The Knittery journey, as captured by Brenna and edited by us.
Big things have been occurring behind the scenes at Woollykins. We’re well and truly up and running in the new Knittery here at The Mill Castlemaine.
So grateful for these momentous photos by Penny Ryan Photography who came over the week and documented all the milestones – Install, Training, Sampling.
This image is from Install Day – the slightly nerve wracking installation of Nancy – our big fancy knitting nancy from Japan….
Training Week
After the big install day we got stuck into learning all about our new machine and getting right into the knitty gritty. We were up to our eyeballs in new technical info, tiny weeny machine parts and exploring the finest of our motor skills and knitting know how…
It was wild and fun and a lot of new things to remember but again, thanks to the amazing Shima team – we did it! So proud of us and we’ve been knitting up a soft storm ever since this week, so whatever they did, it worked!
Finally, the real fun begins, testing out new designs in all the beautiful yarns we have sourced over the months for this very day.
It’s been 14 years of running Woollykins now and we’ve been designing our own Women’s knitwear collection UMIFORM which is made in Peru in collaboration with My Alpaca Copenhagen for the past 5 years.
Now we’re so excited to also be able to make a range of fine knitted pieces right under our own roof. The ability to make small batch knitwear inhouse means that we can dream up and create pieces we believe are needed and useful and also created from pure unadulterated natural fibres.
We’re learning a whole lot more about the wool industry here and what processes are no longer available in Australia and also what is starting to reestablish again and look forward to working towards the holy trinity of local knitwear production: Wool that comes from regeneratively/organically grown wool from Australia, Yarn washed/carded/dyed/spun in Australia and finally knitted right here in Castlemaine, Australia.
We look forward to sharing the first 8 or 9 designs we have started producing in The Knittery and we really hope you love them.
Love my Woollykins team of amazing women.
