{"id":81666,"date":"2026-05-08T11:14:58","date_gmt":"2026-05-08T09:14:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/colourspun.com\/shop\/?p=81666"},"modified":"2026-06-20T09:40:47","modified_gmt":"2026-06-20T07:40:47","slug":"colourspun-story-hand-dyed-yarn-south-africa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/colourspun.com\/shop\/colourspun-story-hand-dyed-yarn-south-africa\/","title":{"rendered":"The Story of ColourSpun: How a Love of Colour Became Something More"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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It’s the colour. All the colours under the sun, literally, that led to ColourSpun – and to a life built around hand dyed yarn. If you’ve ever struggled to choose a palette yourself, our guide to finding colour combinations you’ll love<\/a> can help.<\/p>\n

As far back as I can remember, colour is what makes my memories vivid. I can still see myself finger painting at nursery school, covered in a bright yellow plastic apron. My hands like little rainbows, splashing colour onto large sheets of paper. I painted and coloured my way through childhood, and when I learned to knit in 1977, that deep love of colour transferred itself to hand dyed yarn.<\/p>\n

A Stash That Grew (and Grew)<\/h2>\n

My yarn stash of every colour soon outgrew my ability to knit it up. That was fine, because I liked just having it to look at. When my boys were little there wasn’t much time to knit, though I managed at least a few rows a day for most of my knitting life. The stash grew quietly in the background, and I was always on the lookout for that one new colour I didn’t yet own.<\/p>\n

When my boys were teenagers and I could knit more, I found myself constantly searching for colours that simply didn’t exist in the shops. So I decided to make them myself. My adventure with hand dyed yarn began!<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t

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The Early Experiments<\/h2>\n

My first attempts were hand dyed yarn with general purpose dye bought from the local pharmacy. I was trying to dye acrylic yarn – it was all that was widely available – and the results were far from satisfying. There were no books on the subject that I could find, and there was certainly no internet to turn to. I had no choice but to keep experimenting, keep trying, keep failing forward.<\/p>\n

It got frustrating enough that I stopped for a while. And then I met Hazel Hele, and everything changed.<\/p>\n

Hazel opened up a whole new world for me. I learned an enormous amount from her about natural fibres, dyeing and spinning. Soon I had a large stash of yarn I had dyed myself. Each skein was unique, and it made a real difference to my knitting. Friends started noticing and wanting some for themselves, and before long I was sharing my yarn with them. My friend Rose gave them a nickname: Odd Balls<\/em>. For a while, that name stuck.<\/p>\n

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From Hobby to Small Hand Dyed Yarn Business<\/h2>\n

I started selling yarn at local quilting guild meetings and designing patterns to go with it. By 2002 I had become a regular contributor to Craftwise<\/em> magazine. In 2007 I took on the role of Consulting Editor: Textiles for Stitches<\/em> magazine, a position I held for many years. Both publications have since closed, but those were extraordinary creative chapters, and the demand for my yarn kept growing steadily alongside that work.<\/p>\n

Through it all, the dyeing continued. What had started in 1998 as a personal project to find colours that didn’t exist in the shops had slowly, quietly become something much more. By the early 2000s the small amounts had grown substantially, and it was clear this was no longer just a hobby – it needed to become a proper small business.<\/p>\n

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The Name That Almost Wasn’t<\/h2>\n

Around 2004, I decided it was time for a website. I sat down to search for Odd Balls<\/em> – and got a page full of results that were, let’s say, not at all what I had in mind.<\/p>\n

So the name had to go. I thought carefully about what the business was really about: colour, movement, energy, the spin of the yarn. ColourSpun<\/em> was born, and it has felt like exactly the right name ever since.<\/p>\n

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Earth Friendly, From the Beginning<\/h2>\n

As ColourSpun grew, I made a conscious decision to keep it as earth friendly as possible. All my hand dyed yarn and fibres are locally grown natural fibres – merino wool, kid mohair and cotton – grown and coloured right here in South Africa with earth-friendly dyes. I developed a process that uses the minimum amount of water, heating it with a gas geyser and using sun stoves to cook the yarn. It’s a small studio in South Africa, but one I feel good about – and it’s where every skein of ColourSpun hand dyed yarn begins its life.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t

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The ColourSpun Hand Dyed Yarn Range Today.<\/h2>\n

What started with a few skeins of hand dyed merino has grown into something I could never have imagined in those early pharmacy dye days.<\/p>\n

Today the ColourSpun range<\/a> includes:<\/p>\n