I first discovered Philsophers Wool a few years ago, when I stumbled upon a book of their Fair Isle sweater patterns in a library in Colorado. Since then I’ve admired them for their commitment to producing local, natural, and fair trade yarns–unlike most wool buyers, Philosophers Wool pays farmers a fair price for their [...]
Archive for the ‘sustainability’ Category
A visit to Philosophers Wool
Posted in knitting, spinning, sustainability, yarn stores, tagged philosophers wool on July 22, 2008 | No Comments »
no more plastic shopping bags
Posted in knitting, sustainability on May 7, 2008 | No Comments »
I was recently surprised to learn that those ubiquitous accessories of consumer culture, polyethylene plastic shopping bags, have been banned in multiple countries (unfortunately not the US or Canada). They’ve been banned for good reason, as not only are they cluttering up both cities and countryside, choking animals and contaminating soil as they photodegrade [...]
pondering the 100-mile yarn diet
Posted in knitting, spinning, sustainability on April 17, 2008 | 5 Comments »
Even though the phrase ‘carbon footprint’ has only recently entered my official vocabulary, for a long time I’ve made the effort to shop locally whenever possible, especially when it comes to food. It makes a lot of sense to me: things are fresher (and often therefore healthier), there’s a better chance that small-scale [...]
official Blog Action Day post
Posted in spinning, sustainability on October 16, 2007 | 3 Comments »
For Blog Action Day, I thought I’d write a bit about why I’m moving further away from commercially-prepped roving and spinning fibre. When I started spinning my own yarn, I’d never worked with raw fleece straight off the sheep’s (or alpaca’s, or goat’s, etc.) back. As I was just trying to get the [...]
renewable vs. sustainable (the Pidge, again)
Posted in knitting, sustainability on October 5, 2007 | No Comments »
You know, I hate to harp on one thing in particular (and in fact I’ve been working on a series of posts detailing the way I produce my yarns, start to finish–stay tuned for that), but I happened to look at the website for the Pidge again this morning. They’ve done a complete overhaul, and [...]
the Pidge and being “green”
Posted in knitting, ravelry, sustainability on September 25, 2007 | 12 Comments »
Recently there’s been a bit of buzz on ravelry about a new little garment called the Pidge. Basically it’s an 1/8 of a scarf, with buttons, to be worn around the neck as a sort of collar:
The makers of the Pidge describe themselves as environmentally friendly, because aside from the Italian cashmere yarn, each [...]
