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Can you believe it, after months of work and planning, Issue 4 is here. Have you checked it out yet?! No! Let me tell you all about it.

Issue 4 is an invitation to take a look at the craft we love and share as a way of challenging the status quo, changing standards that no longer serve us, and, yes, subverting the norm.

Back in April, we kicked off our new series of blog post surrounding Sustainability In Knitting with our first blog post - What Is In My Yarn? In this article, we broke down all the types of fibres you can find when knitting, including animal fibres, plant fibres, synthetic fibres, and the group that falls somewhere in the middle, synthetic plant fibres.

Today, I was to focus in on one particular group - synthetic fibres, and if they are as bad as we think.

Last week, we shared Karida Collins' (Neighborhood Fiber Co.) perspective on dyeing and selling superwash and non-superwash yarns in our 'Indie Dyer Perspective' series on superwash - and this week I'm thrilled to welcome another indie dyer I've admired for a long time to these virtual pages: Bethany Evans-Brown from Woolberry Fiber Co.!

Woolberry Fiber Co. is a completely family-owned and run yarn business: Bethany and her husband Rhys hand-dye all of their yarn while taking care of two little ones - and they just welcomed their first employee to Woolberry Fiber Co.!

Back in May, when we published our first two articles on superwash yarn where we explored why superwash yarn is not sustainable and looked for more sustainable superwash options we received quite a few comments over on Instagram asking 'But what about the indie dyers?'

It's true - a lot, if not most, indie dyers dye on superwash bases. Superwash yarn takes dye beautifully, and it's still very high in demand, so it doesn't come as a surprise that it constitutes a large portion of the indie dyed yarn market!

So, you are out yarn shopping and you've found a lovely new-to-you skein of goodness. You spot the little green t-shirt symbol that tells you that is GOT's certified. We all know it means something good, right? But what does it actually mean? And what does it take for yarn to be GOT's certified?

Let’s cut to the chase right away: Yarn is expensive. Traceable, ethically and sustainably produced yarn even more so. It’s not rare that a 50g skein of sustainable yarn comes in at EUR 15 or more. Which is, when you consider the factors that contribute to that number - fair compensation for everyone involved in the yarn production process, the cost of setting up sustainable, maybe even certified production processes, as well as offsetting your CO2 emissions, for example - often a fair price!

Sadly, though, it’s one that quite a lot of us cannot afford. So how do we solve the conundrum of wanting to knit with sustainable yarns, and yet not having the budget for them?