There are many things involved when creating your own yarn. Apart of course of the continuous learning, the process itself is very long. Although we have our personal lives and day jobs, working with yarn is a pleasure to both of us, and I think this makes us very very lucky!
Our goal as a company is to have our own very yarn, from sheep to colored skein (100% traceable) but this is not easy and takes quite some time for planning, getting contacts, and preparing stock.
In the meantime, we then decided to outsource our first yarn collection. Why not start using good quality undyed yarn instead? We then bought a few different ones to try! We are in love with all, each one has a different quality that makes them so lovely! There are sock, lace, and DK yarns. Although most of them are superwash, we will also have a small amount of 100% non-superwash wool which is really good for Fair Isle knitting too!
What about the colors then? Let’s dive right in! We first started choosing a nice palette of colors. We narrowed it down to 5 main colors that would guide us this season. We wanted to bring all the Spring feelings in this time and this was our starting point
Then, we started working, or can I say “having lots of fun”, creating lots of batches with amazing colors and a lot of testing! It is amazing to see how we can create so many color variations all with natural ingredients! Here are some of the ingredients you will be able to find in our first yarn batch: Madder root, Tansy flowers, Onions (red and yellow), Indigo, and Walnut. And do you wanna know a fun fact? A lot of those ingredients were collected by us! Here is a few sneak peeks (from left to right): non-superwash wool bundles (for a very special pattern), fingering yarn (100% SW merino wool), and DK (100% SW merino wool).
We also experimented with creating naturally speckled yarn. And the results are so incredibly pretty. We would like to invite you to save the date of our first collection! Mark in your calendars: March 20, on the first equinox of this year we will release a small batch (about 100 skeins) of naturally dyed yarn as our first collection. Follow us on Instagram (@allkemi) or subscribe to our newsletter to be the first one to know!
Cheers,
Natalia and Betina