Getting to Know Anzula Luxury Fibers!
Hi Everyone!
Many of you who follow me regularly here and on social media know that my latest release, Riverton, was knit with Anzula Luxury Fibers. If you didn't know, now you do! Many of you also know a lot of my designs are collaborations with yarn companies. Some are indie dyers and others are larger more popular lines we are all familiar with. If you didn't know that, now you do!
I love to collaborate on projects together with yarn dyers and have done so many times over the years. They are my favorite projects to work on! In the past, these have ranged from yarn support from a particular yarn company to yarn support AND promotion of my work via their social media outlets. I appreciate all the yarn support anyone wants to give me! In a collaboration, as a designer, my hope is that more and more people will learn about me, who I am, what I like to design... and then maybe, just maybe... if I'm lucky... they'll wander on over to Ravelry and buy a pattern or two of mine. The types of collaborations I like best are the ones where we each support one another to the best of our ability. While knitting a project that is a collaboration, and being active on social media, I always try my very best to always talk about the yarn I am using while I am using it. My hope is that other knitters who have never heard of the yarn I am using will go and seek it out and perhaps buy some for themselves based on my recommendation. I have done 10 collaborations in the past and that is mostly how things have gone. As a designer, I am and have been grateful for each and every collaboration I have ever done.
Now that you know Riverton was knit with Anzula Luxury Fibers, you may have guessed this knit was also a collaboration. But Anzula Luxury Fibers changed what a collaboration was for me. I have to tell you, from the very beginning up until yesterday, working with Charlie and the team at Anzula has been nothing short of an amazing experience. So much so that it really deserved its own completely separate blog entry about it.
I am not a well-known designer like Joji Locatelli, Romi Hill, Melanie Berg, or Jen Lucas. When I want to do a collaboration I have been the one to approach the yarn company I want to work with to ask if they would be interested in a collaboration. Perhaps someday I will get to a point where people will come to me, but not today...LOL. When I approached Anzula about doing a collaboration, after they had looked at the body of my work, they were very enthusiastic about it. They were very open to my ideas. After choosing the colorway I wanted to work with they dyed up my skeins and sent them right out. I knew what I wanted to do with the design itself and I kept that a secret initially. They explained to me that what they wanted to do, once the shawl was finished, was not only promote me on all of their social media platforms (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest) but wanted to also promote me on their website/blog. They suggested that near the end of the project, they would send me a list of interview questions I could answer. I was off the charts excited because no one had ever done this for me before. This was beginning to shape up like no other collaboration I had ever done before. Knowing what was waiting at the finish line for this design only made the entire shawl that much more of a pleasure to knit.
Anzula Luxury Fibers is just that.....PURE LUXURY. When it arrived after being dyed up I couldn't believe my eyes and how gorgeous it was...
Its hard to capture the true beauty of this yarn in a picture.... but the next picture is better, and it also shows the stellina that is in the yarn...
This particular base I was working with was called Lunaris and the blend is 80/10/10 superwash merino/cashmere/stellina. It's nothing less than stunning. It slides through your fingers with such ease and it is SO SOFT you'd think the cashmere count was much higher than 10%. I had never designed anything with stellina in before and was really excited about the element it brought to the design as a whole. Riverton is meant to mimic flowing water and water sparkles and glistens in the sun. The 10% of stellina in the blend was perfect enough to be just what the design needed to show this. I was never concerned about strength this yarn. 80% superwash was perfect and would get it done just fine. Every single time I knit on this project, which was daily for a long time, it felt beautiful, different, incredibly soft, and very, very special. When I would work on this project outside of my home at Knit Night or Stitch Group, people just wanted to feel it! No one could believe there was only 10% cashmere in this blend.
One of my dearest friends in the world, Frankie, wanted to order this same yarn exactly, for every single reason I've written here. Oh, and I forgot to mention, the name of this colorway is actually "Frankie." She was destined to own some! I emailed Charlie at Anzula and was given the exact information on what she needed to do to get her hands on this yarn. Through the entire process, Anzula has been helpful, knowledgeable, and absolutely lovely.
When I emailed them that the shawl was finished and sent pictures (unblocked) they were as excited as I was! The next day they sent me the interview questions. I had so much fun answering them and adding pictures to go along with my answers (bonus for you...I had a lot of pictures!) Since I had never done an interview like this before I had so much fun with it! Everything is all formatted and ready to go on their side and will be live very early Saturday morning! You can read the interview here. They even made a nice little graphic for me...
If you have never used Anzula Luxury Fibers before, please do yourself a favor and go check them out on their website here. If your LYS doesn't carry Anzula, talk to your LYS about contacting Anzula for details on how to change that. You can also shop online!
I am quite proud of this collaboration, as you can see. Anzula has really raised the bar and I am as thrilled as I am lucky that they did. I would like to thank Charlie and the rest of Team Anzula for everything they did to bring true life to this collaboration. When life hands you lemons and you make lemonade, that's always a beautiful thing. But when you're handed a couple of pitchers of the best, freshest, tastiest lemonade to start with, that's when you know you've made friends, not just a shawl...
Until next time...Knit On!
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