Along with her Cumbria collection, Marie recently added six more shades to her British Breeds yarn collection: Acer, Ocean, Willow, Walnut, Storm, & Seagrass! Now available!
Marie Wallin's BRITISH BREEDS took two years to develop into the beautiful, soft, bouncy 4 ply yarn that it is today. Worsted spun in Devon by John Arbon and his wonderful team, BRITISH BREEDS is available initially in twenty lovely shades. It took Marie a long time to finalize the color palette as she had to be sure that all of the colors worked well together in Fair Isle knitting as well as having each shade stand on its own as a beautiful individual color for single color knitting.
BRITISH BREEDS is made from four different British sheep breeds:
Bluefaced Leicester
Exmoor Horn
Wensleydale
Zwartbles
The wool fiber from each breed adds a certain characteristic to the yarn. Bluefaced Leicester adds the beautiful softness, Exmoor Horn adds the softness too but this sheep produces a white fleece therefore adding a ‘cleanness’ to the blended tops making for more successful dyeing. Wensleydale adds the strength and luster and Zwartbles adds the bounce or springiness. To produce the yarn, the Bluefaced Leicester, Exmoor Horn and Wensleydale wool fibers are first blended together and then dyed into various colored tops. These colored tops are then blended together using a ‘recipe’ to create each of the twelve base colors. Each color base is then blended with the un-dyed Zwartbles fibre creating the lovely mélange effect. Once the yarn is spun it is sent to Edward Hill’s Ltd in Bradford, England to be steam relaxed and balled into 25g balls. The steam finishing ‘opens up’ the yarn creating the full, light appearance and handle.
This yarn can be a joy to work with. And I’ve found that if I run slightly short of a color I can usually find a similar color to substitute in my Jamieson’s stash. My only complaint is that it has a tendency to pill over time—but that’s what soft yarns do, so it’s a bit of a trade-off, and I’ll still give it five stars.
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Nancy
Lovely colors and lovely to knit with
The color range has grown! I find it easy to knit with. Much softer than other fingering weight color work yarns such as Jameson. Blocks beautifully. With Marie Wallin's patterns it is definitely a win! I've now knit Beech - an allover cable and twisted stitch oversized cardigan and also Primrose, an allover color work sweater and both are very special sweaters in my wardrobe. The only reason I did not give it five stars is that it is pricey if you are just looking at the price for 25 gram balls. However I have felt it is worth it especially if you are knitting Marie's color work patterns which are genius - not worth substitution if you are making the time commitment to knitting her designs.
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Linda
Love this Soft Shetland Yarn
I love this yarn. I've always used Jamieson's and this is much softer. The colors are fantastic. It's a joy to knit. I'm knitting Marie Wallin's Honeysuckle design from the Gentle brochure. It's so pretty and fun to knit. I can't wait to see what new colors Marie Wallin's add to the collection in the coming year!