In da Club I: Das Mondschaf

Strickmich! Club 2015 will have four very special yarns by four very special dyers, and the first that we would like to introduce is Sabrina Gleiß and her “Mondschaf“-yarns (“Mondschaf” is German and means “Moon Sheep”). Her yarns are smooth, shiny and soft, and she is the only dyer working for the club so far who also does spinning fibers (which, as an aspiring spinner, I appreciate a lot!).

Sabrina was born with a great sense of color: “As a kid, I used to paint and draw all the time, and my favorite toy was a huge box of crayons”, she says. Later she went to college to study media design to create websites and virtual projects. In her job, she worked really hard to deal with the pressure, but at some point an acute hearing loss forced her to slow down. “I started to knit to distract myself. I sat down with my mom and some sock yarn from the supermarket”, Sabrina says. “The constant rhythm of knitting really soothed me and helped me to slow down.” Soon she discovered beautiful yarn blends with silk and multicolored yarn, but they all were not quit to her taste. “I knit this pair of hand warmers and ended up with huge black blobs on the backs of my hands. I thought: Well, there has to be another way – and started experimenting with dyeing yarn myself, trying to dye multicolored yarns that would not pool.” She started out with easter-egg dye from the drugstore and moved on to professional acid dyes. Back in her job, she spend her weekends dyeing. And she managed to dye multicolored yarns that would not produce stripes or blobs, but create an interesting, but harmonic knitted fabric.

“I realized pretty soon that I was dyeing way too much yarn to knit it all up myself. So I put up a few skeins on Etsy and Dawanda (a German platform for handmade goods).” Knitters all over the country were smitten, and it did not take long until Sabrina could update her shop regularly and present her yarns at knitters’ conventions, supported by her partner Jens (who, interestingly, is a magician) – “he helps me with all my crazy ideas.” Luckily for us knitters, Sabrina has a lot of those: “I always wanted to do something really cool, really creative, and dyeing yarn is just that to me. I can make people happy with the things I create, and that’s the best feeling on earth!” At Strickmich! Club, we share knitters’ enthusiasm about Sabrina’s yarns and are proud to announce that she has agreed to dye a very special color for our club members.

One last question: Why is her shop named “Das Mondschaf” (“The Moon-Sheep”)? “I like this name because it sounds so dreamy. Also, I love the night, because people slow down and everything is nice and calm. During summer nights, I like to sit outside and watch the moon.”