A Scandinavian knitting story told from rural France.

Biches & Bûches is a small yarn brand with a double identity. Its website describes it as a brand based in France, “from Scandinavian roots, Danish & Norwegian,” and says the business is a very small team built around Astrid, its founder, who is also the company’s knitwear designer. The name is French: “biches” are does, female deer, and “bûches” are logs. The company tells its story mainly through Astrid’s own history. She learned to knit at about the age of six, it says, taught by her Norwegian grandmother.

The business behind the brand is a French company. The French public company register lists Troland & Cie, a simplified joint-stock company (SAS) trading as Biches & Bûches, created in October 2013 and registered for the wholesale of textiles, with its seat in the Saône-et-Loire department of Burgundy. In October 2026 the register named Astrid Troland as its president. An archived copy of the brand’s website from February 2016 described it as “a little Scandinavian company of handmade knitting kits settled in France,” and its Danish text said the company was writing from Burgundy; a 2019 version of its About page gave its location simply as “Burgundy, France.”

The yarn came after a long run-up. The company says Astrid spent three years on her first design collection, about a dozen pieces, and that it was first shown at the Fanø Knitting Festival in Denmark in 2015, the year the website still gives as the start of the brand. The first yarns were two lambswools, a fine one and a heavier one, and the range later grew to a middle-weight lambswool, a silk mohair and several cottons.

Spun in Scotland and Italy, sold from France.

Biches & Bûches does not spin its own yarn. The company says it has worked with the same mills since it started, in the United Kingdom and in Italy, and its FAQ in October 2026 described its yarns as made “in collaboration with heritage mills in Scotland, England, and Italy.” We give the details below as the company’s own account; it does not name the mills.

The core of the range is lambswool in three weights. According to the FAQ, Le Petit Lambswool is a fingering weight, Le Lambswool a double knitting and Le Gros Lambswool an aran, and all three are woollen-spun, spun in Scotland and finished in England. Woollen spinning leaves the fibres less aligned than the smoother worsted process, which gives a lighter, airier yarn with a slightly fuzzy surface, a character that suits the brand’s soft, heathered colours.

The second pillar is Silk Mohair, which the company says combines South African mohair with mulberry silk from China and is spun and dyed in Italy. Its yarn page says part of the mohair is certified to the Responsible Mohair Standard, and that dyeing and finishing take place in European and English mills that work to the European Union’s REACH chemicals rules and, where applicable, OEKO-TEX standards. The cottons are newer. Le Petit Organic Cotton is certified to the Global Organic Textile Standard, the company says, and a cotton and alpaca blend pairs organic cotton with alpaca from Peru.

The supply chain is international, but the shipping point is not. The website’s footer says that all orders are shipped from France, and the company presents itself as a French brand selling both to knitters directly and through yarn shops. For a brand of its size, the range is deliberately narrow: a handful of bases offered in many colours, rather than many yarns in a few.

Yarn makers and documentation.

The seven brands in this group all sell yarn for hand knitting and crochet, and they come from six countries: Gepard Garn from Denmark, Berroco and Lorna’s Laces from the United States, Retrosaria from Portugal, Biches & Bûches from France, Kremke Soul Wool from Germany and Lanas Stop from Spain. Between them they show several very different ways of putting a ball or skein of yarn on a shop shelf.

Some yarn brands are the visible face of a mill or a family firm, and their names are bound up with a place, a fibre or a long run of pattern books. Others are design-led labels that choose fibres and colours and commission the spinning from someone else. Some dye by hand in small batches; some pass from one owner to another while the name on the label stays the same; and a few survive mainly as a name inside another company’s range.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — who founded it, who owns it now and where its yarn is made — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A very small team with a wide reach.

For all its small size, Biches & Bûches reaches knitters well beyond France. In October 2026 the company said its yarns were stocked by more than 160 shops around the world, and that it had worked with outside designers ever since 2015. An archived version of its website from 2019 shows what that looked like in practice: patterns by the Japanese designer Junko Okamoto and the Danish designer Camilla Vad, among others, written for its yarns, alongside books and patterns by Marianne and Helga Isager that the shop also sold.

The same 2019 page listed the brand’s early press. It pointed to an episode of the Woolful podcast telling the story of Biches & Bûches, an article in issue two of Laine magazine that included a wrap designed by Astrid, and her design Selenite in issue 23 of Pompom magazine. Those titles sit at the independent, design-led end of knitting publishing, which is also where the brand has placed itself: minimal patterns, natural fibres and a restrained palette.

The company’s own timeline is short and recent. It says it held its first pop-up shop in Paris in September 2025, ten years after the yarn was first shown in Denmark. On ownership, the French register lists Troland & Cie as an active company with Astrid Troland as president, and we found no report of a sale or outside investor in the sources we checked.

The identity follows the same logic as the product. The website uses plain photography of knitwear and skeins, little decoration and a measured, personal voice, and the brand’s story is told almost entirely through its founder. Two cultures meet in it: a Scandinavian knitting tradition passed down in a family, and a French base from which the business is run and its orders are sent.

For a design guide, Biches & Bûches shows how a very small yarn brand can build a clear identity from one designer’s taste, a narrow range and carefully chosen mills. Compare Isager, the Danish yarn house whose patterns it once sold, and Plassard, another yarn maker from Burgundy. For this guide we use a fawn, bark and lambswool cream with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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