Free Yarn!

Yarn Support is a way to get free yarn. Yarn companies will provide free yarn so that a knit designer can develop a pattern for the yarn. I became very familiar with the process of getting yarn support when writing my book of “30 Blankets to Knit” that will be published in Fall of 2020. Getting yarn support involves three steps: 1) Researching and selecting Yarns, 2) writing a Yarn Support Request, 3) Finding the right person to send the request to.

RESEARCHING AND SELECTING YARNS FOR KNITTING DESIGNS

**Many yarn companies will provide yarn support for designs when you provide a comprehensive proposal**

There are so many yarn companies to choose from! First, I made a list of the yarn brands offered by three large yarn websites: Webs, LoveCrafts and Jimmy Beans. The list of 171 yarn brands was then sorted alphabetically and researched. I looked at each yarn company’s website to identify yarn lines in a washable worsted weight suitable for a blanket. When I found one, I evaluated the offered colors. My designs need many different colors, so I made a note of the yarn lines that offered a wide range of colors. Once I had a list of candidate yarn companies and yarn lines I matched yarn lines to blanket designs by comparing the yarn colors offered by the yarn line to those needed by the blanket design. I then wrote a yarn support request.

WRITING A YARN SUPPORT REQUEST

A yarn support request is a lot like a knitting pattern proposal for a magazine or book. Ideally it should be one page and include:

Name of the Design
Identification of the yarn brand and line (i.e. “Cascade” is a brand, and “220 Superwash” is a line)
Sizes being offered
Clear illustration of the Design in the yarn line and colors being proposed. For clothing I generally draw or paint by hand, but for the geometric blankets in the book, I made the illustrations in Powerpoint. It is important to produce a very professional and compelling illustration, so I spent a lot of time on this. I also did a lot of experimentation and calculations at this phase to make sure what could be easily drawn could also be knit by a person with intermediate knitting skills.
Knitted swatch — this is not strictly necessary if you are not using any special or unique stitches or if there are no open issues with the construction. For the book, the blankets are all worked in garter stitch, which is the most common knitted fabric, so swatching wasn’t needed at this phase. And generally, if you are a more established knit designer, a swatch may not be required because you have established credentials. In the fair isle blanket in the sample proposal below, instead of a swatch, I prepared a color chart of the main motifs in the blanket.
Summary description of the construction approach to show that the Design is feasible.
Photo Snips of the yarn colors that will be used and the quantity of each color needed to complete the project.
Brief Bio and Contact information: Name, website, Ravelry name, and mailing address. If I wanted the yarn sent directly to a sample knitter, I noted that in this area, although I didn’t always have the sample knitter identified at this time.

If the yarn company liked the proposal, they had everything on this one page to immediately send me the yarn, which happened in several cases. In other cases some yarn colors I was requesting were out of stock or being discontinued so there was an email exchange to find replacements. And sometimes I wanted the yarn company to hold off shipping until the pattern was written and a sample knitter found.

Below is an example proposal for a knitting magazine, but it is similar to what I developed for the blankets in my book. This is the proposal for the Snowdrift Blanket which appeared in the Merry Knitmas collection by Knitpicks in 2017.

Estimating Yarn Amounts

Method 1: Using gauge and a yarn calculator

As mentioned, I like to include the yarn amounts in the proposal. Estimating yarn amounts was an inexact science that I got better at over time. The yarn label and the company’s description on the web specifies the number of yards and a gauge on a particular size needle. This is an estimate and reality will vary widely. To save myself the $40 or so for shipping I often had the yarn shipped directly to the sample knitter. Occasionally I asked for sample yarn for swatching but not always, and sometimes when I asked it did not arrive in time for me to use it. Without yarn, there was no way to figure out the needle size for producing the best fabric and how much yarn would be consumed. And even if I did a swatch myself, the sample knitter might knit tighter or looser and consume yarn at a different rate on the same needle size.

So what I did was use the Jimmy Bean’s yarn calculator (JB). To demonstrate how I did this, an example for the Connect blanket has been included below. I entered from my swatch into the JB yarn calculator, and selected the 36” x 36” blanket. My gauge was 3.75 stitches per inch, and Jimmy Bean’s could estimate either 3.5 or 4 stitches per inch. So I generated estimates for both gauges then averaged the results. Since this calculator produces yarn estimates for stockinette stitch, I increased the recommended yardage by 35% to account for the additional yarn needed to produce the much denser garter stitch. Based on the stitch count in the blanket’s borders and the yarn label gauge, I extrapolated from the yardage needed for the fictional 36” x 36” blanket to the size of my Design. I then determined the percent of the blanket that would be knit in each color, multiplied the total yardage needed by the percents to get raw amounts for each color, divided the raw amount by the yards per skein/ball/hank then rounded up to the next nearest whole skein/ball/hank. If the raw amount was close to the next whole number, I added an extra skein/ball/hank.

