From fashion forecasting to her own yarn.

The Erika Knight yarn collection is named after, and was created by, Erika Knight, a British knit and crochet designer. Her brand’s website describes her as coming from a Fine Art background, with a career in the fashion industry whose trend-forecasting work, it says, rekindled her interest in making by hand. She is the author of numerous books on knitting, crochet and craft, and the website says she has lectured at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London as well as at art institutions and universities.

The yarn brand, the website says, was launched in 2012. It describes Erika Knight’s ethos at the time as keeping things simple: “to support British manufacturing where possible, to promote sustainable, natural fibres and to celebrate both traditional skills and modern innovation.” The site sums up the collection as “born in Britain, with a passion to support indigenous fibres, heritage mills and traditional crafts,” and as “concise and considered,” with a small number of yarns and colours chosen to work together. We found no independent dated report of the launch, so the year rests on the company’s own account.

Erika Knight herself now works with her daughter from a studio on the south coast of England, where, the website says, the two act as consultants across the craft industry; she also presents a podcast, KnightKraft.

British wool, and where it is spun.

The collection is built mostly on natural fibres, and its marketing leans on British sheep breeds. British Blue Wool is spun from Bluefaced Leicester, which the company calls “the cashmere of British wools.” Wool Local and its heavier Aran version blend Bluefaced Leicester with Masham wool. Other lines include Gossypium Cotton, a recycled-linen yarn called Studio Linen, a mohair blend and a woollen-spun tweed, and the colours are presented as inspired by the British landscape.

The specifications are those of a classic hand-knitting range. British Blue Wool comes in 100-gram skeins of 220 metres, for hand washing only; Wool Local Aran gives 180 metres per 100 grams. Pure Tweed, the company says, is woollen-spun: the fibres are carded but not combed, trapping air to make a lighter, loftier yarn that it says wears for years. The brand also publishes its own pattern leaflets, booklets and lookbooks, including one titled “Best of British.”

“Born in Britain” does not mean that every yarn is made there, and the company’s own product pages are specific about the differences. For Wool Local it says the fleece goes from the British wool auction in Bradford to finished yarn “in less than 50 miles,” being “scoured, combed, spun, dyed, steamed and hanked in the county of Yorkshire.” For British Blue Wool it says that the raw wool is sourced in Great Britain but “dyed and spun in our favourite mill in Turkey.” Gossypium Cotton, it says, is made in India, in the Hisar district of Haryana, by a manufacturer it describes as promoting fair labour practices. Studio Linen, it says, is made by re-spinning waste linen fibres from industry. These are the company’s claims; it does not name the mills, and we have not been able to check them independently.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group all sell yarn for hand knitting and crochet, and they are linked to six countries: Paintbox Yarns and Erika Knight from the United Kingdom, Juniper Moon Farm from the United States, Lamana from Germany, Laines du Nord from Italy, De Rerum Natura from France, and ITO, a label run from Germany whose yarns, it says, come from Japan. What they share is less a place than a question: who actually makes the yarn that carries the name on the label?

Some yarn brands are, in effect, designer or retailer labels. The company chooses the fibres, sets the colour card, writes the patterns and builds the brand, but the spinning and dyeing are done by mills elsewhere, sometimes in another country, and the name on the ball tells you who designed it rather than who made it. Others are fibre-led, built around a particular wool, a flock or a mill, where the story of the yarn starts with the raw material and the place it was grown or spun.

Many brands sit somewhere between the two, and their own descriptions do not always make the line clear. Each guide therefore 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 British brand with a German address.

The name on the ball band is British, but the business behind it today is German. The brand’s website, erikaknight.com — the older erikaknight.co.uk address now forwards to it — is published by Selected Yarns GmbH, which trades as Soul Wool and is based in Neustadt-Glewe, in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, according to the site’s legal notice. Its copyright line reads “©2026 Selected Yarns GmbH,” and many of its product descriptions appear in German as well as English.

The same site lists sales agents for Scandinavia and for France and Great Britain, with Selected Yarns handling the rest of the world itself, and it runs a registration page for trade buyers rather than selling directly from the brand site. Archived copies of the site’s legal notice show it published by Kremke Handelsgesellschaft mbH, the company behind the German yarn brand Kremke Soul Wool, in May 2024 and January 2026, and by Selected Yarns GmbH by October 2026, under the same commercial-register entry, which points to a renaming of that company rather than a sale; we found no announcement of the change. What the site does make clear is the division of roles: Erika Knight is presented as the designer and creator of the collection, while Selected Yarns publishes, distributes and supports it.

That arrangement is not unusual for designer-named yarns, where the person supplies the eye and the name and a larger company handles sourcing and wholesale. It does mean that the brand’s Britishness is a matter of fibre, design and story rather than of where the company is based or where every yarn is spun.

For a design guide, Erika Knight shows how a designer’s name and a sense of place can carry a yarn line wherever it is run from. Compare Debbie Bliss, another British designer’s yarn brand now owned by a larger company, and Rowan, the Yorkshire yarn brand built on designer knits. For this guide we use moorland green, fleece and undyed oat with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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