Wool combers in a peat town.

Scheepjes is a Dutch yarn brand with two lives. The first began in Veenendaal, in the province of Utrecht, a town that turned to wool when its peat ran out. The company says that in 1799 a wool comber called Dirk Steven van Schuppen was working there with thirteen helpers, buying raw wool from farmers, having it combed and washed, sending it out to be spun by women in the area, and dyeing and weaving it on his own premises.

The family history is a little more complicated. Dutch Wikipedia’s article on the family firm, which cites a company history by G.G. Callenbach and the town’s published history, gives the 1799 founder as Steven van Schuppen (1767–1850), and says it was his son, Dirk Stevenszoon (1803–1855), who decided in 1837 to have his combed wool spun by machine in Leiden, while twisting, dyeing and weaving stayed in Veenendaal. The municipal archive of Veenendaal also credits Dirk Stevenszoon with being the first in the town to have his wool machine-spun.

After Dirk’s death in 1855, his widow and their son took over, and the firm became Weduwe D.S. van Schuppen & Zoon — “the widow D.S. van Schuppen and son.” Steam power followed: the archive says the firm was allowed a 12-horsepower steam engine in 1858, while Dutch Wikipedia dates the first steam engine to 1865. The workforce rose from about fifty in 1850 to some 300 by 1885, the year the mill stopped weaving. In 1906 it became a limited company with a long name, the N.V. Veenendaalsche Sajet- en Vijfschachtfabriek.

Dutch Wikipedia says the firm was known for decent conditions by the standards of its time, with sick pay and, from 1888, a pension fund — though before steam, the working day ran from five in the morning to nine at night.

Royal Scheepjeswol, rise and fall.

The name Scheepjeswol — “little-ship wool” — came into use in the 1930s, the company says, when the firm invested heavily in new buildings despite the Depression. The ship was not random. Dutch Wikipedia says the logo shows a samoereus, a flat-bottomed inland barge also used to carry peat away from the diggings around Veenendaal, and the company notes that the same vessel appears in the town’s coat of arms. The old slogan, Dutch Wikipedia records, was “U vaart er wel bij” — roughly, “you’ll sail well with it.”

By 1928 the firm employed about 450 wool workers and had shifted from yarn for stockings and underwear to yarn for knitting outer garments; from 1936 it also spun industrial yarns for knitwear makers. During the Second World War it was made to produce grey-green yarn for German uniforms, and Dutch Wikipedia says its workers joined the strike of April and May 1943.

The war also produced an odd sideline. Dutch Wikipedia says the firm discovered in 1944 that cholesterol could be extracted from wool grease, and from 1945 ran a chemical works alongside the wool mill; that business was sold to Philips-Duphar in 1969 and survives today under other owners as a separate company. In 1949, at its 150th anniversary, the yarn maker received the Royal predicate. Its workforce peaked at about 900 in 1962, and it was listed on the stock exchange in December 1960.

Decline was gradual. The company cites wage rises of about ten per cent a year in the late 1960s, the shorter working week and, in the 1970s, cheaper imports from outside Europe. Dutch Wikipedia says a fire in 1984 was the final blow. Sources differ on the end: the Veenendaal archive says the Scheepjeswol factory went bankrupt at the end of 1986; Dutch Wikipedia says it was taken over in 1987 by the Leidsche Wolspinnerij, also in Veenendaal, which itself failed in 1988 — the year the company gives for the bankruptcy. The mill buildings were demolished in 1989, and a shopping centre called De Scheepjeshof now stands on the site.

Yarn, colour and the craft trade.

The seven brands in this group all sell yarn for hand knitting and crochet, but they work at very different scales and come from seven countries. Between them they cover most of the ways a ball or skein of yarn reaches a maker: from a mill on an island, from a small hand-dyeing studio, from a family distributor, and from names sold widely on the high street and in craft chains.

Four come from continental Europe. Phildar is French, Scheepjes is Dutch, Katia is Spanish and Isager is Danish, and each guide sets out who founded the brand, who owns it now and what it says about where its yarn is spun. Two are smaller and rooted in place: Jamieson’s of Shetland, from the islands north of mainland Scotland, and Hedgehog Fibres, an Irish hand-dyer. The last, Cascade Yarns, is an American family firm in Seattle that sources its yarn from partner mills abroad.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself, and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A barge on the label, a wholesaler behind it.

The name did not disappear entirely after the mill closed. Archived pages from 2003 show HWS-Markoma, a company in Nieuwegein, describing Scheepjeswol as one of its registered brands of hand-knitting yarn, alongside Neveda and Durable, and also supplying the Spanish brand Katia to Dutch shops. The company’s own history passes over this period, describing the return of Scheepjeswol yarns in 2010 as coming “after a twenty-two-year hiatus.”

In 2010 the brand was taken over by De Bondt, which the company describes as a family-owned haberdashery wholesaler in Tynaarlo, in the province of Drenthe; Dutch Wikipedia dates the purchase to February 2010. De Bondt describes itself today as the exclusive distributor of Scheepjes, and also wholesales brands such as Prym and Gütermann. Today the brand is sold simply as Scheepjes.

The new Scheepjes made its name with colour and with crochet. Its Whirl yarn, a “cake” whose shades change slowly along the strand, is spun from six threads, the company says, one replaced by another at each colour change; its cotton Catona is widely used for amigurumi, Dutch Wikipedia notes. The brand runs crochet-alongs and make-alongs and a Designer Collective of pattern writers. Newer yarns lean on recycled fibre: the company says Woolwise is 100 per cent recycled superwash merino and Terrazzo a blend of recycled wool and viscose, and that its Organicon cotton is GOTS-certified. It says its OEKO-TEX-certified yarns carry a QR code on the label.

Where the yarn is made today is not something the company states on the product pages and history we checked, so we do not say; the Veenendaal mill has been gone since 1989. What the brand kept is the name and the barge.

For a design guide, Scheepjes shows how a heritage name can be bought, relaunched and made to mean something new to a different generation of crafters. Compare Katia, the Spanish yarn brand once sold alongside Scheepjeswol in Dutch shops, and Phildar, another European yarn name with a long history. For this guide we use navy, cream and a coral with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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