An elegantly designed, practical, and inspirational guide to choosing, blending, and spinning richly textured artisan yarn for weaving, knitting, and other textile art applications. In this beautifully designed book, Imogen Bright Moon reveals the secrets of her practice, explaining how to choose raw fibers for use in your work (the author’s are ethically sourced from various ecologically responsible sources, including a rescue flock of sheep on the South Downs), how to put together different types of fibers—raw sheep’s wool, plant fibers such as hemp, soya and wild silk, alpaca hair, and much more—to create richly textured yarn, the delicate art of blending naturally occurring pigments, working with shade and tone to create subtle and nuanced colors, a process that Imogen likens to a painter mixing paints on a palette, the principles of hand-spinning, from a simple, single-spun thread to more complicated yarns such as triple-chain ply yarn, using a traditional floor spindle, and ideas for taking your yarn into finished craft and art projects, with stunning images of the author’s own work.

With an emphasis on engagement with nature, the rhythms of the seasonal craft cycle, ethical making, sustainability, and mindfulness, this book is ideal for weavers, textile artists, and anyone seduced by the joys of yarn. Imogen Bright Moon is a British Romani textile artist. She creates large textile-based installations, using tapestry weaving and cloth weaving techniques, featuring painterly hand-blended-and-spun yarns. Her practice is founded in material processes, material ethics, and heritage craft processes. She is also a researcher, writer, and textile-crafts historian. In 2022 she was a recipient of Gypsy Maker 5 from the Romani Cultural & Arts Company/Arts Council Wales. She is based in Brighton.