This is the fifth in a series of blog posts featuring the fabulous sponsors of Indie Untangled, taking place on October 17, 2025, in person in Saugerties, NY, and online. Tickets are available and selling fast!
One of the fun parts of working with indie dyers is getting a peek into what sparks their creativity. I love seeing how a favorite book or movie can be transformed into skeins that tell a story.
Before Indie Untangled next month, Cat and Penny of Cesium Yarn are taking us behind the scenes of their newest collection, inspired by The Muppet Christmas Carol. They’ve transformed this holiday classic into a playful, Muppet-filled palette that you can shop from their mobile yarn truck, Ellie, at the show.
Who is Cesium Yarn?
We are a wife-and-wife team of indie dyers based in Roanoke, VA. Cat is our creative maestro who dyes all the yarn, and Penny takes care of the business end of things. We sell our yarn online and travel to events like Indie in our mobile yarn truck, Ellie! When we’re not at shows, we’re snuggling our fur babies and coming up with the next round of colorways to bring to you.
What are collections at Cesium?
When we are ready to release new colorways, we like to give them a theme so they all go together and tell a story. This gives us a more cohesive collection, and makes it more fun for us to create the yarn. Our memories are our biggest source of inspiration, and so many of those memories are tied to the media we’ve enjoyed throughout our lives.
How do we get ideas for a collection?
We come up with our collections in an entirely self-serving way: we talk about what we like and pick something that sounds fun. There’s probably a better way to do it, but this has been working so far, and it means we’re never bored while we’re doing the work! For this year’s Indie Untangled, we knew we wanted to continue being inspired by The Muppets because we had so much fun with last year’s Muppets Movie theme. There is so much Muppets material out there! We also knew we wanted to have it be fall or winter focused, which led us to two obvious options: The Muppet Christmas Carol or Muppets Haunted Mansion. While we were planning this theme, we were so deep in Halloween prep for our Twin Peaks countdown boxes, we decided that a cozy Christmas Carol theme was the way we wanted to go (though keep your eyes peeled for the future 😉).
Once we got the theme nailed down, we watched the movie and looked at each scene for either colors that stood out or colors that ran through the movie as a whole. For Christmas Carol, obviously that meant we were going to have a lot of warm colors, since there are lots of homey scenes that evoke a comfy fireside emotion. But it also meant we got to play with the ghosts’ and early-film Scrooge’s cool colors, which gave us a lot of options for balancing the overall collection.
How do we design each colorway?
Once we know our theme and we’ve spent some time with the inspiration source, we get down to picking individual colorways. For a movie, we take promo images or screenshots of scenes that we think are especially pretty or iconic. We try to start out with a ton so we have lots of options to start with, then narrow it down to the number of colorways we want for a collection. From each image, we pull out the colors that stand out and see which ones go well together. For the Indie collection, we already had favorite characters that we knew we wanted to work into the colorways, and there were some iconic repeating colors that are integral to the color story in the movie itself. It was especially important to us to have a Miss Piggy colorway, for example, because we obviously love her! And we wanted the red in Scrooge’s scarf because it represents his being accepted into the Cratchit family, who are often portrayed in red as well. Each colorway is given a bit of the story to tell.
Once we’ve come up with a palette we like, Cat takes it to the dye studio and puts them on yarn! There are lots of ways each set of colors could be dyed, so we often do a couple of drafts of a variegate to decide which one we like best. We analyze each colorway both unskeined and twisted into a skein to get an idea of what each colorway will look like when it’s worked up. We also look at all the colorways together to make sure the overall collection is cohesive and tells the story we want it to tell. When we’re satisfied with each colorway individually and the collection as a whole, we are ready to photograph them and get them ready for release day!
What will the final colorways look like?
You can find our Muppet Christmas Carol-inspired yarn on the Cesium Yarn truck at Indie Untangled, and on cesiumyarn.com starting the day of the event! Plus watch our stories on Instagram for sneak peeks of the final colorways in the days leading up to Indie.
