We've all been up to a trade fair at the NEC in Birmingham over the past few days. It's not the sort of event where you can buy things or bag freebies (although we were tempted to help ourselves to the display toys advertising Wendy's forthcoming range of knitted toy kits; the penguin is gorgeous). The event does give shop owners and the press the opportunity to see what new products firms will be releasing over coming months.
One thing that struck us was milk yarn. We first encountered it being displayed by Portuguese firm Rosarios 4, distributed in the UK by Moral Fibre. Sole Latte and Silk4Milk are both incredibly soft. Milk yarns are like buses, though, and as we carried on around the show we encountered a third, to be released later in the year by a major knitting yarn manufacturer. Like the Rosarios 4 yarns, it was wonderfully soft to the touch, and we're looking forward to getting our hands on balls of milk-based yarns to try out for ourselves.
We're still debating whether milk is an odder fibre source than chitin, a derivative of crab and prawn shells used in South West Trading Company's Tofutsies. Have you seen an odder fibre? We'd love to know what strange fibres you've found to knit with!
Wednesday February 20, 2008 
