Dear Spinning Circle,

Today. On Wool n' Spinning Radio. Dionne sat Rebecca & Rachel down to quiz them about Knit City Vancouver 2025. Rebecca & Rachel had spent the weekend exploring the marketplace, meeting with everyone in our community & of course, shopping. We share some of the trends we noticed emerge this year, including maching knitting, crochet (yay!) and more. Lots of fleece talk this month - we fell into a bit of a rabbit hole at the end of the show about a property of wool that Melissa (MellyKnits) and Rachel have been exploring with increasing interest, along with Dionne and her fibre blending experiments, called porosity (skip to ~45 minutes to listen to just this discussion). The definition of porosity is the quality or degree of having minute spaces or holes through which liquid or air may pass. Melissa has described this phenomenon to me in the past as fleece, that when felt, has 'holes' or 'spaces' that she can 'fill' with something like cotton, possum, and other fibres. Silk, alpaca and llama seem to go into most fleece without problems. Dionne was the first in our community to put a word to the attributes of these fleeces that are able to blend with these sometimes difficult to card fibres. I hope you enjoy our conversation!

Photos of Rachel & Rebecca at Knit City in their matching Jethro Cardigans, along with photos of their hauls and Rachel's tea towels inspired by her SweetGeorgia colourway (woven by Kathy Cunha) available on the Patreon post here.

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• Knit Social here
• SweetGeorgia Yarns here
• All Wound Up Knitting & Sheep Fleeces here (reach out to Megan for information about her fleeces & shipping)
• Mawdsley Fibre Arts here (look for Helen's hollow whorl spindles)
• MellyKnits here
• Caliope Fibres here
• Coniagas Textiles here
• Fireweed Fibre Co here
• Crafty Jaks Boutique here

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Thank you for listening! If you would like to be a guest on Wool n' Spinning Radio, please reach out below, in the comments, or send an email to rachel@welfordpurls.com.

Until next month, keep wool close and your spindles closer!

I hope you enjoyed our conversation. If this is your first time tuning into Wool n’ Spinning Radio, welcome. This audio podcast is a spin-off from the original podcast available on YouTube at youtube.com/RachelSmith. Rachel has been podcasting since 2014, talking about handspinning and making yarn. Her passion is working with her handspun yarns in projects, both knit and woven. Links to the website, Instagram and more are available in the show notes and at Patreon.com/woolnspinning.

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Thank you for listening! If you would like to be a guest on Wool n' Spinning Radio, please reach out below, in the comments, or send an email to rachel@welfordpurls.com.

Until next month, keep wool close and your spindles closer!

Dear Spinning Circle,

Today. On Wool n' Spinning Radio, Dionne, Rebecca and Rachel attempted to sow dissent and debate the merits of calling those handspun yarns that are not conventionally spun as 'novelty', 'art' or 'textured'. Increasingly, we are seeing people describe their textured or art yarns as what they actually are, be it 'corespun' or 'supercoils' or any other number of yarn structures that we know and celebrate on a regular basis. It's important to celebrate those in our wider handspinning community who have really helped to make these yarns household names by sharing their own practice around them, as well as, teaching others and fostering an environment of learning, exploration and joy around learning these various techniques. Calling our yarns by the structure really helps others to understand what was done to create that yarn since, as others' increase their knowledge, they will be able to recreate their own yarn, using those same techniques and thus, sharing with others.

For photos containing examples of textured or art yarns, look at the Patreon post here.

This episode of Wool n' Spinning Radio is to celebrate the beginning of our last part of study for our 2-year book study of Sarah Anderson's Book of Yarn Designs. Part IV is dedicated to the chapters in Sarah's book that come under the heading 'Novelty Yarns'. Much of Rebecca's work on The Wool Circle, which is one of the podcasts available when you subscribe on Patreon, will be centred around these yarns beginning now, September 2025 until the end of the year. The syllabus is linked here.

Rebecca has been spinning singles in August to get ready for her sampling schedule and I know she is excited to share her plans for the yarns with you as the Fall goes on! She will be starting with corespinning and variations, including super coils. Next, boucle will be explored. From the basic structure to some variations, this is an increasingly common yarn that was previously not really discussed much by knitters and seemed to be for weavers. That trend is changing and it's exciting to see how yarns evolve. Finally, some of the complicated and often very beautiful yarns that have those show-stopping features to them will finish us off: Pigtails, beehives, cocoons, and tailspun.

For those who have been wanting to learn those techniques to create those yarns, this is the time to jump into Patreon, join The Wool Circle and begin learning alongside Rebecca.

I hope you enjoyed our conversation. If this is your first time tuning into Wool n’ Spinning Radio, welcome. This audio podcast is a spin-off from the original podcast available on YouTube at youtube.com/RachelSmith. Rachel has been podcasting since 2014, talking about handspinning and making yarn. Her passion is working with her handspun yarns in projects, both knit and woven. Links to the website, Instagram and more are available in the show notes and at Patreon.com/woolnspinning.

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Thank you for listening! If you would like to be a guest on Wool n' Spinning Radio, please reach out below, in the comments, or send an email to rachel@welfordpurls.com.

Until next month, keep wool close and your spindles closer!

Dear Spinning Circle,

Today. On Wool n’ Spinning Radio. We sat down together to discuss how Tour de Fleece went for each of us, what we accomplished and what went well. We each had some finished spins and Rebecca shares spinning while travelling again this summer, focusing mostly on her supported spindles. Dionne spun an incredible amount of fibre and shares her favourites. Thank you for joining us in another episode!

I hope you enjoy our conversation. If this is your first time tuning into Wool n’ Spinning Radio, welcome. This audio podcast is a spin-off from the original podcast. Rachel has been podcasting since 2014, talking about handspinning and making yarn. Her passion is working with her handspun yarns in projects, both knit and woven.

Photos of our finished spins can be found here.

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Thank you for listening! If you would like to be a guest on Wool n' Spinning Radio, please reach out to Rachel [at] welfordpurls [dot] com.

Until next month, keep wool close and your spindles closer!

I hope you enjoyed our conversation. If this is your first time tuning into Wool n’ Spinning Radio, welcome. This audio podcast is a spin-off from the original podcast available on YouTube at youtube.com/RachelSmith. Rachel has been podcasting since 2014, talking about handspinning and making yarn. Her passion is working with her handspun yarns in projects, both knit and woven. Links to the website, Instagram and more are available in the show notes and at Patreon.com/woolnspinning.

***

Thank you for listening! If you would like to be a guest on Wool n' Spinning Radio, please reach out below, in the comments, or send an email to rachel@welfordpurls.com.

Until next month, keep wool close and your spindles closer!