Interview: Imperial Business Intelligence

An interview with Ruth Saunders at Imperial Business Intelligence.

Interview: Trusted Clothes

An interview with Scott Jacobsen at Trusted Clothes.

Press: GQ Style File

We're stoked to be appearing in British GQ's November issue in Style File.

Interview: Saiint

Read our feature interview with new ethical fashion blog Saiint.

Interview: Fashion Capital

Paul Markevicius from Fashion Captial distills meaning from a long, rambling conversation with Ramnation's Creative Director.

Make it British

Feature interview on the Make It British website.

Wales, Wales, wool

The Cambrian Wool initiative invited our Creative Director to meet HRH Prince Charles at an exclusive exhibition of Welsh wool products.

Cambrian Wool Challenge

Early in 2015 we submitted a piece for the Cambrian Wool Challenge, made from lovely Welsh wool,

Garment workers paid £3 an hour??

Recently the Ethical Trading Initiative released a report looking at the garment industry in Leicester. The results were saddening, if not surprising.

In the beginning, there were tough questions

Next week takes us to the first Make It British conference at the Truman Brewery. Which reminded us of how we got wrapped up in wool in the first place.

Pin money: the numbers behind hand knitting

We see lots of beautiful handmade sweaters being sold for pitifully small sums. We didn't understand it, so we had a closer look at how the numbers add up.

The Darling Lambs of Spring

Stretching our legs in the sunshine, in the countryside with the lambing sheep.

Pop-up launch at the Truman Brewery

Ramnation launched it's first collection with a pop-up party and photo booth at the Old Truman Brewery in London's Brick Lane.

The scarf story

What happens when a scarf isn't just a scarf? The inside story on how we made our very special opera scarves.

Devon: Exeter wool and Plymouth gin

On the woollen trail in Devon.

First photo shoot

Our first ever shoot for the knitwear range.

The scarf story

November 20, 2013 at 6:06 PM

We spend a lot of time worrying about the materials and processes we're using to create our knitwear. As in cooking, we aim to start with the best ingredients - and we want those to be as non-toxic and harmless as possible.

While our mill organically dyes our yarns for us, we were struggling to find the printed silk fabric necessary to bring the classic opera scarf to life... so we decided to print it ourselves. This presented a whole new set of problems - how to print on silk while retaining the soft handle of the fabric? Could we use resists, dyes or discharges?

After inhaling the sulphurous odour of some unpleasant discharge chemicals, we decided to go our own way and print using naturally derived plant dyes and traditional dyeing techniques. We cooked up some ink on the stovetop using a randomly derived recipe of water, dye extracts, cornstarch and gum arabic. We used a (not too traditional) woad vat to dye some fabric for overprinting. We used seaweed extracts as a resist.

The resulting prints are boldly patterned with vibrant natural colours - perfectly in tune with the organic yarn colours. Each hand-printed scarf takes the natural ink and dye in it's own way, introducing subtle variations to the paisley rhythm.