so that counts in my book.

The colours couldn’t be a more perfect fit to the scenes I’m trying to convey, and the yarn itself is soft and luxurious which is how I want the scarves to feel when worn.

As to how they look when woven, you’ll have to wait until the next blog post.