Cormo Australia

Quite a few people have been asking - so to assuage those fears, yes, dyeing of Cormo will be offered. We just need to get to top and yarn stage first with samples that we’re able to test and dye, before giving out the details of exact charges and whatnot. We were guestimating on ravelry that charges could be around $25 a kilo, but that was 24 hours ago, and suddenly got thrown out the window with new information to our hands.

So, it’s best to take those baby steps, deal with things when we get to them, and see where it takes us all. In the meantime, here’s a few resources that you might like to check out. Libraries in the Yarra/Melbourne City area will be getting them in if they don’t have them already.

If you’re into natural dyeing (we’ll cover standard dyeing in a separate post), and haven’t had the chance to give it a shot, there’s a couple of books that you might like to check out. Aussies are terribly lucky to have Eco-Colour as most books are o/s centric, so it’s wonderful to have a book focussing on using plant material like Eucalypts that we take for granted. For us, it’s the bible, we’ve taken a week long workshop with India Flint (and recommend them) and started a flickr group Botanical Alchemy as a result.

One that seems more basic and homey (ie using coffee grounds, berries) is the handbook of natural plant dyes. There’s many other books & resources about natural dyeing, for example, the Handspinners and Weavers Guild in Carlton have a regular dyeing day each month - a great way to learn how to dye and share with others.

If you’re new to Cormo, and finding out about what to knit and spin with other than Merino, there’s a couple of great books that have come out recently. The Knitter’s Book of Wool: The Ultimate Guide to Understanding, Using, and Loving this Most Fabulous Fiber (KBOW) is a wonderful recently released primer which looks at several breeds, and provides sources, recommended uses, and some great patterns. The great boon to me though, and the start to my own slippery slope with Cormo was the KBOW-along on ravelry. I started with the best of intentions, figuring that meeting up with people around the world to learn about sheep breeds, and try knitting and spinning with a new one each month would be a great learning experience.

Which is how, my friends, this whole thing started. Long story short - Cormo is big in the US compared to Australia, yet we have the founding family and their sheep here. Hence the plan to manufacture Cormo in Australia, which so far, so good.

The book that blows us away with its resourcefulness, research, and just plain bible-of-fibre quality is “The Fleece and Fiber Sourcebook: More Than 200 Fibers, from Animal to Spun Yarn”. It’s the book that should be in every textile library - whether that be the library of a spinning guild, or a new to natural fibres yarn hound.

Just in case those who’ve pledged are a tad stuck, or maybe you’re thinking of taking the plunge and want some ideas of what the heck to do with it, here’s the ms.gusset guide of ruvly things to do with your cormo yarn (a word of warning - yes you need ravelry. if you’re a knitter and you don’t have a login, that’s ok. go grab one - we’ll wait).

For starters, we’re aiming for a weight that should be popular and appropriate for a lot of projects, so a aran/worsted it is. Let’s pretend it’s going to be a worsted weight, like our good friends Elsa Wool, who do a line of super lush, raved about cormo in the USA.

Yardage on Elsa (and hopefully ours!) is around 230 yards/210 metres per 100g skein, so it’s worthwhile checking out the projects on ravelry that have been done in elsawool. If you happen to have the book that basically started the quest for TON OF WOOL, which is “The Knitters Book Of Wool” there’s a rather sweet pattern for mitts that’ll be fine for a AUS$16 pledge of a skein.

If you or someone you know has a little one on the way, you might like to think of making a sleep sack, which isn’t so much for sleeping, but for toting the bub around, and taking ultra adorable photos.

We have these little dreams of using cormo to make something wonderful from Teva Durham: there’s a couple of patterns that we’ve lusted over for years: The Cabled Riding Jacket, and the Renaissance Tunic. Both look pretty amazing in a dark red.

For something a tad simpler and using less yarn, Saroyan is looking a sure bet.

for immediate release

MAKING AUSTRALIAN WOOL POZIBLE

“‘A project like this is the way to go, away from commodified merino’ - Charles Massy, author Breaking The Sheep’s Back”

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“TON OF WOOL”  is an innovative online initiative to demonstrate the viability of onshore processed wool. Supporters of the project pledge money online at http://wool.pozible.com in return for rewards such as yarn and wool top. Intended to help boost demand for sheep-to-skein “all Australian” processing, the project is also about education.

Current labelling and terms like ‘Grown and spun in Australia’ obviously aren’t telling the full story, when that product has been scoured and processed in China, and it’s not on the label. If Australia is shipping seventy percent of its wool clip to China, that means we’re using fossil fuels to transport around 60 million tonnes of scourable waste each year. Consumers should have a right to know when a product has left the country before it’s reached them for sale.

Less about speed than quality, the project entails taking time in the top making and spinning stages to ensure that people who pledge on Pozible will get a product that will leave them speechless when they open their packages. No other company in Australia is producing yarn from Cormo sheep, an unmulesed, sustainably farmed breed founded in Tasmania, which is what makes the end product so special. TON OF WOOL is about proving that we’re capable of making first class yarn without it leaving the country and that there’s a demand for it.

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Kylie Gusset is a knit and textile specialist who runs Ms. Gusset, a business specialising in hand dyed yarns and fibres. Pozible provides project creators with a platform to present their ideas to a worldwide audience in order to gain funding.

Contact information: 

Kylie Gusset

ph: 0403921121

email: kylie@gusset.net

http://wool.pozible.com