Free Shipping on orders over €75 (Germany) | €125 (International)
Free Shipping on orders over €75 (Germany) | €125 (International)
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.
Comments will be approved before showing up.
November 19, 2024 12 min read
October 28, 2024 8 min read
About three weeks ago, I had surgery. Nothing major, and it was planned - but it was my first time undergoing general anaesthesia and facing an uncertain recovery period, both of which made me quite nervous. I knew that I was going to be in the hospital for two days, if everything went well, but then it was between one and three weeks of recovering at home, depending on how fast my body was going to heal.
Needless to say, I packed knitting for the hospital, but I didn’t feel like picking up my needles until my second day in the hospital. And then I knit. I knit, and knit, and knit. Curiously enough, I always get the urge to clear off my needles this time of the year - something about the weather changing, sweater season approaching, maybe? And this year, this urge coincided with me wanting to do something while watching copious amounts of Netflix without having to think very hard about what I was going to knit. Win win!
June 26, 2024 1 min read
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.
Sign up to our weekly newsletter to get the latest yarn news and pattern inspiration!
Every Tuesday our newsletter arrives in your inbox, full to the brim with Making Stories goodness. If you would like to join in on the fun, fill in the form below.
As a thank you, we gift you a digital publication of your choice!