Very Big News!

I have been sitting on some news since last June and I am so excited to be able to share it with you today. Juniper Moon Farm will be launching three new yarns line with Knitting Fever, inc., this fall! KFI are the wonderful people who bring you Debbie Bliss, Noro, Louisa Harding  and so many more of the yarns you love and I am positively honored to be in such auspicious company.

These yarns will not be created from the fleece from the JMF sheep. All of our fleece is pre-sold to our CSA Shareholders. These are yarns that I am designing as part of my continuing effort to support wool production and products. These new yarns will be available in yarn shops across the country.

The past 10 months have been a whirlwind as we put these three lines together. Turns out that designing a line of commercially produced yarns has very little in common with producing the small run, hand-dyed yarns that we have built our business on. The learning curve was crazy steep, the hours crazy long. In the end, I learned a lot and developed some yarns that are truly special.

To get started, I had to decide what kinds of yarns we wanted to make. Fiber, content, construction, number of plies- the possibilities were endless. We came up with 10 ideas that were sent out to various mills for prototypes. Once they came back, we met in New York to select which yarns we loved and which mill made it best. We settled on three amazing yarns that we were completely smitten with, all made in Italy.

Next up was coming up with “color stories” for each line, which is much, much harder than it sounds. While we were waiting for the color samples to come back from Italy for our approval, my dear friend and Co-Creative Director Tanis Gray and I sat down to decide what kind of patterns we wanted to release with the yarns. Tanis, a former editor at Vogue Knitting, is madly talented. If the JMF logo was going to be on patterns, I knew I wanted Tanis to design them.

We will be releasing 3 books in the fall, one for each yarn line, and the patterns in each of them are just breath-taking.  I’ll be writing much, much more about this later, but trust me,  you’re going to want to knit them all.

But back to the yarn. I can honestly say that all of them are my favorite. It sounds kooky but it’s totally true! They are each so special and so lovely. They each deserve the spotlight so I’m going to tell you about one of them at a time.

First up is Willa, a 60% Merino, 40% Super Fine Kid Mohair blend in a bulky weight with an ice cream cone twist. I wanted to make this yarn particularly because so many knitters think they don’t like mohair. I say if you don’t like mohair it’s because you’ve never knit with good mohair. Super Fine Kid Mohair doesn’t have any of the itch associated with lesser quality mohair, it’s gloriously soft and has a lovely sheen.

We’re releasing Willa in 12 colors for Fall/Winter 2011

Aberdeen, Merry, Lagoon

Steel, Norwell, Pomegranate

Vitamin C, Bollywood, Concord

Marine, Heliotrope, Aquarium

All photos by Joel Eagle, who is a prince because it’s super-hard to get the colors right.

The colors were designed to work together, so the possibilities are amazing!

Willa was named for Willa Cather, one of my favorite authors.

Tomorrow, I’ll introduce you to Findley, our new lace yarn.