Weekend Read: Wild Yarn by Imogen Bright Moon
Before fibre becomes yarn, it passes through a series of deliberate, attentive decisions. In Wild Yarn: Creating hand-spun yarn from ethical fibres, Imogen Bright Moon begins precisely there: with the raw material in the hand. Her book asks us to think again about what yarn represents — not simply a means to an end, but the foundation of a textile practice shaped by ethics, touch and time.
Wild Yarn: Creating Hand-Spun Yarn from Ethical Fibres, Imogen Bright Moon.
Bright Moon’s practice begins long before the spindle turns. Wool from a rescue flock on the South Downs, hemp, soya, alpaca, wild silk: her fibres are ethically sourced and carefully chosen, but more importantly, carefully met. ‘Each time we encounter our raw materials,’ she writes, ‘it is an opportunity to experience them for the first time.’ The statement reads less as instruction and more as position. Materials are not passive. They are in relationship with us.
Photo credit: Béla Váradi
The book moves between the practical and the philosophical with ease. Chapters on blending read like colour theory refracted through fleece. Working with naturally occurring pigments, Bright Moon likens fibre preparation to a painter mixing oils — shade against shade, tone against tone, until something both subtle and alive emerges. Spinning itself, whether a simple single or a triple-chain ply, is presented not as mastery over fibre but as a dialogue with it. Rhythm replaces speed. Attention replaces control.
Photo credit: Béla Váradi
There is technical clarity here: tools for blending, spindles and wheels, skeining, soaking and wet-finishing, methods for storing and curating a yarn collection. Yet what distinguishes Wild Yarn is its refusal to treat technique as an end point. The ‘stash’ becomes a site of composition. Arranging hanks in sequence can constitute the entire design process — a quiet rebellion against the tyranny of the sketchbook. In Bright Moon’s materials-led approach, intuition is not indulgence but discipline. To ‘get out of the head and into the hands’ is an act of creative trust.
Photo credit: Béla Váradi
Her woven works — large, tactile, landscape-inflected — hover in the background of the text. Shells pocketed from the beach, flints gathered on walks, the mineral tones of the Downs translated through fibre’s own language. Spinning, she suggests, allows the raw to remain raw, even as it is transformed.
Photo credit: Béla Váradi
In a moment when sustainability risks becoming slogan, Wild Yarn offers something slower and more demanding. Ethical sourcing is not checkbox but ethic; mindfulness not aesthetic but practice. This is a book for those who suspect that yarn carries memory — of animal, of land, of hand — and who are willing to listen before they begin to twist.
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Further Information:
Wild Yarn: Creating hand-spun yarn from ethical fibres by Imogen Bright Moon is published by Batsford Books, and is available now in the Selvedge Bookshop.
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Image Credits:
Lead: Portrait of Imogen Bright Moon. Photo: Alun Callender.
All further images as credited in photo captions.