Vegan Crafting Made Easy: Knit and Crochet

We’ve talked about vegan sewing supplies and vegan soap making, and I don’t want you fiber artists to be left out! There are lots of wonderful options for vegan knit and crochet supplies. It just takes a little bit of extra attention to materials to suss out common animal products.

Vegan Yarns

This big pitfall with yarn is wool. Wool comes from sheep, which means it’s not a vegan product. While smaller farms might treat their sheep humanely, commercial wool comes with a huge dash of animal cruelty. Sheep live in terrible, unhygenic conditions and suffer from mistreatment and cruel practices all in the name of producing merino and other wool yarns. If you want to read more details on the horrors of commercial wool production, This Dish is Veg does an excellent job of explaining what’s cruel about wool.

Luckily, you don’t have to abuse those sweet sheep to satisfy your yarn cravings! Here are a few vegan yarn options that are eco-friendly to boot:

• Organic cotton
• Hemp
• Bamboo
• Reclaimed yarn
• T-shirt yarn
• Banana silk
• Vegan recycled sari yarn

Many vegan knit and crochet artists use synthetic yarns, and I’m sure you noticed that I left that off of the list above. While synthetic yarns are usually animal free, they’re also usually made from petroleum products, which doesn’t make them an eco-friendly option. Vegan crafting doesn’t always equal green crafting, but with options like the ones above it’s easy to achieve both!

Etsy is also great resource for vegan yarns. Just do a quickie search for “vegan yarn” under supplies and you’ll get tons of results. Remember though: some people have good intentions but don’t fully understand what vegan means. If you’re not sure what a material is, Google it to ensure you’re not accidentally buying an animal product.

Next >> Animal Ingredients to Avoid

[Image Credit: Creative Commons photo by moria]