Behind The Scenes At Sirdar: Part 3 - The Showroom

The afternoon session of our behind-the-scenes tour of Sirdar started in the showroom. This white, beautifully-curated room is the place to go to see future Sirdar, DMC and Wool and the Gang knitted-up designs and yarn. White mannequins wear display collections that are fashionably-styled as a full outfit. At the foot of the mannequins lie the balls of the yarn used in the garments.

The showroom is the place where reps and retailers come to see what next year's collections will bring. Trouble is it's:

We weren't allowed to take any photos of the designs but needless to say there were quite a few that caught my eye, including a forthcoming sweater from the Sublime range with a retro feel. It was very exciting getting a sneak preview of the ranges, seeing the colours forecasted to be on-trend next season and, of course, having a good squish.

As I can't show you the outfits I'll instead offer another photo of Sirdar's current yarn range on display in their meeting room:

Knit Now editor Kate Heppell then gave a presentation in the showroom explaining how the magazine is produced - it was so fascinating and thorough I'll cover it in a future blog post. Then it was time for all the winners to receive their certificates.

Here's mine!

It was fabulous to meet such a great, creative and friendly bunch of women.

I came away from the day very impressed with Sirdar and its combination of heritage and forward-thinking. As someone, however, who doesn't live near a decent wool shop and is used to buying online, my one tip to the company is to improve their website.

At the moment it's merely a shop window for their products with no opportunity for customers to purchase them. All you can do is browse. If Sirdar sold direct or at least provided a one-click link straight to online retailers who do sell the customer's product of choice it would be extremely beneficial, as would making their patterns available to buy and download on Ravelry.

Image courtesy of Sirdar

A massive thank you to Kate Heppell and all the Sirdar employees who generously gave their time to us on the day and sent us away with goodie bag containing magazines and yarns from the Sirdar, DMC and Wool and the Gang ranges.

Coming home with a goodie bag, it felt like Christmas in June!

Read the other posts in this series:

Behind the Scenes At Sirdar: Part 1 - The Warehouse

Behind The Scenes At Sirdar: Part 2 - The Design Room