Lab Goddess Fibre Club September 2016

Last week saw the shipment of the last instalment of the third quarter of the 2016 Lab Goddess Fibre Club - Oh Be a Fine Girl on Falkland.

Let me talk about the base first: after a couple of months of crunchy wools, I decided September was a good time for something soft and luxurious. It's also my birthday month, so a treat was called for! This superfine Falkland Merino is soft, squishy and breathtakingly easy to spin. This fibre will make fantastic shawls, cowls and hats - good for anything that's going to be next to your skin.

The colourway is inspired by Annie Jump Cannon, an American astronomer and the person who came up with a new classification for star magnitude using visible light. Over her 40 year career in astronomy, she manually classified (i.e. with her bare eyes through a telescope) approximately 350,000 stars, including 300 variable stars, five novas and one pair of binary stars.

By Jan Homann - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6504291

The colourway name and palette come from the spectral classification system that Annie Jump Cannon invented, which is based on the emission spectra of the hydrogen atom, and reflects the effective temperature of the star. The classifications are identified as ), B, A, F, G, K and M, andhave relative colour labels: blue, blue white, white, yellow white, yellow, orange and red, ranging from hottest to coolest. The colourway is a repeating sequence of the spectral classes.

The name comes from the mnemonic that Annie Jump Cannon derived to keep track of the classifications: “Oh Be A Fine Girl, Kiss Me.” 

This is the last month of the current fibre club, but spaces are still available for the fourth quarter, running from October through December - space is limited so don't wait!