Knitting Is the Coziest, Most Wholesome Tragedy of Trump’s Trade War

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The announcements started on Instagram. Posts addressed specifically to U.S. knitters warned of confusing days ahead. Other notices came in via email, letting crafters know that, out of an abundance of caution, U.S. shipping was suspended. The members of r/knitting began to assemble, keeping panicked records of these announcements, the bell tolling with every new post: another yarn brand down.

These records are made up of international millers, spinners, dyers, and stockists who, in the face of new tariffs that stripped low-value imports of their duty-free status, could no longer afford to supply the tens of millions of U.S. knitters and crocheters with the yarn they’d come to rely on for the past 50 years. For them, this isn’t just a setback. This is yarn-ageddon.

“There’s an element to it that’s like, ‘Can I have one thing?’ ” Vanessa, a 34-year-old knitter from San Francisco, told Slate. “Everything is on fire, and now I can’t even buy yarn.”

For the same reason we don’t just drink coffee from American beans, knitters source some of their favorite yarn brands from all across the globe. Livestock from Argentina, Iceland, Norway, and more produce distinctly varied types of wool, from merino to lambswool, cashmere to mohair. U.S. dyers relied on this wool as the base for their own brands, which make up the rich (and literal) tapestries of U.S. crafters. These materials are the difference between a dark winter sweater and a bright summer tank top, a luxurious cashmere scarf versus rough woolen mittens.

For hobbyists, this cannot be achieved with U.S. materials alone. While the country boasted thousands of wool mills in the 1800s, America spent the past 100 years introducing trade policies, like NAFTA and the Multifiber Arrangement, that made it financially favorable for brands and designers to outsource. This dramatically reduced the industry to less than 80 U.S. mills still active today. Many of these remaining mills are small and family-run, and not built to handle the demand these tariffs will create.

“American knitters are probably the largest consumer bloc of yarn purchasers in the world,” Clara Parkes, author of Vanishing Fleece: Adventures in American Wool, told Slate. While tariffs are designed to encourage consumers to buy locally, that’s not possible if there’s no local industry to turn to. We no longer have the equipment, nor the skilled workers, to jump back into production.

It would take at least a year, Parkes estimates, for a single new U.S. mill to get itself up and running to help meet demand, and given the volatile nature of the current economy, there’s no sure incentive to do so. Meanwhile, international brands are losing a huge portion of their customer base, and brick-and-mortar small businesses similarly can no longer ship individual orders to the U.S. Many American customers will likely be reduced to yarn tourists who, in an effort to save money, limit their purchases to only when they’re on that country’s soil. Other knitters won’t be so dedicated, and either turn to lower-quality, less sustainable yarns like acrylic or polyester, or get priced out of the hobby entirely. As a result, the entire global knitting ecosystem is tied up in knots.

Brands like Knitting For Olive, which is based in Copenhagen, plan to circumvent the tariffs by only shipping wholesale to U.S. stockists. Parkes says this is still likely to increase the cost for consumers, which is why some knitters stocked up ahead of different brands’ cutoff dates, and those who weren’t fast enough are now watching their orders languish in customs. Others are hoping their existing stash of yarn will be enough to weather them through however long these conditions last.

For U.S. knitters, it’s annoying and disheartening. For U.S. yarn stores, it’s devastating.

“Figuring out what I want to stock and when to order it has suddenly become a lot more stressful,” Hannah Wilson, owner of the Dropped Stitch in the Andersonville neighborhood of Chicago, told Slate. “I can’t switch to U.S.-based suppliers even if I wanted to, because they simply don’t exist for the type and quantity of products my customers are looking for.”

And that goes for more than just yarn: A fiber artist, no matter how much yarn they have, can’t get far without needles and hooks. The major producers of these tools are almost exclusively located in China, Japan, India, and Germany. Wilson will just have to raise prices, she says, and hope the community sticks by her.

“I really hope that for now we’ll manage to hold it together,” Parkes says, and has suggested smaller shops offer arbitrary digital purchases—quite literally PDFs that just say “hello”—as a gesture of financial support available to international customers. As for the crafters themselves, r/knitting won’t allow anyone to get left behind. “The silver lining is definitely always the online fiber-art community,” Vanessa says. “It’s a strong vehicle for community building across borders.”

Vanessa is also an administrator of Fiber + Friends SF, a community of Bay Area knitters who gather for meetups and, more recently, yarn swaps. She hopes to increase their focus on the latter so their knitters never have to go without the materials they need, but the subreddit has countless other suggestions. Knitters can opt for smaller patterns that require less yarn, or use up leftover yarn through designs that allow for different yarns to be cobbled together, such as striping. They can thrift old sweaters and unravel them to repurpose or, in select cases, learn to spin yarn themselves.

It’s certainly not ideal, especially for knitters for whom the hobby was a respite from the horrors of our current politics, but it exemplifies the long-standing and relentless spirit of the crafting community. It’s time, as it was in the past, and will surely be again one day in the future, to make do and mend.