As the days become shorter, colder, and wetter, I am spending more time knitting and spinning. I had an idea to get some sort of wool mini skein or fibre advent calendar, but apparently I have left it far too late in the year and most are sold out already! I did find a few still available, but they were quite expensive and I felt nervous about spending so much money on completely unknown colours.

So, thinking about my DIY Art Advent Calendar, I decided to make my own. Unlike the art version, I didn’t have lots of spare fibre lying around, so I did need to buy something. I decided on a selection pack from Wingham Wool. 27 little samples of their Yorkshire collection. When the box arrived, it was delicious seeing all the different little squidgy balls of colour together. Nothing was labelled, so I set about matching the samples with the photos of the Yorkshire collection on the Wingham Wool website.

Some were easy to identify, others more tricky, and I ended up with three that I just couldn’t find a match for.

Why bother doing all this, why not just enjoy the little mystery colour pops? Well, the sensible answer is that some of these are beautiful and I might want to order more, so I need to know what they are. But that was probably about 25% of the reason. Mostly, I just like doing things like this. Like sorting out a giant bag of Lego blocks into colour groups, or sorting a tub of buttons by size and shape.

Anyway, here are the three samples I couldn’t identify:

21 looks vaguely similar to a few of the Yorkshire range, but there was always a better match. 7 and 25 look like nothing in the collection at all! Still pretty though, so I’m not complaining. These are the three options from the website I didn’t find a match for:

I weighed each little sample then put it in a bag with it’s number and put all the little bags into a big gift bag. The total weight is 233g and the box cost £17 so that works out at £7.30 per 100g. For comparison, 100g of a single colourway from the range is between £4 and £5.

Each sample is around 7 – 10g so too small to spin up individually and make anything worthwhile. Instead, my plan is as follows: On December 1st I will pick one sample at random and spin it. The next day I will join the next sample and continue spinning each day until I have approximately 58g. Then I’ll start a new bobbin in the same way until I have another 58g. Then ply them together and repeat the whole thing. Sometime between Christmas day and New Year I should end up with two 116g random colour skeins.

My thinking is that this will make something unexpected, but not ugly, because each sample is the same type of fibre and, although they are different colours, they are made up from the same selection of colours. The red in one sample will be the same red in all the others, for example. Will this prove right? Will they look like a rainbow, or a kaleidoscope, or just a mush? I am excited to find out!