Cumbria Sock Yarn Gen
Posted on by Kim Kearney

Our New Cumbria Sock Yarn

Cumbria Alpaca Sock Yarn

This yarn is being unveiled at unravel 2019 at the Farnham Maltings next week.  This yarn is a blend of 47% British alpaca with 43% Blue Faced Leicester wool blended with 10% nylon.

We buy the Blue Faced Leicester wool from farms around the Yorkshire Dales and Cumbria, so this really is a local yarn.  We carefully skirt and grade each fleece at Town End.  This wool was then blended with white and coloured British alpaca fleeces which we clean and grade on a wire mesh over an old table tennis table.  The fleeces are mainly white but about 15% are black, fawn, brown and grey. The resulting natural oatmeal colour is a great base for the eight dyed shades:Aubergine, Turquoise, Pink, Olive, Mustard, Midnight, Grey and Rust.

After scouring (washing), carding, combing with the nylon and dyeing, all in West Yorkshire, the fibre was finally spun.  We have plied and hanked a small amount for hand-knitters – the rest is being knitted into socks for Arbon Socks…..

Blue Faced Leicester wool

Blue Faced Leicester sheep wool

White alpaca fleece

White alpaca fleece

Cumbria sock being spunAlpaca tops being spunCumbria sock yarn on cones

UK wool Alpaca Sock Yarn
Posted on by Kim Kearney

UK Wool Alpaca Sock Yarn

UK Wool Alpaca Sock Yarn now in web shop

Our new No-Nylon Blue Faced Leicester and Alpaca Sock Weight Yarn

This No-Nylon UK wool and alpaca sock yarn is a soft, bouncy blend of 90% Blue Faced Leicester wool and 10% alpaca.  We buy the fine Blue Faced Leicester wool from farms around Cumbria and the Yorkshire Dales.  The alpaca fleece is purchased from breeders in the UK and the fleeces are sorted and blended on our farm in Cumbria.  The fleece is scoured in Yorkshire before being spun for us in Cornwall.  The yarn is then dyed in small batches on the farm.  So, this yarn is 100% grown, spun and dyed in Britain.

Posted on by Kim Kearney

New Alpaca Sock Yarns

I was pretty low on alpaca sock yarns after all the shows I did before Christmas, so I’ve been madly dyeing and washing loads of hanks ready to photograph.  Finally the rain has stopped and the sun come out long enough for me to take some shots.  The new colours are all loaded on the website now, and here’s a selection for you to see.

Posted on by Kim Kearney

The tweedy bits in our new Alpaca with Shetland DK

This summer I bought some beautiful, crimpy, fine Shetland fleece from a local farmer. I’ve blended some of the fawn coloured fleeces with white and light fawn alpaca fibre and just sent it off for spinning. This is going to be a woollen spun almond coloured DK yarn with coloured flecks. The tweedy effect is obtained by adding lots of coloured nepps (or small felted balls of wool) into the fibre as its being carded. I decided to dye my own colours and here they are!

If this works well, I’ve already got plans for the next batch and the colours I’m going to use.