As a part of the Anthology Knitalong we're sharing a bit of the story behind some of the yarns used in Carrie Bostick Hoge's newest book, Anthology 3 / Seaside. Today we're sharing a bit from Astrid of Biches & Bûches.

Carrie used Biches & Bûches Le Petit Lambswool to design the Always and Forever Pullover, and the Caroline Cap. She used Biches & Bûches Le Gros to design the Autumn Shoreline Vest, and the Sea Sand Cardigan, and Biches & Bûches Le Cashmere and Lambswool to design the Fleur Cardigan. 

Biches & Bûches began as Astrid’s dream of being creative, playing with yarn and colors, and making knitting kits. She had many times bought beautiful yarn without a pattern or a precise idea of what it should be used for, experiencing difficulties in finding the right pattern afterwards to match the yarn quality and quantity she had bought. That’s why she felt it would be a good idea to make knitting kits.
 
She looked around to find the right yarn ; being a Danish/Norwegian girl living in France, she wanted to introduce the French knitters to another yarn quality than the ones they were used to and therefore she wanted Norwegian wool, which comes in a huge color range.
 
But eventually, she found an equivalent yarn quality, only much softer, in Scotland, a pure lambswool which was dyed and spun in Scotland of the finest lambswool coming from New Zealand. In the beginning we bought the yarn on cones and prepared the yarn balls at the atelier, but it soon became too time consuming and we now have the yarn sent to England to be fully processed there, with the scouring and packing with our own hand-written labels.

When Astrid had around 30 designs ready, mostly sweaters and shawls, she wanted to take her design idea a step further and decided to open a company – just finding a name was the first difficulty…
 
At this time, Caroline graduated as a bachelor in photography and she spent a whole Summer working on the photos and everything visual for Biches & Bûches to prepare our website and our first show which was held in Denmark.
 
Things have evolved quite a lot since then, and today we have four yarn qualities using the same base, Le Petit Lambswool, Le Gros Lambswool, Le Silk & Lambswool, and Le Cashmere & Lambswool. And we have projects about introducing new yarn qualities in the near future.
 
We have collaborated with amazing knitting magazines like Making, Laine, PomPom and Amirisu, and our yarn was used for many of the gorgeous designs in Anthology 3 by Madder.

And we have more than 30 wonderful stockists all over the world making Biches & Bûches known in their beautiful shops.
 
Every Summer and Winter, when we, Astrid, Caroline and Louise, spend time together at the Atelier in Burgundy, we take Biches & Bûches a step further. And have photo sessions. And a lot of fun.
 
Thanks for reading – and Happy Knitting ! Much love, Astrid