Despite all this number crunching we occasionally ran short of yarn during sample knitting, or had a lot of extra yarn left over. My estimates got better as I went along; particularly once I started adding on an extra 35% to the Jimmy Bean’s estimate to account for garter stitch and added an extra skein/ball/hank when the raw number was almost the next whole number. Also, when I had the yarn and could swatch, this greatly improved the estimates.

In the example yardage estimate for the Connect blanket, below, the Shape Count is a count of the number of pinwheel motifs in the blanket by each color. There are 33 pinwheel motifs total. To get the Raw Yards, the “Percent of blanket” of a particular color is multiplied by the total required yardage of the blanket (2077 yards). Finally, I generally added in 400 yards for the border. But since this blanket was smaller I figured that 2 hanks (about 375 yards) would be enough.

Note: the Connect blanket is the only blanket in the book that is not machine-washable, but since it is small, hand-washing it is not be an issue. And it has such a wonderful and subtle color palette. Also of note is that the gauge for the swatch of this yarn was 3.75 sts/inch on size 8 needles as compared to the yarn label which was 4.5 sts/inch. Had I not swatched I would have requested a lot more yarn than was actually needed.

Method 2: Swatch and Unwind

Another method to estimate yarn yardage is to knit a square using the pattern stitch that will be used in the item, using the target needle size. Unwind the swatch and measure the number of yards used. Divide the total stitches worked in the swatch by the number of yards of yarn used in the swatch to get a per stitch estimate of yardage. Calculate the number of stitches to be worked in each color of yarn for the entire project, then multiply the per stitch estimate of yardage by the total number of stitches to be worked, for each color. I used this method for the last blanket and found that although I had a lot of confidence in while I was crunching the numbers, it vastly underestimated the amount of yarn I needed, so I conclude that this method is a little too prone to human error for me to use.

Who to send the Yarn Support Request to

To get yarn support for my book I always started with the “Contact Us” on the yarn company’s website. I included this type of message:

Hi <yarn company’s name>,
I am a knit designer who is writing a book of 30 knitting patterns for blankets. The blankets feature geometric shapes and are boldly colored. I would love to feature your yarn in one of the blanket designs. Is there a person at <yarn company’s name> to whom I could email a Yarn Support Request? For examples of my previous work see: http://www.theknitwit.org.
Thank you.
<My name>

The “Contact Us” is a form where you can leave your email address and a short message but not an attachment or images. I was often successful in getting a response this way. Typically I would receive a reply with the name and email of an actual person to whom I could email my proposal. Sometimes this was not the right person, but this person usually knew who the right person was. There was one yarn company that didn’t respond to my “Contact Us” attempt, and didn’t return phone calls to their toll free number. I finally asked my publisher if they had a contact for this company, and they were able to find the information for me. I used a few Indy or smaller yarn companies where the contact person was the owner him or herself, but the means to contact this person was always information provided on their website.

Once I had the contact information I sent the proposal to that person, and included again my website address where I have photos of my previous designs. At this point I often needed to exercise some patience and diplomacy. The decision maker at the yarn company is a person who is in high demand and often traveling to trade shows and fiber events. So it was normal to get a quick affirmative from the decision maker, but then to have trouble engaging with them to get the yarn colors selected and shipped. After a week of not hearing from them I would write the decision maker a politely worded email asking if they were ready to proceed or had any questions for me. This difficulty engaging is one of the reasons I learned to put the yarn colors, yarn amounts, and shipping information into the one-page proposal so that the decision maker could act on the request right away. I had the same engagement issues when I ran out of yarn and needed to request more, which is why I began requesting an extra ball of each color.

Companies that Provided Yarn Support for my Book

I am grateful and honored to have received yarn support from many of the best yarn companies. The number of blankets they supported is in parenthesis after the name: Cascade (4), Lion Brand (3), Red Heart (3), Berroco (2), Knit Picks (2), Malabrigo (2), Premier (2), Valley - Web's in-house brand (2), Sugarbush - part of Patons, Patons, Anzula, Ella Rae, Erika Knight, Jaggerspun, Lang, Paintbox - LoveCraft's in-house brand, , Plymouth, Richard Devrieze. Universal.

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