Lion Brand Announces Partnership with Quince & Co.

Here’s a bit of breaking yarn industry news for you that’s pretty short on details, but I will update you as I have more information.

Lion Brand Yarn announced on its Facebook page a partnership with indie yarn maker Quince & Co. The post welcomes the yarn maker “to the pride” and goes on to say:

With the elevated expertise and passion of our combined teams, we look to create an even better experience for our valued customers.

Our consumers should expect the same great quality of products, patterns, accessories, and services – plus so much more. We are excited to see where our newfound engagement takes us next!

Unfortunately that’s about all there is to the statement, and when someone asked for more details the reply from the company was to stay connected and they will share updates.

I’m not seeing any information on the Lion Brand or Quince & Co. websites about the news, nor on the Quince & Co. social media pages, but I will continue to look and provide more details as I have them.

Lion Brand Yarn was founded in 1878 and is the oldest producer of craft yarn in the United States. It has been run by members of the Blumenthal family for five generations, and is celebrating its 145th anniversary this year.

Quince & Co. was launched in 2010 by designer Pam Allen in partnership with a historic mill in Maine. The company’s about us page says Allen wanted to start a yarn company because, after working for a major yarn company, she “wanted to work with mills to design yarns from the ground up” and to be able to produce yarn made in the United States.

It will be interesting to see if Quince & Co. yarn is still produced in the same way and this partnership just gives them wider distribution channels (such as the ability to be sold in big-box craft stores). It also gives Lion Brand a much wider selection of natural fiber yarns that it can introduce to its consumers.

Update: This was first posted on June 21. On the 22nd, Quince & Co. shared the news on its Instagram page, with some of the same wording as the Lion Brand announcement, but a little more for its customers: “As our beloved customer, you should expect the same great quality of our bespoke products, patterns, accessoreis, and services that you have come to know and love from Quince & Co. and Twig & Horn.
[Photo via Lion Brand Facebook page]

When I was looking around for free knitting patterns to share recently, I came across this fun leopard print wrap from Yarnspirations.

This fun bulky wrap gives you tons of practice with instarsia and makes a bold statement while keeping you warm. It’s rated for intermediate knitters and the design is charted but pretty easy to follow. And it’s only 50 rows and worked in bulky yarn, so it wouldn’t even take that long to knit. (You can grab the free pattern from Yarnspirations.)

So what’s the problem? The yarn that the pattern calls for has been discontinued, and it’s not a yarn that a substitute for immediately springs to mind.

The original yarn was Patons Alpaca Blend, a single ply bulky yarn that was a combination of acrylic, superwash wool, nylon and alpaca.

My first thought was Lion Brand Hue + Me, which is an acrylic and wool blend, with two plies instead of a single. It looks like it has the colors you would need to make this fun shawl.

But as I was thinking about it, I thought this would be a good opportunity to introduce you to YarnSub if you don’t already know about it. This website is a giant database of yarn that can consider the qualities of the yarn you want to substitute and offer potential substitutions.

It’s not only thinking about yarn weight, like I was, but also fiber content, number of plies, gauge and even the difference in yardage between one ball and another. It even looks at the price and can be filtered by your price range or preferences about fiber content (if, say, you’re sensitive or allergic to wool, for example, or don’t want to you acrylic).

When I plugged in Alpaca Blend, it gave me a lot of different options, though many of them were self-striping or multicolored, which wouldn’t work for this project, and I don’t see a way to filter for solid colors only.

Still, it’s a good tool to give you some ideas you might not know about or might have forgotten about, and it tells you how the new yarn is similar to the old one and how it differs, allowing you to make smarter choices when substituting yarns.

[Photo: Yarnspirations]

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