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We're here to help you stitch sustainability into every aspect of your making.
With our carefully curated selection of non-superwash, plastic-free yarns and notions, we have everything you need to get started on your next project - and the one after that.
Here's to a wardrobe of knits we love and want to wear for years to come!
We're here to help you stitch sustainability into every aspect of your making.
With our carefully curated selection of non-superwash, plastic-free yarns and notions, we have everything you need to get started on your next project - and the one after that.
Here's to a wardrobe of knits we love and want to wear for years to come!
May 22, 2024 4 min read
The joy of spinning your own yarn is that you can design the yarn from the fibre up. In theory this means you can hold the pattern or project you’d like to make in mind, and create the yarn to match.
However in practice, at least at the beginning, that’s often not how it goes. Perhaps your spinning is either a bit inconsistent, or you find it hard to spin to a specific weight of yarn. Maybe you enjoy spinning from gloriously dyed variegated fibre and the result is very busy-looking yarn. It might be that you have small, precious skeins of practice yarn, or on the other end of the scale, you’re amassing hand-spun yarn faster than you can possibly knit through it.
We’re going to take a look at a few of my hand-spun projects that cover some or all of these situations, and will hopefully inspire you to make more with your hand-spun.
These are the Holding Hands mitts, designed by Claire Walls, which I made for my husband years ago. They still live in his coat pockets and come out every winter.
Shown here is my Aspis Hat, using some hand-spun Cheviot as the contrast, with an undyed commercial Bluefaced Leicester/Masham blend as the main colour. The hand-spun yarn was left over from making the pair of mittens above.
My hand-spun version of the Leoma Shawl uses two different hand-spun yarns with quite low contrast. The yarn was much finer than the pattern called for, but using the same needle size as the original gave a much lighter, more airy fabric.
It’s become almost cliche that crafters who take up spinning are then likely to begin weaving. I am no exception to this. Five months passed from my first clumsy attempt at spinning to when I began to weave with the yarn I was making. I started with a home-made tapestry loom and progressed to a rigid heddle loom a while later.
I made a skirt from 400 grams of approximately DK-weight hand-spun yarn: 200 grams each of two different colours. I made the skirt from panels, pleated into a waistband so that none of my precious fabric would be wasted.
The whole process – from beginning to spin the yarn, through weaving it up then sewing – took about six weeks. And while I did obsess over it a little, that was in evenings and weekends, working around work and childcare. To create a knitted garment of similar size would have taken way longer, and much more yarn!
There’s nothing to say that patterns have to be designed for hand-spun yarn for you to use them. But if you’d like project inspiration for multicoloured hand-spun, look at designs that use yarns like Spincycle Dyed In The Wool, Chimera by RiverKnits, and Noro.
Here I’m wearing the Ironwork Tee by Dianna Walla in a kitchen-sink blend of alpaca, angora, Shetland, Bluefaced Leicester, mohair and probably some other things I’ve forgotten. It’s the fuzziest thing. The cardigan almost reaches my knees, and is the Gown cardigan by Irene Lin, made from a very similar blend to the tee, minus the angora.
I will mention that I have been spinning for many years, and do tend to get very involved in projects – so if you’re just starting out, don’t be put off. The intention is to illustrate that once you get comfortable with spinning, you can be quite deliberate about the yarn you create, and make things you may never have dreamed of being able to.
Marina is an enthusiast of slow textile crafts, as well as a yarn dyer and knitwear designer.
Using local fibres wherever possible, she’s been spinning yarn by hand for almost a decade and believes in learning by experimenting.
She works from her home in a small rural village in the South-West of England. Find her yarn and patterns at www.marinaskua.com, and follow her projects on Instagram and podcast on YouTube.
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We've seen dramatic changes in the knitting magazine landscape over the past 12 months: Pom Pom Quarterly ceased publication at the end of 2023, Laine sold the majority of their company to one of the biggest Finnish publishers, and Amirisu first pivoted to books, and now to an online-only media outlet. Multicraftual magazines that often included knitting patterns were equally as affected: Making pivoted to a combined app and monthly membership business model, and Taproot first changed to a preorder model, and then very abruptly closed their business (the website is offline, hence no link).
This has left us standing as one of the very, very few indie knitting magazines in the market.
We're a delightfully tiny team dedicated to all things sustainability in knitting. With our online shop filled with responsibly produced yarns, notions and patterns we're here to help you create a wardrobe filled with knits you'll love and wear for years to come.
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