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.
Love the heathered tones and woolly feel of Marie Wallin's British Breeds. Always happy with every order from the Woolly Thistle!
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Anita H.
Excellent service
I have made many purchases from The Wooly Thistle over the past few years and have never been disappointed. They are proactively communicative and obviously care about their customers.
It is very reassuring to find such a high quality, caring company who knows their way around the craft yarn world. I definitely recommend them as a source for your next project.
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mkg
Lovely and soft
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.