A pet project that became a yarn company.

Blue Sky Fibers is a yarn company in Minnesota, and by its own account it began with animals rather than a mill. Its website’s “Our Story” page, as archived between 2016 and 2020, said the business “started as a pet project, of sorts”: shortly after graduating from college, owner and founder Linda Niemeyer developed a “curious preoccupation with Alpacas” that led to her buying one. Soon she had more yarn than she could use, took it to a nearby yarn shop that agreed to buy and sell it, “and the rest, as they say, is history.” The page added that “ever since we started with a small herd of alpacas in our backyard,” the company had been committed to making yarn that showed off its natural beauty, and it joked that things might have turned out differently “had Linda been obsessed with giraffes instead.”

The company did not give a founding year on that page. The most precise date comes from its sale: when the business changed hands in 2023, the departing owners, Linda and Chad Niemeyer, spoke of “26 wonderful years,” Craft Industry Alliance reported, which places the start in the late 1990s. The alpaca origin also survives in the company’s older name: posts on its own blog, archived from before 2017, refer to the brand as Blue Sky Alpacas, including one announcing a “fresh and new Blue Sky Alpacas website.” We could not establish exactly when the name changed to Blue Sky Fibers.

Beyond alpaca.

As the name change suggests, the range grew past its first fibre. By 2016 the company said its “exclusive offerings have grown beyond alpaca to include wool, organic cotton, silk and cashmere,” and described the result as a “consciously crafted collection of high-quality natural fibers and patterns.” Its yarn list from that period included Baby Alpaca, Alpaca Silk, an organic cotton in several weights and Woolstok, a wool it said came from the region around Puno, in Peru, which its staff had visited “to meet the source.” The company also published its own knitting and crochet patterns to go with the yarns, from series of easy patterns to seasonal knit-alongs announced on its blog.

Alongside the main range it ran a second brand, Spud & Chloë, which its website described as “family-friendly” machine-washable wools, silk and organic cotton “in bright colors,” supported by quick, easy pattern collections. The two lines shared a website but were presented separately: Blue Sky Fibers for natural, often undyed or quietly coloured luxury fibres, Spud & Chloë for playful colour and easy care.

For a yarn company, the brand leans heavily on naturalness rather than on pattern or technique. Its frequently asked questions, as archived in 2020, said it worked with “alpaca and sheep herders in South America,” that the animals “are raised and cared for as they have been for centuries,” and that there was “no factory farming or cruelty involved”; it also said that “all of our cotton is GOTS certified organic.” We report those as the company’s statements and have not checked them against certification records.

Hand-dyers and the yarn trade.

The seven brands in this group all sell yarn for hand knitting and crochet, and they come from seven countries: Stylecraft from the United Kingdom, Araucania from Chile, Tukuwool from Finland, Cardiff Cashmere from Italy, Wollmeise from Germany, Blue Sky Fibers from the United States and Biggan Design from Australia. What separates them most is not the shape of a ball or the length of a colour card but the question every knitter eventually asks: where does the fibre come from?

Yarn brands answer that question in very different ways. Some tie their identity to the sheep of one country or even one local breed, and put the farm and the flock at the centre of the story. Some build a name on a single luxury fibre such as cashmere, where sourcing and finishing matter as much as colour. Some are defined by the dye pot, turning bought-in yarn into one-of-a-kind hand-dyed skeins, while others make affordable acrylic in large volumes, for knitters who want bright colour, easy washing and a low price.

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

Owned in Uruguay, run from Minnesota.

Where a Blue Sky skein is made is less clear than where the company is based. Its own descriptions point to South America for the raw fibre: alpaca and sheep raised by herders there and, in its words, “processed at central mills,” with the Woolstok wool traced to Puno in Peru. It did not name those mills or say in which country each yarn is spun, and we could not confirm that from independent sources. What can be said is that the company was Minnesota-based and designed its yarns and patterns there; the spinning, on the company’s own account, happened at mills near the fibre.

In May 2023 the business changed owner. Craft Industry Alliance reported on 3 May 2023 that malabrigo, the Uruguayan hand-dyed yarn company, had acquired Blue Sky Fibers, which it called “a Minnesota yarn manufacturer of consciously crafted, high-quality natural fibers and patterns.” Linda and Chad Niemeyer had decided to retire and sell; both firms were described as family-owned. Tobias Feder of malabrigo said: “We are very excited to see our family growing.” The report said Blue Sky would carry on “business as usual,” with its headquarters and team remaining in Minnesota, and that the two companies would stay separate, each developing yarns for its own aesthetic and customers — Blue Sky its natural fibres and coordinating patterns, malabrigo its hand-dyed yarns. The same report placed the deal among several recent sales of family-owned yarn businesses, after Berroco’s sale to Premier Needle Arts and WEBS’s to LoveCrafts in 2021.

Since then Blue Sky has been a Minnesota brand with a Uruguayan parent. We were unable to load its current website for this guide, so we have not confirmed any changes to its range or story since the sale.

For a design guide, Blue Sky Fibers shows how an origin story — a few backyard alpacas — can outlast the fibre it began with. Compare malabrigo, its owner since 2023, and Cascade Yarns, another American family yarn firm. For this guide we use a sky blue, a navy and an alpaca fawn with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Blue Sky Fibers’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.