Bright and dark at the same time

It was clear as soon as we began unpacking the Harvest Hues skeins from the latest John Arbon delivery that we were in the company of a whole load more than the 400 meters on the 100g skein band.

There’s a totally unexpected toothiness to the yarn which is concealed by its lustre – a characteristic more common in drapier yarns that lack the kind of bounce you can feel immediately in the plumpness of the twist on these skeins. In fact the more you look, the more there is to see. Beyond the distinct colourways there’s a riot of different shades that combine to create an optical illusion of a solid colour. Harvest Hues feels a bit like tasting some sweet delicacy that has a note of tartness followed by a hint spice at the end. The complexity of the colour may present as something simple but its depth is unmistakable.

This was plainly a yarn that needed a bit more understanding. So I contacted Sonja Bargielowska, one of the co-owners of the John Arbon Mill in North Devon to see if we could get to the bottom of what it is about the yarn.

“Everything is dyed in the wool rather than being dyed afterwards – that’s why the colours of Harvest Hues are so amazing. The dyed fibre is blended with naturally undyed dark brown Zwartbles rather than a dyed black. So if you look really closely at the skeins, sometimes you can see there’s little bits of white in there still that give it a depth of tone and makes it really sparkle like that.“

And there’s something in the telling of this story which is making her sparkle while she tells me about it.

The John Arbon signature style of dyed-in-the-wool yarn begins with dyeing their unspun wool in a limited palette of bright primary colours. The final range of shades is created by blending different combinations of the wool before it gets spun into yarn.

Sonja explains, “We have about 18 colours of our 50% merino 50% Buefaced Leicester blend – these are really solid primary colours – like pillar box red and really bright turquoise. For Harvest Hues, we mix those colours together and then mix them with the undyed Zwartbles, to create the different shades. For instance Bracken which is the orange one, doesn’t actually have any orange in it. It’s just yellow and red mixed with the Zwartbles brown. And Elder is a really crazy hot pink, like the colour of seaside rock, then mixed with the black of the undyed Zwartbles. That’s why it’s bright but also dark at the same time.”

The dyed wool is blended at the mill in a machine called a Gill box. Sonja describes it as “initially coming out looking stripey, a bit like toothpaste from a tube. It’s put through the machine three times before the yarn gets spun. The colours and the fibre integrate more each time, so it becomes softer, shinier and smoother.

This approach of creating shades by blending dyed wool tops, is longer and costlier than the more standard approach of dying the spun yarn. In fact Sonja explains that “We could get the tops that come from [the scouring] up north and just spin that straight away but I think our extra blending process is what makes it feel special and unique.

So let’s talk about the fibre. Harvest Hues mixes fibre from local Zwartbles sheep with John Arbon’s staple 50:50 Falklands Merino, Bluefaced Leicester from Devon, Cornwall and Somerset.

“The merino is in there because it’s lovely and soft, a really poofy fibre.. Adding the Bluefaced Leicester to the merino gives it more drape and makes it more durable. And Zwartbles is in there as it’s a naturally dark brown sheep. The Zwartbles look a bit like black Beauty – they’ve got a white stripe on their nose and little socks and a little bit of white on the end of their tails and the rest of them are black.“

“Zwartbles is a really bouncy fibre.. it’s got a tonne of loft to it.” explains Sonja. “And although worsted spun yarn tends to be a bit drapier and a little flatter, the liveliness of the Zwartbles helps counteract that. So I actually think Harvest Hues feels woollen spun to a degree. It’s not super drapey like you’d think a worsted would be.“

Some background may be helpful here: John Arbon is a worsted spinning mill. This means the fleece which they spin is prepared with the fibres combed to lie in parallel, so that they twist into a yarn with a smooth, drapey and less air-filled handle. This contrasts with woollen mills that can spin yarn from jumbled up fibres that have more air trapped between them. Woollen spun yarns are bulkier, commonly also less smooth and soft than their worsted spun cousins.

But what Sonja and her colleagues have managed to do by bringing Zwartbles into the Harvest Hues mix, is to almost trick the worsted spin into having a touch of woollen-ness, using the innate loft in the fibre. This is proper best-of-both-worlds yarn, and begins to explain that unexpected bounce you feel when you first pick up a skein.

So let’s get down to the juicy bit.. what are we going to knit with it?

Our main considerations are going to be gauge and handle. We’re looking for 4ply (fingering ) weight patterns that celebrate colour and fabric. Added to that, it’s worth noting that as well as the regular 100g skeins, the mill also winds HH into 25g minis, making the prospect of shopping for colourwork shades a bit more realistic. With all of that in mind, here are 3 of our top picks..

With enormous thanks to Sonja Bargielowska for her time and expertise, and the rest of the folk at the mill for making this extraordinary yarn. We are absolutely delighted to have all the colours in both 100g and 25g skeins available in Clapton and online now.