Fibre Focus Friday: Peppermill & Sea Salt

Our avid dyers may have already discovered Peppermill and Sea Salt, but if you haven't we dare you to have a look!  These two yarns are great examples of how slight variations in fibre colour can give different effects, not just in the ecru yarn but also when it is dyed.

We had a clear ideas about these yarns while we were designing them.  They needed to have a high percentage of British fibre in them, they needed to be superwash and they needed to have some added texture which wouldn't get lost if they were dyed.  The natural choice for the base fibre for these yarns was Blue Faced Leicester; our 100% BFL yarn (Bakewell) is a firm favourite and we wanted to introduce a couple of yarns which would complement it while still showing off the fantastic characteristics of the BFL fibre itself.

Peppermill and Sea Salt are both superwash yarns which means they are less likey to felt if you put garments in the washing machine.  Superwashing involves removing the scales which are naturally on wool and which lock together when felted; if there are no scales the chance of felting is significantly reduced.  We still like to use wool cycles for our garments, just to make sure we're not over-spinning or stretching them.  After all, a lot of time and work goes into these items!

The final addition is the tweed fibre; this is what creates the magic and the difference in these yarns.  Peppermill uses a grey tweed which mutes the natural cream shade to a pale silvered grey and adds defined flecks of black and grey.  Sea Salt uses a white tweed which blends with the creamy ecru shades and gives very subtle, brighter white flecks.  Each of thes can be used quite happily on their own without dyeing and will product a soft and durbale fabric.

But dyeing is when they come into their own...

The tweed nepps are viscose which means when they are dyed with our Eurolana dyes (which are designed fo wool), they won't take the colour.  This results in the yarn changing shade and the nepps remaining prominent flecks of colour.  You can see examples of this on the product pages; there's a handy little slider which shows the difference between dyed and undyed.  We also dyed Sea Salt in limited edition shades so you can really see the white nepps pop against the darker colours.

Just like Bakewell, we decided that these yarns would be best in 4ply, DK and Aran so that they can be used for a variety of different projects.  To add to this, they're also available in 100g hanks or 1kg cones, so if you do want to knit something larger you don't need to worry about joining hanks.