Our 3rd Mill Open Weekend is now just around the corner (Sat 14th and Sun 15th May)!
We are busily polishing our most prized machines – they will be standing proud waiting to show you what they’re capable of!
Here are a few photos of our machines in action to wet your appetite!
Happy Wovember wool lovers!
With each November, comes Wovember … and Wovember is about celebrating all things WOOL.
Instigated by designers Kate Davies and Felicity Ford, the movement celebrates real wool, whilst highlighting the misuse of the term wool in product labeling – campaigning for clear and non misleading terms, such as wool rich, and adopting clear and concise compositions.
At John Arbon Textiles we love to use pure wool. There is no substitute for it. We produce lovely knitting yarns and fibre for spinning, felting and other crafts from wool. We also have our sock range using yarn we spin, made here in the UK. Our production concept is simple – a return to old style textile manufacture sustainably sourcing raw fibre locally wherever possible and converting it in Britain into high quality tops, yarns and textiles.
We support our local community by using the Exmoor Blueface Sheep fleece in some of our hand knit yarns – Excelena, a yarn created by John and used by designer Susan Crawford and our Exmoor Sock yarn, and 3 of our sock ranges – the hard-wearing, cushion soled Stanbury Walkers, the everyday Exmoor Socks, and the knee-length Exmoor Country Hose. We also use our local Zwartbles sheep in a few of our yarns!
If you have managed to get your hands on the latest POMPOM Quarterly magazine (the Autumn issue), you may have noticed that they came to visit us at the Mill and also our home town of Lynton recently. We had so much fun when Lydia, Meghan, Amy and Agnes came and they have written an amazing article about their 24 hour action packed fun Friday with us. Photos are by “Agnese Sanvito for Pom Pom Quarterly.
What a blast we had at Fibre East … we camped, got rained on and had a fabulous show.
As always, it was great to see everyone again and catch up with projects in the planning and just completed.
A lovely customer – Adrienne, who often visits our stand at shows, has finished her blanket that we have been longing to see for months!
A whopping 3.5 Kg worth of Knit By Numbers yarn was used to create this amazing piece!
It looks totally wonderful…
Hello woolly folk!
We thought we would share some info about the goodies on the secret Mill Members web page at the moment.
One of the perks of being a Mill Member is you get first look at our new scrummy fibres and luscious yarns.
On the secret Mill Member web page we have two new wondrous tops, and two limited edition yarns, exclusive to our Mill Members.
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The launch of our Mill Membership is complete and the first Membership packs have been sent out in the post.
So we hope all you Mill Members have received your packages, with your special John Arbon Textiles needle gauge Membership card that has your Mill Membership number on the back … hope it made you smile!
And we had our first Mill Members come and visit the brand new show room AND have a mill tour! A couple of those visiting had even won their free membership in the raffle at the Open Weekend. A group of splendid ladies and one lovely man, who were on a camping holiday and they had all brought their spinning wheels along for a grand spin-along around the campfire. (HOW GREAT IS THAT!?)
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…What a fab time we had at the brand new show in Devon, Proper Woolly.
Here are some photos of the lovely local show we exhibited at!
At our Mill Open Weekend we asked people to bring along things they had made out of any of our products (ie: yarn spun from our tops or textiles knitted with our yarn or animals made with our socks, etc, etc).
Each person who brought along something was given a raffle ticket and entered in the prize drawer, with the winners (10 from each day) getting a Free Mill Membership.
We were so overwhelmed with all the lovely things you brought along, that we decided to pick 11 winners from each day (so 22 in total).
John and Becky drew the raffle tickets out of a fibre can a couple of days ago…
Firstly, thank you so very much to everyone who came to our Mill Open Weekend and made it such a special event! We all had a fantastic time and hope you all did too…
It was so wonderful to be able to spend a couple of days letting you lovely folk have a look around the Mill where all the magic yarn and top making happens! We hope you had a fabulous time and got to know a bit more about our process and some of our fibre secrets!
We are now back into normal Mill mode. After having a tidy up and finishing off the cakes, we are prepping for Proper Woolly, our next show in a couple of weeks!
Anyway, here are a selection of images from the weekend.
Here is John, surrounded by a group of eager top lovers first thing in the morning!
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We are in the final days of the preparation for our Mill Open Weekend!
And haven’t we been busy!
Yarn, socks, tops and cakes have been made ready for your visits over the weekend!
Here are a few further images to show you the special limited edition Mill Open Weekend Yarn you can get exclusively this weekend!
Today we are spending the day giving final touches to our new Mill Showroom! This you can also visit on other days by appointment if you become a Mill member! Speaking of Membership, don’t forget to bring your made items to enter the prize-draw to win a free Mill Membership!
Tomorrow we will be putting up the marquee and filling it with lots of woolly sale goodies!
Now, just a teaser of what to expect….
