Knitting yarn from the wine country of northern Spain.

Lanas Stop is a Spanish brand of hand-knitting and crochet yarn. Its name simply means “Stop yarns,” and for most of its documented life it was sold from La Rioja, the wine region of northern Spain. Today the name belongs to a different story: it is one of the brands sold by Katia, the yarn company based near Barcelona, which offers a short range of Lanas Stop baby yarns.

The best record of the brand’s earlier years is its own website, preserved by the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. From 2012 to 2016 the footer of lanasstop.com named the company behind it as Desarrollo de Fibras Textiles S.A., with premises on the Lentiscares industrial estate in Navarrete, a town just west of Logroño. Earlier, between 2004 and 2011, the lanasstop.com address forwarded to the website of INFITEX, Industrias de Fibras Textiles S.A., a Flash-era site whose archived pages show wool and certification logos and catalogue sections for winter, baby and rug yarns. The archive does not show how the two company names are related, so we do not say.

The company’s “Historia” page, archived in 2012 and again at the end of 2015, gives no founding year or founder. It describes Lanas Stop as “la empresa española líder en lanas para labores” — Spain’s leading company in yarns for handwork, in its own words — and says it had spent more than 50 years in production and trade around the world. That page says the yarns were made “en nuestras instalaciones en España,” in the company’s own facilities in Spain, and that it sold through its own network of sales agents in most of its export countries. It also says the company held ISO 9001 certification from the Spanish standards body AENOR and was a licensee of the marks of the International Wool Secretariat, the body behind the Woolmark.

Magazines, fake fur and a street of wool.

Like most European yarn houses of its generation, Lanas Stop sold its yarn together with patterns. The archived site lists a numbered magazine, simply titled Lanas Stop: issue 105 appeared in February 2011, issue 122 was a spring-summer children’s number in 2013, and issue 130 was on the home page in early 2016. There were special issues for babies, children, accessories and shawls, sample cards for rug yarns, a seasonal “trends, colours and yarns” catalogue, step-by-step tutorials for knitting and crochet, and free themed patterns, among them a series of knitted Nativity figures. By 2012 the site ran in Spanish, German, English and French.

The brand’s most distinctive line was its FUR collection, yarns made to imitate animal pelts. A company news post of January 2012, headed “Colección FUR Made in SPAIN,” presented two new qualities, Mink, with a longer pile, and Seal, with a short one, alongside the existing Visón, all in viscose and polyamide and knitted on 7–8 mm needles. The company said both were made with technology developed entirely in Spain by its technical department, including the machinery needed to produce them, and pitched the line as fashion that also spoke for the protection of animals. Further fur yarns, among them Felino and Lynx, followed later in 2012.

Lanas Stop also put itself behind wool. In autumn 2011 its news pages reported that it had joined the Campaign for Wool, the initiative launched by the Prince of Wales to promote the fibre, and that when the campaign reached Madrid on 6 October 2011, turning Calle Serrano into an “Avenida de la Lana” for a day under the Spanish designer Estrella Archs, Lanas Stop supplied the yarn used to decorate the street. The company said it also provided yarn for the covers of a limited edition of recycled-glass jars sold by Woolmark.

By 2016 the site’s range ran from spring cottons and the fur line to classic yarns, limited editions, kits, knitting needles and crochet hooks, and its home page still claimed “más de 50 años de experiencia en el sector” — more than 50 years of experience in the trade.

Seven countries, seven ways to spin.

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 legendary name, a smaller range.

The independent Lanas Stop website came to an end in 2017. The Wayback Machine’s last ordinary captures of lanasstop.com date from March of that year; from April its pages answer with permanent redirects, and by May the home page forwarded to katia.com. In October 2026 both lanasstop.com and www.lanasstop.com still lead there.

Katia tells the next part itself. Founded as Hilaturas Génesis in 1950 by Ramon Castelló and run today as Fil Katia, S.A. from Castellbell i el Vilar in the province of Barcelona, the company lists among its achievements of the 2010s: “We brought back the Spanish brand Lanas Stop, adding a selection of their best yarns for babies to our catalog, alongside the Canastilla magazine.” Katia does not give a date or the terms on which it took the name, and we found none in the sources we checked, so we describe the change only as the record shows it: the brand’s web address and products now sit inside Katia.

On katia.com, Lanas STOP appears in the brand menu beside Katia, Concept by Katia and WOW! by Katia. Its page speaks of “the legendary Lanas Stop brand” and offers six yarns in October 2026, among them Giza-5, a mercerised Egyptian cotton, the fine acrylic Nido, which Katia calls hypoallergenic, and pure Angora. A Katia blog post dated April 2022 introduced Canastilla — Spanish for a baby’s layette — as a downloadable magazine of 58 knitting patterns for babies, written for the Lanas Stop baby collection. The Lanas Stop pages we checked do not name the country where the yarns are made today, so we do not name one.

For a design guide, Lanas Stop shows how a regional yarn name can outlive its own company: a Rioja brand built on numbered magazines and bold novelty yarns, now kept alive as a gentle layette range inside a larger house. Compare Katia, the Barcelona-province company that sells it today, and We Are Knitters, a Madrid yarn brand of a much younger generation. For this guide we use a Rioja red, a layette cream and a cradle blue with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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