2019 Fashion on the Ration Challenge

Errr...... How do I explain this? I’ve done it. I’ve blown the lot and then some. The sheep made me do it!

(There really was a sheep. It was a Blue-faced Leicester and I saw it being sheared, then got to handle its fleece.)

We went to Wool@J13 for the weekend, in the small Staffordshire village of Penkridge. When I bought the tickets last October, I had no idea that I’d blow through my 2019 Coupons so quickly. I just thought, “It’s a knitting event that’s 2-ish hours away and doable as a day trip. If Chelsea make it into the FA Cup Final, I can just do the Sunday...There’s bound to be a few vendors I’ve never seen before, who could sell interesting stuff. I may even get to play on a spinning wheel...”. Ahem.

Anyway, once Chelsea were knocked out of the FA Cup, my DH suggested we make a weekend of it. (We’re season ticket holders, so would have gone to Wembley.). His role is pretty clear: driver (so I can knit on the journey); conscience (“Do you really want that?”); bag carrier; colour tester (we have the same colouring, so I hold stuff up to his face to see how it suits); and - more rarely - enabler (like the time he talked me into buying a sweater’s worth of cashmere at £10 a ball, because it came as a kit with a pattern I fancied).

My personal resolution was to only buy something if it was truly special and, if it was that special, to buy enough to make a jumper. And there were some pretty special yarns at Wool@J13: lots of hand-dyed; several rare breeds; some even being sold by the people who raised the sheep...

The first yarn to seduce me was a grey Poldale Sock Yarn, which was hiding in the sale bin of one of the stands. I don’t know which stand - I’m working away this week and can’t check the bag - but the stallholder’s boyfriend did hold up the sign for me to take a photo of it together with the yarn..



At £6/skein, I bought all four skeins lurking in the sale bin. (8 Coupons spent.)

The second yarn to seduce me, is Hawkshaw Sheep’s “Clotted Cream 4-ply”, a blend of 90% Cheviot yarn and 10% Alpaca. I’d heard Sue, the owner, interviewed on Knit British sometime last year, so was delighted to meet her at the show. Cheviot sheep are raised primarily for meat, but a couple of years ago Sue started wondering what could be done with the fleece from her flock. She was told, “Cheviot yarn is too coarse...”, handled some lambs’ wool and disagreed. The rest is history. Four more skeins ended up in my bag.



The above was meant to be black, but after two trips through the dye pot, the darkest Sue could manage was this shade of French Navy. Black is, apparently, quite a difficult shade to achieve. (We actually chatted for quite a while.)

Anyway, in little over 3 hours, I managed to spend 16 coupons, when I only had 6 left for the rest of 2019. I’m going to keep tracking, but I reckon I’ll be lucky if I get out of 2019 with less than 100 coupons spent.

- Pip (76 coupons spent, so -10)

Laura_Elsewhere wrote: »

Hmmm.


I know in the war, any yarn bought in a shop would need coupons, but I genuinely wonder if it was always the case when buying direct from the small-supplier?

More to the point, the reason we're all doing this is several-fold: to reduce the amount of unnecessary clothing we all buy each year.... to reduce the amount of textile waste from shoddy rubbishy clothing ending up chucked because it's worn out in a few weeks... to reduce the thoughtlessness of buying whatever we want when we want...

Now... I wonder whether we should draw a distinction between buying commercially-produced yarn in a shop because it's pretty (ahem, oops, blush), and buying yarn that is hand-spun, hand-dyed, produced by small producers who are selling it themselves...

Isn't part of what we're doing here trying to PROMOTE the idea of buying top-quality, and including buying from the makers/ spinners/ dyers/ farmers themselves?

It's the difference between buying a slab of orange rubber "Cheddar" from Asda or buying a small piece of really good cheese direct from the dairy, made on that farm with milk from their own and neighbouring cows, using recipes and methods that are traditional to the area, isn't it?

So maybe half or even quarter - or none??? - of the coupon-cost for "ethical" yarn-buying?

You are right, Laura, but I'm too close to this right now to judge. One thought I had (mentioned earlier in this thread), is that maybe we should have Fashion On The Ration awards at the end of the year:

Platinum - spent 44 coupons or less in the year (the lower level from later in the War)
Gold - spent between 45 and 66 coupons inclusive
Silver - spent between 67 and 80 coupons
Bronze - spent between 81 and 100 coupons
Iron - "I counted coupons! Honest!" :rotfl:

I am hoping to stick within Silver.

Also, I am drooling over my keyboard at that blue. It is gorgeous and I am deeply in love with it... she's right re black - hence why historically only the wealthy wore black robes, ie clergy, lawyers, doctors, the 'professions', as a sign of status... there was a colour known as "poor black" which was a faded rusty ex-black from the end of the dye pot - but I'm told that getting black historically, pre-aniline, involved overdyeing again and again with all kinds of colours, layering it up until you got black...

It is drool-worthy. I think I'm drawn to that colour blue - it's similar to the Touch Merino, Possum & Silk blend I bought in New Zealand. I'm thinking that I might knit a twin-set out of them, depending how they look together. (Got home last night and was far too knackered to do anything except sit on the couch and go "Wibble". I've picked up a cold from somewhere and had a right fit of the miseries last night.)

- Pip