In da Club II: Rosy Green Wool

… and today it is my pleasure to introduce the second supplier of yarn for Strickmich! Club 2015: Rosmary Stegmann and her heavenly soft “Rosy Green Wool“. Rosy grew up surrounded by yarn: Her parents owned a small spinnery in southern Germany that specialized in natural fibers. “My grandma used to design with our yarn and taught me how to customize sweaters for myself”, Rosy says. “In High School I knit all the time – I had tons of hand knit sweaters!” Today, Rosy has expanded her repertoire to shawls, hats and other accessories and loves to knit with beautiful colors: “I like it when my knitting pleases both my hands and eyes.”

Rosy Green Wool’s color range

Three years ago, Rosy was looking for a soft organic yarn: “The softness is very important to me – if something is produced animal-friendly, it should not mean that it’s not comfortable.” But such a hand knitting yarn was impossible to find. So she decided to create her own yarn label: Her high-quality certified organic Merino Wool is grown in Argentina and spun in a traditional Spinnery in England.

Rosy in the dyeing kitchen

Rosy has a PhD in Computer Science, and in the beginning, she worked for her yarn business part-time. But about a year ago, the wool demanded her presence full-time. “It was not an easy decision, because I was quite happy in the IT business”, Rosy says. “But this project of mine to bring great, animal-friendly yarn to knitters around the world was more important to me.”

Her new job has a lot of challenges to keep her sharp mind occupied: in-depth research about sheep breeding, dyeing and spinning techniques, customer care, choosing colors. Does she feel sad that her parents’ spinnery had to close in the 80s? “Well, on one hand it would be great to manufacture the yarn myself, and it’s surely sad that cheap synthetic yarns squeezed our products out of the market. On the other hand, it’s a huge task to run a factory, and I have grown very fond of the spinnery we work with in the UK. They’re doing a tremendous job!”

For Strickmich! Club, there will be a very pretty, exclusive color that dyer Danny has developed in a small dyeing workshop in England. He will kettle-dye the batch especially for our members (it’s not the color in the pictures – the Club-colorway is super secret and will remain so until the packages are delivered!)

Danny and his kettle

I am very excited!