A hand-dyer who could not find the colours she wanted.

Fyberspates began as one person’s dye pots. The company says it “started as a hand dyed company in the UK in early 2005”, at a time when, in its founder’s words, hand-dyed yarn “was hard to get hold of.” Its founder and owner, Jeni Hewlett, writes on the company website that she had seen the colours American hand-dyers were selling online, looked for British companies doing the same, and found that they were “few and far between.” The designer Kate Davies, who has worked with the business for years, put it more simply in 2019: “Jeni began Fyberspates in her kitchen as a talented independent dyer.”

The first phase did not last in that form. As demand grew, the company says, it became clear that it “would not be able to manufacture yarns in our own back garden on a scale large enough to supply shops as well as our beloved customers.” Its answer was Scrumptious, which it calls “our very first commercial yarn”: a merino and silk blend made in quantity rather than dyed skein by skein at home. The Scrumptious range later grew to several weights; the company now lists only the lace and 4ply as current, and says the DK, Aran and Chunky have been discontinued.

The paper trail at Companies House is short. A private limited company called Fyberspates Limited was incorporated in September 2009 and dissolved in December 2017, according to the public register. The business itself carried on: today its website describes Fyberspates as “an Independent wholesale yarn & distribution company owned by Jeni Hewlett,” based at a business park in Deeside, in Flintshire, just across the Welsh border from Chester. We did not establish which legal entity trades under the name now, so we describe it only as the company describes itself.

Commission-spun, and dyed in South America.

Fyberspates is not a mill, and does not present itself as one. The company says “we commission spin all of our own yarns”, and elsewhere on its site refers to “the mill we spin our yarns with,” without naming it. That puts it among the British brands that design yarns and their colours but have them spun by others, rather than among the country’s remaining spinners.

The hand-dyed side of the business also moved abroad as it grew. After Scrumptious, the company says, it wanted “to go back to our hand-dyed roots” and created Vivacious, a high-twist merino. “We flew to South America,” the founder writes; she taught the dyers her recipes, and “in return, they now dye me the most wonderful Vivacious and Gleam ranges.” The company lists Vivacious 4ply, Vivacious DK and Gleem Lace as its hand-dyed yarns, and warns knitters that no two skeins are identical, recommending they alternate two rows from each skein in a large project. A botanically dyed version of Vivacious, it says, uses “natural dyes native to Peru,” developed “alongside our dye house.”

Peru also appears in the one detailed third-party account of the company’s supply chain. In January 2019 Kate Davies launched Àrd Thìr, an Aran-weight yarn of Peruvian highland wool and alpaca, which she said had been “produced for us by our friends at Fyberspates and Chester Wool Company.” She wrote that the mill involved, in the Peruvian highlands, “operates vertically” — “from fleece to finished yarn – all processes are performed in-house” — and that the Chester Wool side of the partnership had worked with the same Peruvian mill for more than 60 years. She did not name the mill, and neither do we. Fyberspates still lists Àrd Thìr, describing it as “produced in one highland landscape (Peru) and inspired by another (Scotland).”

The company’s other own-brand yarns follow the same pattern of fibre-led names. Gleem Lace combines Bluefaced Leicester wool with silk; Cumulus, which the founder calls “a slight departure” from the shiny, bright yarns, pairs a silk core with a halo of baby suri alpaca.

Britain’s mills and its yarn brands.

The seven brands in this group all sell British yarn for hand knitting and crochet: West Yorkshire Spinners, John Arbon, Baa Ram Ewe, Blacker Yarns, Laxtons, Uist Wool and Fyberspates. They share a country, but not a way of making yarn, and the difference between them says a good deal about what is left of Britain’s wool industry.

Britain once spun yarn on an industrial scale, and the mills that remain are a small fraction of what there was. Some brands still own the machinery that turns fleece into yarn. Others design yarns and colours and pay a mill — at home or abroad — to spin them, which is how much of the modern yarn trade works. Between the two sit firms that do part of the work themselves, such as dyeing or blending, and buy in the rest. A brand’s label rarely makes clear which kind of company it is.

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 spun and dyed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A yarn brand that became a distributor.

The biggest change at Fyberspates has been in what kind of business it is. It now describes itself as a wholesale-only company: it does not sell to the public, and directs knitters to a map of retailers in the UK, Europe, the United States, Australia and New Zealand. Alongside its own yarns, it says it partners with three designers to produce and distribute their own yarn lines — Rachel Coopey’s CoopKnits Socks Yeah!, Carol Feller’s Nua for Stolen Stitches and Lily Kate Makes’ Axis — and it distributes books and patterns from independent designers. Kate Davies wrote in 2019 that the Fyberspates and Chester Wool team had been her distributor since 2013, and the company says it has distributed Pom Pom magazine in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world since January 2023.

The company also publishes its own pattern books built around its yarns, including The Scrumptious Collection, the Vivacious volumes and The Cumulus Collection, with designs by Jeni Hewlett and by designers such as Rachel Coopey and Judy Furlong. It sells single patterns through Ravelry, it says, and takes part in that site’s in-store programme for yarn shops.

What it says about itself is consistent: a company that grew out of hand-dyeing and wants, in its founder’s phrase, “to bring a touch of Indie to our commercial ranges, since that’s where we started.” What it does not publish is just as clear. It names no mill, no dye house and no spinning location beyond South America and Peru, and we found no design awards for the brand in the sources we checked; its logo, typefaces and colour values are not documented.

For a design guide, Fyberspates shows how a small hand-dyer can grow into a wholesale brand while keeping colour at the centre of its identity. Compare Hedgehog Fibres, another hand-dyer that built a brand on saturated colour, and Mirasol, a yarn brand rooted in the Peruvian highlands. For this guide we use spiced plum, peacock teal and copper with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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