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CVM/Romeldale 3.0

$ 16.00 USD

Quick Facts

Gauge: A woolen-spun, fingering-weight two-ply yarn, CVM/Romeldale 3.0 produces a stable and cohesive sweater fabric in the 6-7 stitches per inch range on US 2-4 (2.75-3.5mm) needles. For looser decorative fabrics where durability isn't a concern, you can go up to a US 8 (5mm) needle or beyond with lovely results depending on the desired effect. As always, use these numbers as a starting point for your own swatching.

Put-up:
     Alabaster 215 yards (195m) 
     Sandstone and Shale 200 yards (182m)
     Iron 210 yards (192m)

Skein weight: 50g 

Care: Hand wash in warm water with mild soap. Rinse in same temperature water and set out on towel to dry away from direct sunlight or heat.

Source: Wool from CVM/Romeldale sheep raised in Pennsylvania. After shearing, each fleece has been hand-skirted and sorted by color. The fibers were then scoured, sorted again into color groups, picked, carded, spun, skeined, and given a second scour by Anne Bosch at Blackberry Ridge Woolen Mill in Mt. Horeb, Wisconsin. Skeins were twisted and tagged in Biddeford, Maine, from which they are also shipped to you. 

  • The California Variegated Mutant began as a fluke. In 1915, a man named A.T. Spencer attended the Pan-American exposition in San Francisco and came home with a bunch of New Zealand Romney sheep. He crossed them with his Rambouillet flock, hoping that the longwool Romney genes would help his Rambouillet sheep grow longer wool. It worked.

    In the 1940s and '50s, another man and some partners took over the breeding plan of what had, by then, become the Romeldale sheep breed. Glen Eidman was one of those partners. It came as quite a surprise when one of his ewes gave birth to a ewe lamb with a variegated coat. Other breeders might have put the lamb on the meat truck pronto, because color can jeopardize the commercial textile viability of a flock.

    But this was California in the 1960s, and Eidman had bigger plans. He waited and waited and waited, trusting that the genetic odds would be in his favor. Sure enough, a few years later, a variegated ram was born. He sent his two flukes away for a romantic weekend, and over the next 15 years he continued to work diligently to create a breed that would consistently produce this same miracle of variegation.The resulting breed was named California Variegated Mutant, or CVM for short. It's often referred to as CVM/Romeldale to honor the genetics that produced the variegated offspring.

    For knitters and handspinners, CVM is like catnip. It has exquisite color subtlety, which you rarely see in a finewool. It has a generous staple length and a high crimp, making it easy to spin, tremendously lofty, and hard-wearing.

    So rare is CVM that you'll be hard-pressed to find a commercial yarn version of it except for small batches from the breeders themselves. In fact, the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy considers it the most critically rare sheep breed in the United States. If there's CVM at a fleece show, I will not leave empty handed.

    Which is a long way of trying to express just how lucky we were to get our hands on another batch of this fiber, and how rare this yarn is.