Choosing the right yarn

If there is one thing that can make my day, it's getting to visit a yarn store. There's something about the atmosphere, seeing yarns that I love and discovering new ones. Getting to squish those skeins, and see all the colours in real life, there is nothing better!

Unfortunately though, getting to visit yarn shops we love and seeing all that woolly goodness in real life isn't always possible. There may not be a stockist close by for the yarn you're looking at, you may not be able to physically get to a yarn shop very often, or in the case of the last few years with lockdowns, bricks and mortar shops have had to close and move their business online.

Here in the Northern Hemisphere, we are officially into the warmer months, which brings around the age old crafting question; Are you a seasonal knitter?! If, like us, you never put your needles down, do you find yourself looking for warm weather projects?

In our last blog post, we introduced you to one of our favourite sustainable yarn producers, Garthenor, chatted all about their gorgeous sock yarn, Snowdonia Sock and did a little project planning to get the sock inspiration flowing! If you missed that post, you can catch up on it by clicking here.

Today, we want to take a look at another of their yarns; Beacons! This DK weight yarn has been a firm favourite ever since we introduced it into the webshop, and there's a good reason for that.

In the Autumn of last year, we permanently introduced a selection of carefully curated, sustainably made yarn to the webshop. Our aim for selling yarns was simple; we wanted to bring you an opportunity to shop beautiful yarns with the confidence of knowing they were sustainably produced. We wanted to take all the guesswork out of knitting sustainably for you, knowing we'd done all the research for you!

When we were thinking of yarns we'd like to sell in the webshop, one name came up immediately; Garthenor.

Get comfy friends, because today we're tackling a pretty big topic, and one that we've been wanting to write about for some time - Substituting Yarn.

While it's lovely to be able to use the suggested yarn, there are lots of reasons why you would choose another.

Have you ever excitedly cast on a project with your new yarn and a good few inches into it you realise the stitch pattern just isn't showing up the way you would like and aren't sure why. It's because this particular yarn doesn't have good stitch definition.