You may have seen me write things like ‘Pendle Sport is now updated’ or ‘shop update happening’ and wondered what this means..
Hand dyed yarn comes in small batches as it is dyed by me in my garden shed here in Yorkshire. This is what is so unique about it; but it does mean that batches can be in stock then disappear quite quickly. And once they’re gone they’re gone.
So what happens behind the scenes?
Well firstly I have to buy the undyed yarn, so I usually buy 5kg+ of each base which splits nicely into ten batches of five 100g skeins (some yarns come in 50g skeins like Eldwick Lace and Lowther Lace). Five 100g skeins usually fit nicely into my dye pots and sinks so that all works out nicely. I prepare the yarn by adding extra ties to it to try and reduce tangles from happening whilst it’s in the dye pots.
Then comes the dyeing. As you might imagine, this is the most time consuming part. I usually make a list of which colours I’m going to dye although it can change as I go along. A lot of the time the colours I choose are literally what I can see out of the shed window in my garden so they are often very seasonal, but also I have very eclectic taste in colours so I will sometimes choose to do a colourway because I just really fancy it.
The next stage is to rinse and dry the yarn. I have a spin dryer in the dye shed so once the yarn is rinsed I’ll spin dry it so that it’s not dripping wet. Then in summer it goes straight on the washing line if it’s warm and dry enough outside, but in winter I use heated airers. These have shelves in so I am drying the yarn flat (which also makes it nice and bouncy or fluffy) and it dries overnight as the airers are pretty warm and efficient. They have cotton covers over them to keep the heat in too. Obviously using electricity for this isn’t my favourite, but the airers are pretty energy efficient. We do also have a stove downstairs so if we’ve got the fire lit in winter I can also hang yarn in front of it. I do like the multifunctional aspect of doing that!
Once the yarn is dry we’re still only part way through the process as the skeins all need twisting into the nice neat twists you see in my photos. I have an employee - Claire - who comes and helps a couple of times a week so she does most of the yarn processing. She snips most of the ties off the yarn to neaten it up - plus doing this gives her chance to look out for knots or other imperfections (although they can easily be missed). Then she twists the skeins on a machine we have in the office - it’s basically a really chunky meat hook powered by a drive band to make it spin, and we have a sewing machine treadle plugged in to control the spin speed plus start/stop. I used to twist up all my skeins by hand but gave myself repetitive strain injuries in my right shoulder blade, shoulder, elbow, and wrist from it. So I haven’t done that for a long time and I wouldn’t ever ask anyone else to do it either! There’s a knack to twisting up skeins even on a skein twister. We basically try and get them as neat and even as possible.
Next up there’s all the labelling. We use thin card bands to go around our skeins and these have my illustrated logos on them, with care instructions on the back/inside. We use a Dymo label printer to print a sticky label with the specific yarn and colourway/dyelot information on. So they all need to be printed first, and these days we use them to stick the yarn bands on. For a long time we used Japanese staple-less staplers on our yarn bands but in recent years we found that they were getting worse for quality and not doing the job, so we eventually gave up on them.
All of this takes a while up to this point, and whilst Claire’s busy doing her job I’ll be dyeing the next lot of yarn plus adding all the batches to the website (not to mention doing all the other admin that comes with a business). With hand dyed yarn it isn’t necessarily a case of just restocking the same colours over and over - I have over 200 regular colourways that I produce by hand, so with that many to choose from I tend to cycle through them rather than go for the same ones over and over. Of course this means more work - I can’t just go into a listing on the website and re-stock it, and instead need to create a new listing for each (or most of them) new dyelot.
Phew. The yarn is all ready now. All that remains is to photograph it all and get it selling! Again, with hand dyed yarn you can’t really just use the same photos over and over (or at least I don’t), so that means that every single batch that is stocked is freshly photographed. If the value in hand dyed yarn is the uniqueness of every batch, then that uniqueness needs to be photographed. Colours can differ from screen to screen so the challenge is trying to photograph yarn as accurately as possible and the best way to do this is by doing it outside in cloudy conditions. This diffuses the light from the sun and means no harsh highlights and shadows, plus gives you the best white balance for the colours. It’s not foolproof, of course. And I find that in winter people are more likely to be unhappy with the colour of their yarn. Why? Because they open their parcels after work when it’s dark outside and they have their indoor lights on. These have a strong yellow cast and so the yarn can look quite different to how it does in natural light. Anyway, for all these reasons I do my photography outside on cloudy days, and it does really need to be dry for me to be able to work! It means I can find myself waiting for the right weather for photography, and I know that other people set up little indoor studios but I’ve tried so many times over the years and it just never works well for me, or at least I’m never happy with the photos I produce in those conditions. I always end up regretting my life choices when I’ve been stood outside for hours photographing yarn in winter conditions with a windchill of below zero celsius, but it is worth it!
That’s the bulk of the work done then. All that’s left is to upload the photos to the website, make the product listings active, and then spend time posting about it all over social media and on the newsletter. Ultimately it is all very time consuming, but it’s the nature of the job and it produces yarn that can be enjoyed and worn for many years to come. I have a lot of garments made in my hand dyed yarn that are well over a decade old at this point and still bring me joy, comfort, and warmth. They wear really well, draw compliments from people, and are really satisfying to wear/use knowing that I made them myself. I can make the sleeves exactly as long and not-baggy as I want, I can make the neckline exactly as high as I want. I can make my hats and fingerless mitts nice and close fitting, or slouchy, or whatever I feel like. This is the beauty of handmade. Below is a selfie of my September Morn jumper (pattern by Thea Colman) made in Pendle Aran in 2014, so it's still going strong (very strong!!) 14 years later at time of writing.
I think I’ve captured the whole process there for you but if you have any questions do let me know. I’ve probably missed some key bit of the process out or something!
If you liked this post you might also be interested in this one about variegated yarns (which I do sometimes) and how they knit/crochet up: https://www.edencottageyarns.co.uk/blogs/news/a-note-about-how-variageted-yarns-knit-crochet-up