Skeinspotting

Angel Knits

I met up with Ruth, Maggie and Nikki at Angel Knits last night. How I love talking to Ruth about design, she is so open and honest and totally enthusiastic about passing on techniques to others without a jealous bone in her body. She really knows what she is talking about she is the Fibre Queen! Oh yes, this picture has nothing to do with the post but I am not allowed to show you what I am working on at the moment.

We talked about the possibility of a textiles recession and these are my thoughts.

These things always ebb and flow. I think although there will be a bit of a recession, this won't necessarily be as bad as the eighties one. It is just that a few years ago, knitting suddenly got really trendy with everyone trying it out and everyone wanting the dream of a little indie business and doing something they enjoy. The reality is that a lot of people who are creative are not business minded, some may even have been successful in business but decided that making and designing was what they enjoyed not the drudgery of having a shop.

Plenty of people started knitting and realised there is no money in a craft which takes so long to produce a finished piece so they turned their hand to spinning an dyeing as options that might be a bit more speedy. of course, thee are also the hundreds of stitch marker businesses that launched as well. The trend for all these things may die off a bit but will leave the truly devoted.

A lot of novice knitters on the wave of the recent trend might have dropped off now if it was a passing fad for them leaving the hardened knitters to hold the fort. It is likely that interest in the craft will recede, and then reach a steady level that is better than the total financial recession of the eighties.

Although I love the Internet and all it's goodies and I am a devoted housebound shopper of yarns, I do feel slightly bad about the LYS suffering as a result. I used to have a LYS just on the street next to mine but it is long gone. There is another one, but the stock is uninspiring and dingy and not the sort of LYS I love. I do however support Loop and whenever I got to Angel Knits I will pop in to buy something rather than order in on the Internet.