Fibre Focus Friday: Fibre Advent

You've heard about how we make our our Yarn Advent Calendar, so we thought we'd better let you know how the Fibre Advent is created. 

As you've probably guess by now, most things here start with a cup of tea and some biscuits, so once we've got that sorted we begin the important task of picking a theme.  In previous years we've done themes based on the traditions or foods of different countries, so this year we thought we'd look at Christmas characters.  

That was the easy bit; we then needed to do a vast amount of research to not only find a number of different (and sometimes obscure) characters.  This research looked at the characters themselves, their origins, their usage in culture and also their appearance.  After all, we had to make a number of blends to represent them!

Creating the blends is one of our favrouite parts of the design process, but also one of the most tricky.  We know that some of our customers adore glitter and sparkle, but others can't stand it.  Some of you live for Merino and buttery soft fibres, while others prefer more varied textures.  It can be hard to please everyone, but we like to give it a good go!  

Once the blends are created we have a few conversations with the mill; they look at the recipes and offer their advice as sometimes fibres don't blend well together or may be more likely to clump as they're being blended.  This is especially true for blends made using very fine fibres such as ultrafine Merino or Cashmere.  When all of the blends go into production the mill keep a check on all of the recipes, not just to make sure that everything is correct, but also to ensure that the blends are looking their best.  If they think a fibre will need more or less blending, they'll let us know so that the changes can be made.

All of the blends are stored in 10kg bumps, while are like wheels of cheese...except they're wool, and these are then labelled and stacked, ready for packing!  Our packing team then weigh and bag each individual fibre - that's 24 per box and up to 12,000 indivudal bags in total! (And that's just for fibre advent!)

While this has been happening we've been designing the brochures and packaging so that come the shipping date, the calendars can be assembled and zoomed out to everyone as quickly as possible in time for 1st December!

We're really excited about our 4th annual Advent calendar and can't wait to open it all with you!