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.
Hi my lovelies! When we received our latest restock of BC Garn's Semilla Melange (one of my favorite sustainable budget-friendly yarns - 100% wool, non-superwash, GOTS-certified), I couldn't resist: I had to pull out our box of De Rerum Natura Bérénice, the wonderful fluffy silk-mohair-merino yarn, to see if I could find a few color matches.
And I did! 12 perfect matches – I couldn't believe it. So naturally, I had to share them with you!
Hi lovelies! You know how much I adore our 100% non-superwash wool color-changing yarn "Zauberwolle", right? I already knit myself a Pressed Flowers Hat and a Pressed Flowers Cardigan in it, and I can't wait to get the next project on the needles.
I thought it would be really cool to combine Zauberwolle with BC Garn's Semilla Melange, a wonderfully woolly GOTS-certified sport-weight yarn. (I knit the Pressed Flowers Cardigan in this exact combo, and it's a good one.) So imagine my delight when I realized how many colors of Semilla Melange actually work perfectly with the color-changing magic of Zauberwolle!
Without further ado, let me introduce you to a whopping 24 perfect color matches!
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.
Spinning yarn can seem a daunting craft, requiring arcane tools and techniques, but the fundamentals are simple. It is about adding twist to fibre, which gives it the strength to not pull apart. Most preparations of fibre will require drafting – that is, continuously pulling the fibre so fewer strands (or staples) are twisted together to make a thinner yarn. Drafting and adding twist are all that are needed to make yarn.
You might hear about woollen and worsted spinning, and the long- and short-draw methods associated with them. While interesting, and good to understand when improving your skills, the beginner spinner doesn’t need to worry overmuch about these terms.
We’re going to look at the tools and fibre you’ll need before you start spinning yarn.
Learning to spin yarn comes with a huge array of new jargon, and a lot of these terms relate to how the fibre is prepared. Whether animal or plant fibre, there is a variety of ways it can be processed from raw material into something you can spin into yarn.
We’re going to look at some of the common formats available to hand spinners, what their characteristics are and the kind of spinning techniques they’re suitable for.
