Parcel in the night

While I was patiently waiting for my Tesco order to be delivered last night,  I had an unexpected delivery from a courier, couldn't think what it was.  Big box taped up to with miles of brown tape, took some getting into I can tell you!  Finally I was in, my wool and tops at last back from the mill, I had know idea it was on it's way, it was so long ago I sent it off I was beginning to wonder if I would ever see it again.  Usually we join together with Lakeham Alpacas and send a big load of fleece off to the Natural Fibre Company which results in about 25kg of knitting yarn being sent back, we usually managed to sell it within the year but this time I wanted to try a smaller mill and have a selection of colours.  So now I have some of last years grey, white, fawn and black, not bad!
I had sent three fleeces off to come back as double knit yarn and two fleeces into tops, I am really pleased with it, the tops are so soft .... can't wait to start spinning it.  The yarn feels and looks great, I have a black which is really black and comes from our champion female West Webburn Midnight, a light fawn from West Webburn Calypso and a off white from Langaton Caliban.  Now to decide what to do with it all,we only do markets in the run up to Christmas and they were really bad this year due to the bad weather so our next retail opportunity will be the summer shows.  So I think I will try to find some different outlets, we already have a couple of wool shops who buy our wool and we do a lot of our own hand knits as well.  I keep thinking we should put some on the website but to be honest it is usually sold by the time it has been knitted so I have never got around to it.  I now have nearly a year to build up the stocks ready for next Christmas.  We have a couple of interesting ideas in the pipeline so hopefully with some hard work these will work out.
I have started knitting the wool I have just spun and it looks quite good, very soft to handle, I need to spin another skien now as I haven't enough to finish the scarf.  Good job the weather is so wet I have an excuse to be inside by the woodburner with the spinning wheel!