Meet my Menagerie: Emma the Bunny

Emma the bunny was the second animal to join the menagerie, and she rapidly became the number one favourite with all our customers. The irresistible floppy ears have made thousands of people fall in love with her and pick up their hooks and crochet the pattern.  

My niece and nephew's reaction to my second ever crochet project may well be one of the main reasons why I kept going.

Emma the bunny was catapulted to fame in a very early copy of Simply Crochet Magazine and has become the most popular little animal I've taken onto Create and Craft TV.  The bunny pattern has a broad appeal partly due to looking fantastic in most of the Toft colours.  I have personally crocheted one in stone, silver and cream, but have seen gorgeous examples in steel, fudge and mushroom.  Thousands of you have made this pattern and they can all be seen on Ravelry and on the #edsanimals hashtag.

Emma remains one of Edward's favourite animals and sits in pride of place on his  mantlepiece when she's not enjoying a cup of tea with him from his tin teaset.  I am certain that my original stone DK bunny will be in my family for a very long time.  

The 'meet my menagerie' campaign is a 50 day countdown to the official launch of my Edward's Menagerie book.  The Edward's Menagerie paperback can be ordered HERE.

Meet my Menagerie: 50 days of #edsanimals

Over the next 50 days I am going to introduce you to Edward's Menagerie.  This #50daysofcrochet campaign will start to uncover the characters that are now so much more than crochet patterns.

Each animal has had a name since September 2013, and now each animal also has a personality, vocation and back-story.

Many of you have already made many of the patterns from Edward's Menagerie, and I hope you'll be amused to read the way I perceive that animal's persona. I would of course like to add my disclaimer that the characters are all fictional.

The new Edward's Menagerie paperback contains full paragraph descriptions of each and every animal pattern.  I will be giving you a taste of their personalities.

If I pull this off I will have written an eye-watering amount of original content in just over a month.  Wish me luck.

Shearing time again and the fleeces are better than ever before!

This week has been another crazy one as the whole team pulled together for our annual 'harvest'. Ben Wheeler the shearer arrived Sunday evening and we all got ready to roll our sleeves up, start the shears at 7am Monday and keep going until the last alpaca was naked. 

This year the whole process was over in just 48hrs thanks to having many able hands on site in the form of our three current textile interns from the University of Loughborough (and plenty of great cake from The Cornflower Cafe). Lisa, Alison and Ellie enjoyed two days of hard work moving alpacas around the farm, fleece grading and assisting the shearer. 

The fleeces coming off The Toft Alpaca Stud herd were of an outstanding quality, being sorted whilst still warm into our top yarn manufacturing grades.  The stud have done very well again this year in the show ring, and their dedication to breeding fineness and a lack of guard hair really shows in the fleeces of the young animals that fly into the top grade year after year. 

Once again lots of you came to have a look at what it was all about. I extend that invitation to anyone who is interested in where their yarn comes from and learning more about farming alpacas here in the UK. We'll be shearing around the same time again next year and there will be more workshop spaces available to come and get hands-on. 

Shearing week is always a fun but exhausting one, and when over 200 alpacas run back into their fields boasting their new haircuts it's a proud moment. It's the beginning of the yarn process, and the decisions are yet to be made about which weights, colours and designs this year's Toft fleeces will be processed into. As many of you will be aware we do buy other fleeces and have now expanded our range to include wool too, but the Toft fleeces remain at the heart of what we do and will make some pretty exclusive top-notch yarn.