In 2025, to celebrate new beginnings for the Yarndale Start Up Bursary in Memory of Amanda Bloom and Jenny Machin, we were delighted to award the bursary to not one, but three different emerging fibre artists and makers.
Auspicious Stitch
In 2024, following redundancy from her role as an industrial sewing machinist, Sammy who lives in Easington Colliery on the North East coast, decided it was now or never to turn her hobby into a valuable resource to the fibre arts community and launched her fibre arts business, Auspicious Stitch
When she started spinning 15 years ago, she pined for colourful art batts but the equipment to make them was well beyond her budget, and her home lacked the space.
She believes passionately that fibre arts should be accessible to everyone and this belief drives her every day to share what she’s learnt. She’s looking forward to bringing her colourful fibre batts, that she blends by hand on a second-hand drum carder, to Yarndale, so that her fellow fibre artists can experience the joy of spinning thrilling colour and texture blends regardless of their financial status or ability.
Esca
Lauren, who is from and currently resides in Sheffield, is a 2024 graduate in Fashion Textiles–Knitwear from the London College of Fashion. She has recently launched her own brand, Esca, specialising in avant-garde knitwear, bags, and accessories.
She started Esca after noticing a huge gap in the market for avant-garde knitwear made in the north of England. Her own personal experience demonstrated that outside of London it was very hard to find work in the industry with a progressive ethos on sustainability and whilst a large amount of Lambswool yarn is made in the north, there are very few brands currently operating here using the wool.
She chose her brand name to represent her ethos. Derived from the Celtic word for river, ‘Esca’ is the name of someone who has strong feelings for nature and reflects the importance to her of creating a sustainable and locally sourced brand, with a focus on wool and other natural fibres. She hopes to be able to bring more of a knitwear community up to the north.
Lauren aims to enhance her creative practice and take it to the next level through the purchase of a Dubied knitting machine and she also wants to experiment with different techniques using more natural yarns and fibres made here in the north.
Oxford Biocolours
Jim and Darren are industrial biochemists who founded Oxford Biopigments to transform the dyeing industry and developed the World’s first colourfast, plant-based dyeing system for wool. Unlike traditional natural dyes, their dyes meet the textile industry standards for colour fastness (they won’t bleed in the wash or fade in sunlight) and don’t require mordants to bind to wool. This allows the dyes to work in existing commercial dyeing machinery and be blended together to create a wide range of sustainable colours.
To help bring their innovation to life, they recently launched Oxford Biocolours, their own yarn brand that pairs their dyes with beautiful 100% British wool. They have a strong connection with the north, sourcing their yarn from a mill in Huddersfield and dyeing it in collaboration with a small, family-run dye house in the Scottish Borders.
Their debut collection is small but mighty. Each colour is cutting edge science and by combining lab-developed sustainable colour technology with beautiful British wool, they aim to offer knitters a truly sustainable and joyful alternative to synthetically dyed yarns.
