Hey Everyone, how was your summer? For some people the summer is still goin on, but for us here in Sweden is almost at the end. Our summer was great! We went camping, walked in the nature, enjoyed beautiful sunny days outside, but the best of all: our garden grew beautifully and we had a nice harvest of dye materials! We have Coreopsis and Cosmos (yellow/orange), dahlias (orange/red), amaranth (pink) and woad (light blue, mint and pale rose). We did great tests of colors with woad (see our last blog) and amaranth, which we will give more details another day.
We also worked hard during this summer! We got our own yarn (that we bought the raw wool last year) fresh from the mill (Karlsbergsgården Spinneri) at the end of May. We have Jämtland (from Appleryd gård) and Leicester (from Sybbarps gård) and we dyed each one carefully with beautiful colors. All our yarn will be available in our webshop September 10th. If you are a member we will make sure you are the first to know when all our beautiful yarn is available.
In between all of this we did two incredible visits! First, we visited Ulf Johansson, who is a very nice person and an incredible bowmaker. We had the chance to visit his workshop and see a little bit about violin/cello bows making process. It was actually Ulf who found us! He offered us the sawdust he collected from the special wood he uses for the bows, which actually is Brazil wood, the wood that gave our original country Brazil its name. We accepted it immediately! We are looking forward to dyeing some special yarn with it, but it will have to wait until our second batch of Jämtland comes out from the spinning mill this fall.
Speaking about Jämtland, the second great visit we did during summer was to Erik and his beautiful family farm at Nytorps gård. They have Jämtland and Gotland sheep. First we were greeted by two Border Collies, that are, by the way, great sheep dogs! Then we were welcomed by Erik, his wife and daughter. We walked around the farm and got in close contact with all the sheep. What a great experience! The Jämtland sheep is shy, but one of them was bottle fed and more used to humans. So, she came very close to us and loved to be petted. Then we went to see the Gotland sheep, which are very friendly and not shy at all. We were surrounded by them asking to be petted! Oh! We should not forget that the sheep was brought to us by the dogs. It was incredible to see! We were mesmerized seeing it all. All the animals are very well cared for, have a vast place to roam, are extremely cute and fluffy. At the end we sat together for some "fika" (Swedish cultural pause for chatting with coffee/tea and sweets), the perfect closing for this visit.
We are working with wool every day, and every day we are learning more! It is great to work so close to nature! It is also important to see these animals being treated great, having a calm life and then respecting their wooly offerings by coloring it with natural materials, and seeing this big cycle closing in on itself. Many great things are coming soon! Keep an eye on our Instagram and see you next month.
Cheers!
Betina & Natalia