After several months of anxious waiting my last batch of wool from the 2017 clip has arrived.  I am still short of some but will have enough (fingers crossed) for the remaining shows this year.  
The wool above is a lovely soft blend of our Shetland first-clip and some Romney fleece.  It makes a beautifully airy wool with lots of 'bounce' in it.  And I have started knitting with it already .... .I'm using it with some dyed Lammerloch blue to make yet another Surge shawl.
I got another lovely box full of my Simply Shetland Single - laceweight wool, and a batch of pale grey DK which we have christened
Haar - named after the North Sea mist which sometimes rolls inland at this time of year - sometimes cloaking us in fog for days.  
All of these new items are now in the Store of this website and will be available at Woolfest
in a few weeks time.
Now we are just dyeing wool, waiting on wool bands to come back from the printer, and thinking about shearing the 2018 clip.  More on that next time.

Lambing was tough this year and threw up a number of challenges that we hadn't faced for a long time.  I like to think it was partly down to the odd weather we've had over the last few months.  Still, we've made it with only a very small number of losses and one caddy lamb who is slowly being weaned off the bottle.  The two lambs pictured above have also given us some headaches.  The mother - Alice - had a single white (shown) and also stole the grey katmoget ewe lamb from Birgitta (who had also had a GIANT grey katmoget tup immediately named Brian Boru).  Wee adoptee probably didn't get enough colostrum before we got to the field and has been on increasingly strong antibiotics over the last couple of weeks for fluid-filled lungs and poorly legs.  As the vet says - the prognosis isn't great - but we are doing what we can.
First lamb of this year was Breck (or breac) meaning speckled or spotted.  He was huge when born and is even bigger now!

I love  St Abbs Wool Festival - I love everything about it and enjoy being a vendor here. Despite being a bit shy, I can talk about sheep and wool for Scotland, and anyway I love hearing about what other people have knitted.
I was a bit short on wool to take, as I’m still waiting on a missing 16kg of spun grey wool courtesy of Parcel Force who now think they might have delivered it to someone else by mistake. However, I labelled everything I had, dyed lots more wool taking into account the feedback I got in Edinburgh, and I was quite pleased with my display!
I was also placed opposite my absolute favourite stall at the event; Pink Minis who designs and makes the most awesome tweed clothes.
Trade was great! I was very happy that people had come back after buying yarn from me at St Abbs previous festivals; including people who bought sweater-quantities of yarn, as well as people who had been at EYFs Meet the Shepherdess event a few weeks before.
I took along a good selection of dyed mini-skeins and was pleased with how they came out!

As usual, I spent a lot of time just chatting with people  about their own knitting and certainly fell in love with this shawl worn by one customer!  The pattern is Surge by Lisa Mutch on Ravelry and I was inspired by the combination of colours and the short rows used. It’s knitted in 4 ply and I just might have some Devonia 4 ply by John Arbon in my stash which would be ideal for this!  I also plan to dye some of my white 4 ply when it arrives from the Mill.

I really did have to sprint off at the other end to head back to the lambing field, but once again a massive thanks to Jennie from SkyBluePink Designs for all the hard work she does in organising this event.  It is a real success!