INDIE FOCUS
taking care of all of our admin, Alan will be
winding coned yarn into skeins for me to dye,
and may be working on project bags in the
sewing room. Then I check the yarn inventory
and decisions on what to dye that day. We
have a huge range of yarn bases – over 60
different bres, blends and weights in wool,
alpaca, silk, camelhair, cashmere, mohair
and yak – and last time we checked we had
over 630 colourways in stock. I don’t have a
set colour range for each base but mix and
match, so the permutations are endless!
You specialise in dyeing lace and
4-ply yarns. What makes these your
go-to base weights?
I love working with ner weights of yarn. My
favourite styles of knitting are the traditional
ones and I don’t like to wear anything thicker
than 4-ply myself, so those are the weights
I concentrate on. I only use natural bres,
apart from the small amount of synthetic
sparkle thread in two of my laceweights, as
they are more environmentally friendly.
Can you tell us about your Luxury
Yarn club?
The Yarn Club started running regularly in
- We have four a year, each one lasting
three months and featuring a different
yarn each month, with colours based on a
common theme. Recent clubs have been
Spring Songbirds, Mediterranean Flowers
and Norfolk Landscapes and the current one
is Glens and Braes – inspired by our trips
to Scotland. We usually offer the yarn in a
choice of two different yarn weights, normally
lace and 4-ply, but occasionally we include
a ne lace option too. Customers sign up
for a single club at a time, so they can join
as and when the theme appeals to them.
Subscription numbers are very limited as
each skein is painted individually, so I won’t
produce dozens of each colour. This keeps
the colourways exclusive as they are always
new to the range and are not made generally
available until after that
particular club has nished.Your lace patterns are
exquisite. Do you think
it is important to be
able to design for your
own yarn?
Thank you. Having my
own patterns is de nitely
an aid to selling the yarn,
as it helps to show how
the colourways look when
knitted up. I started creating
my own designs after we rst exhibited at a
yarn show, at Fibre-East in 2013. I’d knitted
several samples of other designers’ shawls
using my yarns, and people kept asking if
they could buy the pattern as well as the
yarn. Clearly, I couldn’t sell those patterns,
so went home and came up with my rst
design – Forest Flowers. This was followed
quite quickly by the Abbey and Highland
Heather Shawls.Do you have any future plans for
Watercolours & Lace?
I’m busy working on some new designs – our
next mystery knit-along shawl design should
launch later this spring. I also want to“I sometimes
dye with a
particular colour
in mind, inspired
by a landscape
or fl ower”
Find out more...
Facebook: Watercoloursandlace
Ravelry: Watercolours and Lace
http://www.watercoloursandlace.co.ukcreate more garment designs, particularly
some Fair Isle ones using my 4-ply
Shetland mini-skeins, as well as more of
the shawls I’m probably best known for.
I’m always on the lookout for new yarn
bases to try, and we’ve added three new
4-plys in the last couple of months – a
Bluefaced Leicester/silk blend, a lustrous
Wensleydale Wool and
a Falklands Merino/
alpaca/silk blend. Quite
often I’ll obtain a few
kilos of a yarn that’s not
generally available and
isn’t repeatable, such
as our Lambswool Silk
Tweed and Merino Mohair
Cobweb. A couple of
times these have been
spun speci cally for me.
I’m collaborating with a
company called Great
Escapes, who offer tutored weekend
breaks on various needlecrafts in country
house hotels in the South of England.
We’re trialling workshops on knitted and
crochet shawls for the rst time this year,
so I’m really looking forward to meeting
some keen knitters and crocheters for
those. You can nd out more at
http://www.greatescapes-weekends.com