Welcome Germantown! A New Worsted Weight Yarn from Kelbourne!

We’re excited to welcome Germantown from Kelbourne Woolens! This yarn has a very interesting history. From it’s creators at Kelbourne Woolens:

It’s not often in life that one gets to have a dream and follow it all the way to reality, and I feel extraordinarily lucky to have done just that. For many years I wanted to remake Germantown. Some of you will remember it from it’s previous life as a Brunswick yarn, or if you have a grandmother or great-grandmother who knits, you may remember or have heard of Fleisher’s Germantown, or Columbia – later Columbia Minerva – Germantown.

Germantown is a yarn with a history as old as America. For many years the term “Germantown” did not mean a specific kind or brand of yarn, it simply meant good quality worsted spun wool from Germantown, Pennsylvania.

The days of the bustling Germantown mills are gone. Most of the old textile mills in this country have shuttered, either in whole or part. The ones that survive tend to focus on one aspect of production – top dyeing, twisting, or just spinning – so in order to create a finished product, yarn must move from location to location before it is ready for sale. Wool may come from Wyoming or Texas, travel to California to be cleaned and processed, shipped to Pennsylvania to be spun, then to Maine to be dyed, and then back to a warehouse in Philadelphia. The machine, as they say, has a lot of moving parts. That said, there are many amazing small mills across the US who will make yarn sheep to skein, but as a wholesale company, we need to be able to have a large and consistent inventory, which is something – as amazing as they are – the smaller mills cannot manage. This, coupled with the desire to limit the manufacturing process to one location, makes domestic production an uphill battle.

Yarn details:

4-ply 100% North American Wool in worsted weight
100g/3.5 oz – 201 meters/220 yards
Gauge: 16-20 sts/4″ on US 6-9 (4-5.5mm) needles
$14

Accompanying this new yarn is the Building Blocks pattern series (via pdf only). Designed by Kate Gagnon Osborn, the hat, scarf, and mittens patterns are written with more instruction and explanation of techniques to hone your skill as well as create classic go-to patterns you’ll reach for over and over again! Each pdf pattern includes all three versions seen below.