When we heard that the mill in Scotland who were spinning our Numbers range for us were closing down, the first emotion was panic, but the second was opportunity. For a long time, this range of yarn had got a bit stagnant, and a bit limited. The mill needed very large batches of wool to be worth spinning anything organic, and that stifled creativity - not to mention lead times that were regularly over a year.
 
My first thought was that this is the opportunity to try a semi worsted yarn. We're a worsted mill, but omitting the combing step in the process (where we remove all the shortest fibres) is what makes semi worsted, and seemed like the perfect option. I quickly took some of the sliver we had already prepared, got it ready for spinning and managed to spin a small sample. Great! That's that solved.
 
But it's never that easy is it? When I went to scale up that sample, I realised that we just weren't happy with the quality. The yarn had far too many neps, inconsistencies and irregularities to meet our standards. Back to the drawing board.
 
Whilst the breeds we wanted to focus on for this range are shorter in length than what we'd usually choose for a fully worsted spun yarn, I decided to have a go. Many, many days of wrangling with Clint, our 1980s comb, followed, and by getting the settings just right, slowing him down, and handling the fibre particularly gently, we managed to make the most beautiful sliver.
 
Now on to spinning!
 
Florence, our beautiful, complicated, noisy Italian spinning frame is better suited to longer staples. She has what's called a double drafting system, allowing us to create an enormous variety of yarn weights and types, but within these drafting zones, they're usually best suited for breeds like Romney, Lleyn and Hebridean - which is why you'll have noticed they were the first breeds we spun! After some tweaking, experimenting and some additional parts that had to be custom made for us, we managed to spin the first few shades!

They were actually spun and wound onto cones before Rhinebeck in October, and the intention was to take them with us over to Upstate New York, but about a week before our deadline for getting yarn ready, our trusty 1970s German two-for-one twister, Volti, blew up. It was quite dramatic - the enormous drive belt that runs the full twenty metre (65 foot) length snapped when he was running at full speed. Once again, a bump in the road.

Once I was back from Rhinebeck, it was time to take our time, and get this right. No deadlines, no building it up to people before it’s ready, just head down, spinning yarn. What’s resulted is a palette of twelve semi-solid undyed shades, each one subtly unique, telling the rich story of the landscape of the sheep farms that surround us. To begin with, we’ve selected a small number of breeds that are meaningful to us: Shetland, Manx Loaghtan, Hebridean and Lleyn.

Designing the yarn was an interesting challenge, once we’d settled on spinning it fully worsted (where all the short fibres are removed, and the remaining longer fibres all lay beautifully smooth and parallel), it became a challenge of understanding the heritage and philosophy of this yarn. In some guise or another, we’ve had Number 2 and Number 3 on our shelves for over 25 years now. They were the very first yarns we ever made, so trying to capture that feeling in something new wasn’t easy.

But I think we’ve nailed it.

It’s light, airy and lofty, it’s packed full of texture, and the undyed semi-solid shades are a dream.

What do you think?