Today’s parcel contains 4 skeins of lovely soft Big Wool sent to us by Lana Pura. I haven’t snuggled it yet, but Kate assures me it is nice and squidgy!

The practical black immediately makes me start thinking of chunky hubby hats and scarves, and if there’s any left over, there’s always the felted clutch from Lee Radford’s One Skein.

What’s that? It’s not for me? Bu**er

It’s hard to miss the bright pink Socktopus banner in the sidebar, but it doesn’t really illustrate just how important Alice has been to The Inside Loop right from the beginning.

I met Alice at an IKnit pub night a while back and we hit it off straight away. In the course of a later conversation I happened to mention that Kate and I were tossing around ideas about starting a magazine - her response was instant and positive: Go for it!

She was there for us again a couple of weeks later when we started to waver and have doubts, and she is still there for us at every turn with advice and support.

Not least, she has provided us with completely To-Die-For yarns for the launch:

One skein of The Knittery Cashmere/Merino sock yarn in Orange Blossoms, one of the new Indigo Moon in Emerald…

…and one luscious skein of Dream in Colour Smooshy in Cloud Jungle.

Thank you so much Alice!

Badges! Lots and lots of badges!

We have a hundred of these tiny little Inside Loop badges to play with. And we’ve discovered that everything looks better with a badge on it.

I can’t have Kate getting all the parcels - so I decided to intercept a few in transit.

Yesterday I attended the I Knit London Stitch n Bitch Day in Bloomsbury. It was a great opportunity to catch up with friends, squidge skeins and collect a few more yarns. I still find it amazing that so many people are keen to support us right from the start. We are sure we’ll deliver a fantastic magazine, but it’s so humbling to realise that a lot of other people out there think it as well.

Jeni from Fyberspates had dropped me an email earlier in the week so I was itching to have a chance to pop by the stall at the earliest opportunity. I came away with 2 skeins of her Scrumptious DK and patterns to go with them (seriously Kate, do we have to give these yarns away??)

Afterwards, I had a chance to have a nice long chat with Amanda from The Natural Dye Studio. I’m not sure how she managed to part with these beauties, I promise I will guard them well!

3 skeins of Ariel pure silk laceweight, a skein of the scrummiest-coloured Mirage merino/tencel sock yarn and a lovely, fuzzy Mohair Loop.

I want them all.

I also chatted to lots of other people, there were many small businesses there selling the most amazing yarns. I’m really glad that we’re going to have the opportunity to promote some of these smaller companies and get the word out to everyone that they are there.

Go check out Devon Fine Fibres and Oxford Kitchen Yarns. I almost fell seriously for the cashmere but was being very good.

While we love using yarns from all over the world, we also want to promote British yarns in The Inside Loop. The internet means that almost no yarn is unobtainable in the UK, but that doesn’t mean ignoring the yarns on our own doorstep. We’re slightly yarn obsessed and think we know almost every UK yarn out there, but there are probably still more that we haven’t come across. Even Diane can’t have them *all* in her stash…

So it’s over to you! Which UK yarns would you like to see featured in The Inside Loop? Which yarns are your favourite? Are there any gorgeous yarns out there that deserve more attention? Whether it’s a mass-produced yarn from a large company or one-off colours from an Etsy seller, we want to know about it.