Description
The Jacob sheep are smartly patched and spotted sheep with black wool and white wool – and a bit of grey in some of them and where the black and white get mixed up. They have a fairly fine wool with a good staple length. As a result, the wool need not be spun so tightly. This gives it a very comfortable feel when knitting. Though the wool is more relaxed than the Shetland wool, the individual fibres are slightly thicker.
This dark grey we call Charcoal is made by separating the black and grey wool from the white reasonably well but not too fastidiously. There are thus different fibre colours in the yarn, which gives it depth of texture and a feel of life.
We have this colour batch in the two finer thicknesses, DK and 4ply as well as this Aran.
We have found the darker aran yarns are good for a beginner as they knit up quickly, are forgiving of repeated unpicking and, with the depth of colour from the mixture of the wool fibres, disguise small mistakes readily! The aran yarn is excellent for textured knitting with cables, ribs and simple textures such as moss stitch.
We also have this thickness of wool in Chocolate Black from the Hebrideans, Cream from the Dorset Downs, Moorit, which is a rich brown from Shetlands, a rather lighter tweedy grey from the Jacob sheep and an off-white called Ryemeal also from the Jacob sheep. If you want to work with colours, there are therefore plenty of combinations available to you; we think they are particularly good for simple stripy patterns but they can also be used for much more subtle or complex colour work
