Spring Renewal!

Spring is finally here and the sun is shinning today! 

Spring resonates with renewal and starting fresh, getting the garden ready, spring cleaning etc… 

For us this year is means changes and good ones for that! Today we are talking new dye process and later on this week we will talk new yarn.

Ever since we started our business, we’ve always used great dyes: as eco-friendly as possible, yielding top-quality product. Until recently, however, a tiny amount of heavy metal was unavoidable in turquoise and black dyes.

Then, we heard about new dyes that are completely free of heavy metals, which means that they are even more eco-friendly, as well as being safer, healthier for the dyers (that would be us!).

Those new dyes make for a process that requires less heat and less acid to achieve the same result. Again, this leads to a more ecological process, because we save on resources (such as electricity and auxiliaries).

To make things even better – really, that’s what makes us so excited about this new process! – the colors made with these dyes are AWESOME.

They’re pretty, of course (see below!), but the yarn is more lightfast, washfast, and stable. The colors are richer than ever.

Basically, we ended up with yarn that is attractive, durable, and greener than before: good on the eye, good for the earth. That’s what we call a win-win! But it is time to move on to the colors themselves…

What did we do once we started experimenting with the new dyes? Well, we came up with a whole new palette, that’s what we did. A 28-color palette, to be exact.

While it’s not easy to part with the older colors, the way the new dyes take to the yarn is so different and new, we just couldn’t reproduce them exactly. It felt like the perfect time to reinvent our palette.

We are very happy to say that it was carefully planned. All the colors can be used together in a colorwork project – I recently shared a few pairings & trios on Instagram and Facebook if you want to see examples.

We already have plans to expand the palette, but we’re starting off with 28 shades, reminiscent of a spring forest: soft, muted, pale shades, but also earthy, cool, darker ones.

Most of them are semisolid, but we also rethought our speckled colorways. They are now fully integrated in the palette, which makes them easier to pair with semisolids (peek at the color page on our website!), but they are also dyed differently, to yield an even better-looking knitted fabric.

Those who have worked with Pixel, launched earlier this winter, may have already seen the difference.

We are very excited and proud of this new palette. It is more polished, more practical, focused on wearability while also sophisticated. We can’t wait to see what crafters do with them!

Last, but not least: new Nuance sets! We kept two colorways and created 4 new ones. All of the sets go from one color to…almost another one.

We did that so that you would have the possibility to add a 6th color to your gradient by using a regular skein of Leizu Fingering in the matching color.

A lovely week to everyone and happy knitting! 

Julie & Jean-François