Girl with a Sword Productions Longwool Jumbo Yarn, Undyed Natural Cream, Handspun

Two beehive-coiled art skeins from Girl With A Sword Productions, the small handspinning studio in upstate New York (IG @girlwithasword) that pulls local longwool fleeces — Wensleydale, Teeswater, Lincoln, Cotswold-family — onto the wheel and spins them into extreme texture. Ten yards of fat, undyed corespun, every inch hand-coiled into the lustrous beehive ridges that the longwools were bred for. Cream on cream, a single dye-free skein the colour of unbleached muslin.

About the maker. Girl With A Sword Productions is a one-spinner studio working off her own wheel and the fleeces of local, sustainably raised flocks — wool, alpaca, mohair, llama, angora, and the long-stapled longwool breeds that take a coil this cleanly. Her hangtag (pictured) and the handwritten yardage card ship with the skein. Handspun art yarn is by definition irreplaceable: each skein is the only one of itself. This one she set aside undyed so the longwool's natural lustre and the architecture of the coils do the entire talking.

Specs.

• Fibre: 100% longwool (breed unspecified by maker; longwool family = Wensleydale / Teeswater / Lincoln / Cotswold). Undyed natural cream.
• Yardage: 10 yards 
• Skein weight: 7.1 oz 
• Weight class: jumbo / extreme art yarn.
• Construction: beehive / extreme-coil corespun — a thinner singles wrapped tightly around a thicker core, every coil packed shoulder to shoulder so the surface reads like stacked vertebrae.
• Skeins available: 2 
• Condition: new from the maker
• Care: hand-wash cold, lay flat to dry. Block gently — the coil architecture is what you bought; don't agitate it flat.

Lovely for: a single-skein weft row across a small weaving, the rim of a basket-stitch wall hanging, the brim or yoke band of a sculptural hat, or a textile-art collar where the coil ridge is the whole point. Knit on US 19 / 15 mm or larger if you want to see the coils as their own stitches; held in front of plainer wool for a mixed-media surface in needlepunch and felt collage.

From the Cabinet: a handspun one-of-one in the maker's own hand, ten yards, never knit. When this skein is gone, it's gone.