The Unique Sheep is….
A Modern Yarn Company
It has been almost 10 years since we last re-did our website. A lot has change in the last decade! Most importantly, for a website, 10 years ago most people accessed websites on a computer. But now people are just as likely to visit our site on their phone or tablet as from a laptop. This requires a different approach to website design. Our goal with the redesign is to have a site that is easy to view on any device so that you can quickly and easily see what is new. We want to keep things fresh, clean and uncluttered!
Our personal lives have also changed in the last decade. Laura now has three young children and Kelly is edging towards retirement. (UPDATE: As of January 2023, Kelly is now retired!) We are still committed to bringing you new colors, clubs and kits through The Unique Sheep but other demands on our time have made our schedules less flexible. To ensure that we can still fill orders in a timely manner we are shifting our business model to focus more on new releases and limited edition offerings and less on our pre-existing color collections. Kelly’s colorways have been discontinued with her retirement. Laura’s colorways will re-emerge occasionally for limited times.
As in all industries over the past few years, we have struggled with yarn shortages and freight shipping delays. Combined with our shifting business model, this has led us to offer fewer yarn bases “in stock” at a time. Many of our yarn bases will only be available while we are doing a club or KAL featuring those yarns. We will continue to keep our most popular yarns- Kiri, Verve, Eos and a few more- in stock as long as we are able. If you need one of our bases that is showing as out of stock and you either have a large order or don’t mind waiting until the next time we place a mill order please email us to arrange a custom order.
A Company With Experience
The Unique Sheep is an independent yarn dyeing business started by Laura Lough. A life-long fiber artist, Laura was inspired by the owner of her LYS (Knit Picky) to start selling her handpainted yarn. The response of local knitters to her yarn blew her away and so she decided to branch out and offering her yarn to everyone!
At the start of 2008, Laura was joined by Kelly Eells. Kelly has had years of experience dyeing under the name “Liisu Yarns” but saw a good match with Laura and The Unique Sheep. By teaming up they were able to take advantage of Laura’s familiarity with ecommerce, social media marketing and accounting and Kelly’s experience in the dyeing industry. Together they created the Gradiance Collection. These colorways are dyed over several small skeins (usually 4 or 6) and carefully designed so that the colors in each skein mix together to gradually transition from one shade or color to another. Gradient Sets of mini skeins have become popular in the fiber arts world in the last few years, but it all started at The Unique Sheep in 2008.
At the end of 2022, Kelly retired from The Unique Sheep. Read her retirement message below: