Yarn of the Month – Luma

Origins

Like so many of The Fibre Co. yarns, Luma had an ancestor in the very first yarns Daphne created. At the mini-mill in Maine, in the early days of The Fibre Co., Daphne experimented with carding different fibres together just to see what would happen. She found an interesting naturally brown coloured cotton that she was keen to experiment with, initially mixing the fibre with soy and linen. As is often the case with experimentation, the first attempts were not successful—the carding machine just couldn’t handle the plant-based blend. A yarn was born when Daphne added Merino wool, to provide a more flexible and lofty element to the mix. The yarn reminded Daphne of her years of living in Africa and she paid homage to the landscape by naming the new yarn Savannah. 

When The Fibre Co. outgrew the mini-mill and Daphne was no longer able to create all the yarns with her own hands, Savannah had to be retired because the blend was too difficult to reproduce with the machinery at The Fibre Co.’s partner mills.

Daphne never lost the urge to include a plant-based yarn that would work well for warmer climates and continued to attempt to find a blend that the partner mills could produce. Some years and many tries later, Daphne found a mill that could spin a similar blend of fibres to Savannah with some differences; soy was replaced with natural silk, and the brown cotton was replaced with Peruvian organic Pima cotton. The blend had become something new and needed a new name—something that reflected the inspiration and the blend itself: Luma. The reference to light embodied in the name Luma perfectly sums up the history and the reality of this beautiful yarn.