This is the second in a series of blog posts featuring the fabulous sponsors of Indie Untangled, taking place on October 18, 2024, in person in Saugerties, NY, and online. In-person tickets are available and selling fast! You can also register for the free online event here.
Farm & Fiber Knits, a digital and print exploration of local farms and natural fibers, launched at a time when more crafters have started paying attention to where their wool comes from. We’re so excited to have them as a supporter of a show with so many vendors offering domestically- and locally-produced yarns.
Tell me how Farm & Fiber Knits came to be?
As one of Long Thread Media’s founders put it, knitting is something that we all do — when we’re listening to a podcast, on a road trip, even in a team meeting, most of the editors had knitting projects on the needles. Plus, great knitting stories kept coming up while working on our classic publications Spin Off and PieceWork, and we found so many great natural-fiber yarns. We thought it was time to bring knitters on the journey from the farms to the yarns we love to the knitting in our hands.
Who is behind Farm & Fiber Knits?
Senior Editor Kate Larson had a flock of her own sheep and several popular knitting designs even before she took on the role! Kate loves exploring different natural fibers and discovering farmers who are producing wonderful yarns in a sustainable way. She’s also the senior editor of Spin Off.
Cofounder Anne Merrow used to buy yarn at the Greenmarket when she lived in New York City, before she started the digital sock-knitting magazine Sockupied. Staff from our other publications Spin Off, PieceWork, Handwoven, and Little Looms also work on Farm & Fiber Knits. There’s knitting everywhere we look…
What makes Farm & Fiber Knits different from other knitting publications?
Like lots of knitting publications, we publish original designs and technical information. Farm & Fiber Knits takes it a step further: it connects the knitting in your hands to the farmers and plants or animals that produced the fiber, the skilled artisans who developed the yarn, and the designers who developed the patterns you’re knitting. We strive to not only help you improve your knitting but make it part of a more meaningful, sustainable, authentic world.
What can people find in the magazine that they can’t find on the website and vice versa?
We’re so proud that our first magazine issue had a story by Alice Starmore with photos by her daughter, Jade, that takes readers to the island of St Kilda in the Outer Hebrides. Alice has been working on an imaginative and utterly unique series of knits and textiles that are inspired by and photographed in the island’s landscape and deserted villages. Also in the first issue, Meg Swansen tells the story of how it took her years of patience, persistence, and ultimately a visit to an Austrian castle to publish Twisted-Stitch Knitting and make the technique fully available to English-speaking knitters.
With one print issue per year, we can generally dive more deeply into stories and enjoy some rich, up-close photos. Whether you experience it in print or as a PDF, the issue invites you to step into the pages, handle that shawl, and take a deep sniff of that yarn.
On the website, we post 2–4 new articles every week and several new patterns per month, so subscribers can find so much more than we could include in the magazine. There are also videos, including the new series The Yarn Chronicles, which explores the journey of how wool comes to you ready to knit. We’re so proud of how that series introduces you to a small farmer, a young shearer, a regional fiber mill, and designers who use the yarn. Subscribers also have access to exclusive podcast episodes.
What are some future plans you can share for Farm & Fiber Knits?
We’re working on a print issue for 2025! The first issue was such a joy that we jumped at the chance to make another one. We’re releasing new episodes of our first video series The Yarn Chronicles: The Journey from Sheep to Cloth through the middle of November 2024, and we’re planning another series for early 2025 focusing on color in yarn and knitting. We’re also working on our next pattern collection—it’s always exciting to see what knitwear designers dream up, and we have some sweaters, hand-coverings, hats, and more that we’re dying to cast on.
