Tag: hand spun

Cowichan Valley Fleece and Fibre Festival Fleece and Fibre Festival

Chaotic Fibres Preparing for Cowichan Valley Fleece and Fibre Festival

Post author By Chaotic Fibres
Post date September 27, 2015
No Comments on Chaotic Fibres Preparing for Cowichan Valley Fleece and Fibre Festival

chaotic fibres, victoria bc wool, silk for spinners and felters

Moved! Settled – more or less! We’re back in business and getting ready for the Cowichan Valley Fleece and Fibre Festival. Yes, we have finally moved our stock out of storage and into our new home after almost two months of chaos and disruption. Sharon loves the much, much larger, improved and more convenient space for the business. We’re still in Victoria and still at a location that makes local deliveries easy.

We hope our local friends will venture out to Cobble Hill on October 17^th for our next fibre festival. The Cowichan Valley Fleece and Fibre Festival is Vancouver Island’s longest running fibre fair, so we feel so fortunate to have been able to be included for this year. The Cobble Hill Community Hall dates back to 1921 and is the local centre of community spirit in promoting the values and lifestyle of rural living and agriculture.

We know our unique assortment of quality wools, silks and specialty fibres for felters and spinners will add positively to the mix! As always, if there’s something special you would like us to have on hand, let us know and we’ll try to make room for it. Visit our Online Store for ideas! There will be a total of 25 vendors with everything from all sorts of local fibre and products to weaving supplies and hand spun goodies, demonstrations of rug hooking and braiding, ceramic buttons and embellishments, organic skin care products from Cobble Hill, spinning wheels, hand spindles and small looms.

We’ve visited this event in previous years, and we have been so impressed with the range of products and quality of the merchandise vendors offer. It’s a small venue at this lovely, old community hall, so the challenge for us is creating a display that allows us to showcase the range of products Sharon loves to collect.

Hope we see you at the Cobble Hill Community Hall and Fairgrounds! The Fleece and Fibre Festival opens at 10am and runs to 4pm as a one day event. Come early, stock up!

Tags Cobble Hill, Cobble Hill Community Hall, Cowichan Valley, felters, fibre fair, Fleece and Fibre Festival, hand spun, local fibre, silks, specialty fibres, spinners, Vancouver Island, Victoria, Weaving supplies, wool

News from Chaotic Fibres, Victoria, BC

Silk Yarns ready for Fibres West

Post author By Chaotic Fibres
Post date March 1, 2015
No Comments on Silk Yarns ready for Fibres West

We are packed to the rafters! Getting ready for Vancouver’s Fibres West in less than 2 weeks. We are still receiving some last minute shipments from Europe, preparing, packaging, pricing and loading the new products on our Online Store.

We have some unusual new yarns for knitters! Our new Banana Silk Yarn is luscious! Although there’s really no silk in these, if you know Banana Fibre, you will know that it looks, feels and shimmers like silk. Have a look at the iridescent qualities of Aqua or Peacock to see what I mean. There’s a reason that banana fibre has been wildly popular for over 400 years with Japanese kimono makers!

We also have Sari Silk Yarn, which has many of the same qualities and hand feel as Banana Silk Yarn. This yarn is hand spun by women in smaller Indian villages after leftover silk threads are collected from sari mills. The colours are striking and unique, a result of stray threads of vibrant colour migrating into the yarn during spinning.

For amazing character and texture, our brand new Sari Silk Ribbon Yarns are quite something. The loose threads along the edges plus the varying width of the ribbon sections give this ribbon yarn great character. These are all solid colours with tinges of complementary tones. We hope these draw lots of applause at #FibresWest!

This will be our first time at Fibres West so we’ll be taking lots of wool, silk, specialty fibres – even some felting supplies like our new Bonsai Sprayers, felting pads and Merino prefelt. We are already getting lots of interest for the great variety of wools we offer from different breeds of sheep, one of the best selections we have found anywhere. Come visit us at the Cloverdale Exhibition Grounds Agriplex during the 7^th annual Fibres West for #feltingsupplies, #specialtyyarns and #spinningfibres!

Hand Dyed Hand Spun Yarn

Handspun Madness.

Here’s a chance to add some chaotic texture and kaleidoscopic colour to your freeform knitting projects with some fabulous hand spun yarn from Chaotic Fibres. We’ve loaded up our online store with skeins of Sharon’s OOAK hand dyed, hand spun, ranging from 100% wool, as you will find in Lime Twist and Pacific Sunset, to a custom cool 98 yards of blended merino, mohair, kid mohair, suffolk and angelina in the Starry Night hand spun. Like lots of blending? She uses all kinds of fibre in her top quality skeins, including silk, pulled sari silk, alpaca, angora, silk ribbon and, of course, all kinds of wool. Need a little? Want a lot? These are definitely OOAK (One of a Kind) skeins of yarn, as small as 11 yards ranging to a couple of hundred yards!

Freeform knitting yarns — Striped Impulse, 84 yards of hand dyed 100% yarn.

Hand spun yarn for knitting — Irish Skies, 62 yards of 100% wool.

wool, angora, alpaca hand spun yarn — Autumn Rose. 80% wool, 10% angora, 8% alpaca, 2% angelina. 50 yards. Hand dyed, hand spun by Chaotic Fibres.

Tags alpaca, angora, freeform knitting, hand dyed, hand spun, hand spun yarn, knitting

News from Chaotic Fibres, Victoria, BC

Moroccan Inspired Scarves

Post author By Chaotic Fibres
Post date November 25, 2014
No Comments on Moroccan Inspired Scarves

Chaotic Fibres online store for quality wool, silk and other fibres for felters, spinners and knitters

Our travels to Europe a couple of years ago took us to Marrakesh and the exotic flavours, colours and textures of the thousand year old medina. What an experience it was wandering and getting endlessly lost in the souks of the walled market town. Our photos of that time instantly bring back the rich colours of the textiles and of the food in the market stalls. Sharon has always loved working with colour so here’s a tribute to our time in Marrakesh with a couple of brilliant scarves she has just finished.

The first knitted scarf was made using linen stitch on a circular needle with all hand spun and hand dyed wool, silk, llama and mohair. This technique gives you a wonderful chance to use lots of smaller bits of colour and fibre, giving the scarf a ‘chaotic’ vibrancy.

The second scarf uses a seed stitch and, again, all hand spun and hand dyed wool, with this wool being completely local to our home on Vancouver Island. To show that Moroccan influence, we just had to show off the the knitted scarves with some decorative tagines we brought home after a drawn out and good natured bartering session in Marrakesh.