Meet our 9 new Yarnadelic shades!

It's always fun to play with colour in the Mill, especially when it comes to adding to one of our yarn ranges. We love the original palette of Yarnadelic, our 100% Corriedale yarn, but felt it could use a few more shades to build it out fully.

The 18 colours we had of Yarnadelic all worked beautifully with each other! They were on the more muted side though so when we set out to add more shades to the palette, we knew we wanted some bright and punchy tones. There were also a few almost-neutrals we were missing (like Dark Star, our warm brown MOW special from a couple years back)!

The 9 new shades will be available for Mill Members on the 9th of January and on the 23rd of January, we'll have our big launch! We'll have all of them in Sport, Worsted and fibre tops.

How we developed the 9 new Yarnadelic colours

Our first step of developing new colours is to liberally distribute the fibre we're using to everyone who'd like to have a go at creating new shades. We start with pre-dyed fibre - in this case, 100% Corriedale in 12 solid colours –, get out our hand carders and micro scales, and start playing!

If you'd like to learn more about this step of the process, head over to Youtube to check out Sonja's excellent video with Emily of Tin Can Knits on how to design a yarn shade!

Once everyone has come up with a handful (or more!) of colours, the narrowing down begins. We usually do this by meeting with a few people at the Mill, pulling out the colours everyone has come up with and the existing ones, and choosing which colourways would generally work well as additions to the range.

For some colours, we continue to tweak them – Laura is an absolute champ at this – until they feel just right; others immediately work really well as they are. When we've narrowed it down to the amount of new shades we'd like to add, we do a small test spin to see if the colours work as well as we think they would. Sometimes – like in the case of our new mid-tone teal "Dreams by the Sea", this leads to more tweaking! Other times, we look at the skeins and go "oh, yeah, definitely the right one!"

When we're happy with all of the new colours, we move on to the next phase: Picking names! This is an exercise that involves spreadsheets and lots of colour coding and voting, and is usually heaps of fun! For Yarnadelic, we name the shades after songs, so we all had a grand time figuring out which ones would work best for the new colours.

Lastly, we take a look at the new palette and decide in which sequence we slot the colours into the existing range. We want things to look harmonious, especially on the website, and this is always super satisfying too!

Now, shall we take a look at the 9 new shades of Yarnadelic?

The Neons: Pretty in Pink, Toxic, Spellbound and Drops of Jupiter

We all felt the Yarnadelic palette could use a bit of brightness and so we came up with four punchy, fun neons! They work really well on their own, but are also surprisingly wearable when you pair them with a neutral or a more muted shade of the same colour family, like "Pretty in Pink" with "Kiss".

As with the other shades of Yarnadelic, each of the new colours is named after a song – "Pretty in Pink" by The Psychedelic Furs, "Toxic" by none other than Britney Spears, "Spellbound" by Siouxsie and the Banshees and "Drops of Jupiter" by the incomparable Train. You can listen to the full playlist here on Spotify!

The Classics: Kiss, Dark Star, A Taste of Honey, Dreams by the Sea and Blue Monday

As fun as neons are, sometimes all you want is a good, reliable classic. This is why we added a range of almost-neutrals that we felt were missing from the range: From a dark burgundy-purple to a golden honey yellow and a navy, I'm pretty sure there's something for everyone here! Plus - we just had to bring back "Dark Star", the special colourway Aleks Byrd developed for us, as a permanent addition to the Yarnadelic range.

These five new shades are also all named after songs (everyone gets into the fun of selecting their favourite titles for each shade!) – "Kiss" by Prince (really, there was no competition, right?), "Dark Star" by Crosby, Stills & Nash, "A Taste of Honey" by The Beatles, "Dreams by the Sea" by John Martyn and, of course, "Blue Monday" by New Order. Have a listen to the full playlist here on Spotify!

I just adore how all nine shades look together! Tell me – do you have a favourite?

The 9 new shades will be available for Mill Members on the 9th of January and on the 23rd of January, we'll have our big launch! We'll have all of them in Sport, Worsted and fibre tops.