Wild Yarn: Creating hand-spun yarn from ethical fibres

A practical and inspirational guide to choosing, blending and spinning richly textured artisan yarn for weaving, knitting and other textile art applications.

Imogen Bright Moon is a British Romani textile artist who creates richly textured, highly tactile woven textile works from yarn that she spins and blends herself. In this elegantly designed book Imogen reveals the secrets of her practice. In evocative, engagingly written text accompanied by sumptuous images of her work in her studio throughout the year, she explains:

• How to choose raw fibres for use in your work: the author’s are ethically sourced from various ecologically responsible sources, including a rescue flock of sheep on the South Downs.
• How to put together different types of fibres – raw sheep’s wool, plant fibres such as hemp, soya and wild silk, alpaca hair and much more – to create richly textured yarn.
• The delicate art of blending naturally occurring pigments, working with shade and tone to create subtle and nuanced colours, a process that Imogen likens to a painter mixing paints on a palette.
• The principles of hand-spinning, from a simple single spun thread to more complicated yarns such as triple-chain ply yarn, using a traditional floor spindle.
• How to skein, soak and wet-finish your yarn, and how to store your yarn stash.
• Ideas for taking your yarn into finished craft and art projects, with stunning images of the author’s own work.

With an emphasis on engagement with nature, the rhythms of the seasonal craft cycle, ethical making, sustainability and mindfulness, this book is ideal for weavers, textile artists and anyone seduced by the joys of yarn.

Imogen Bright Moon is a British Romani textile artist. She creates large textile-based installations, using tapestry weaving and cloth weaving techniques, featuring painterly hand-blended-and-spun yarns. Her practice is founded in material processes, material ethics and heritage craft processes. Imogen is also a researcher, writer and textile-crafts historian. In 2022 she was a recipient of Gypsy Maker 5 from the Romani Cultural & Arts Company / Arts Council Wales. She is represented by The New Craftsmen and exhibited at Collect at Somerset House in 2023. She is based in Brighton.