Itty Bitty superstar

Susan B. Anderson knit her way to the top

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Famous knitters are famous only among other knitters. Among knitters, Susan B. Anderson is a rock star.

Well, “famous in a knitterly way,” as she puts it.

Anderson’s first book, Itty Bitty Hats, a book of fanciful baby caps published by Artisan Books in 2006, has achieved somewhat of a cult status among knitters.

“She was about the first person to do knit toys,” says Jaala Spiro, yarn dyer and owner of KnitCircus yarn shop on the west side. “I feel like when most people think of knitted toys, she’s the one they’re thinking of.”

While just a few knit toy designs crop up in her second book, Itty Bitty Nursery (2007), they take over her next three books: Itty Bitty Toys (2009), Spud and Chloe at the Farm (2011) and Topsy-Turvy Inside-Out Knit Toys (2013). Itty Bitty Toys has even been translated into Korean. “That really just blows me away,” says Anderson. Artisan has remained her publisher for all these titles, as well as Susan B. Anderson’s Kids’ Knitting Workshop (2015). Her latest, Kindred Knits: Knitting for Little Ones Near and Far was published by Quince & Co. in 2017.

Anderson, 53, calls toy design “a niche,” but quite popular in part because “it’s a small project and it doesn’t have to fit anyone. If you show up at a baby shower with a handknit hat and a toy, I promise you, you’ll be the hit of the shower and everyone will oohh and aahhh and even applaud. And everyone will want one.”

While Anderson is among the best-known knitters in the country, she has a low profile in Madison. Her blog and Instagram account feature a lot of yarn and knits, but also celebrate the joys of living here: trails at the local conservation park, Lake Mendota, snow days, Badger football games, a good morning at the Dane County Farmers’ Market. “I love Madison,” says Anderson. “I travel a lot, but nothing’s like Madison.”

Anderson does travel a lot, coast-to-coast, teaching at a dozen-some knitting retreats a year. Her friend Paula Emons-Fuessle of the Knitting Pipeline podcast figures she’s one of the nation’s top five or 10 knitting instructors; in January she’ll be heading to New York City to teach at the high-profile Vogue Knitting Live conference.

And a year ago she made a big leap into a new business: She launched her own yarn company with her eldest son, Evan, running it out of her house on the west side. This is the kind of venture that’s feasible these days when you have close to 42,000 Instagram followers, most of whom who are avid knitters.

“It’s more work than I ever imagined, but that’s because we’re doing so well,” says Anderson. “So that’s a good thing.”

“Honest and warm”

Adjectives that crop up frequently in a Susan B. Anderson conversation are “sweet,” “little,” “simple,” “fun” and “adorable.” Punctuating her posts and podcasts are phrases like “I’m pretty excited about it” and “I love this so much!” It’s easy to get caught up in this enthusiasm, a welcome antidote to the national mood these days.

“She’s so completely honest and warm,” says Spiro of KnitCircus. “There’s not an unpleasant bone in her body. And her energy is incredible. She’ll go for a run, bake a banana bread, and turn out three new designs. She’ll literally knit a hat in an hour. I’ve seen her do it.” And, adds Spiro, “It’s really worth seeing if you can ever convince her to knit. She’s one of the fastest knitters I’ve ever met. And she doesn’t even realize it.”

Anderson’s video podcasts are as casual as meeting a friend for coffee. “Hello, knitters,” she’ll start off, sometimes still adjusting the camera. “I just wanted to pop in and say hi.” Always she updates her audience on what the weather’s like in Madison that day.

Then she might pull a few skeins of yarn out of a bag, or show a project still on its needles. She doesn’t script it. “I’ll just bring some things that I want to talk about or share,” Anderson says. “I don’t try to be anything I’m not.” She’s been blogging steadily for 11 years; podcasts are more sporadic.

Emons-Fuessle praises Anderson’s designs as “innovative, but easy to do. She always thinks of the best way to do things.” Even the stuffed animals, “notoriously fiddly by their very nature,” says Emons-Fuessle, are designed to be “as easy as they can be.” Her shawls are very knittable, often depending on the overall shape of the garment and the quality of the yarn for interest. Anderson’s “Smooth Operator” sock pattern is one of the most popular downloads, period, on Ravelry, the net’s biggest knit and crochet community. Almost as popular is her post “How I Make My Socks,” which explains the whole endeavor in such a no-big-deal way you’re likely to rush right over to the LYS (that’s “Local Yarn Store” in knitterese) to buy some self-striping sock yarn.

She’s generous about lauding other knitter’s designs, too, knitting them up and blogging about them, with links back to the original patterns — although you’ll often see the words “I changed a few things,” as if she cannot help but find a new way between points A and B.

Anderson has also filmed four online classes for the Craftsy website: beginning knitting, knitting socks, knitting a giraffe and another on seamless knit toys.

Her toys and baby hats could melt the heart of the Grinch himself. There is always something thoughtful about an Anderson design. One of her first toy patterns, for the Three Little Pigs, also includes patterns to knit their homes of straw, sticks and bricks.

Or take her “Wrap-Me-Up Toys” pattern for a sleepy quartet of a puppy, kitten, pig and lamb, each with their own blankets. “I’m kind of obsessed with this whole thing of how little kids love to put things to bed,” says Anderson. “It’s universal — every child does it and there’s something so sweet about having that blanket, or these little sleeping bags.” Striped sleeping bags go with her sleepy kitten set, which is somehow even more adorable. In one of her most popular designs, a teddy bear wears a lop-eared bunny hoodie, aka “bear in a bunny suit.”

“I’ve often joked that her brain is a national treasure of cuteness,” says Spiro. “So many designs in there that no one else could think of, yet she seems to have an endless supply, and each is more adorable than the next.” But, adds Spiro, “Her style has a sophistication as well as a cuteness that is really rare to find.”

Lifeguard duty

Anderson, a lifelong Madisonian, grew up “really crafty” on the west side in the Orchard Ridge neighborhood. Her father was a professor of curriculum and instruction in the School of Education here; she describes her mother, a seamstress and musician, as a huge influence, a woman warmly supportive of all her children’s endeavors.

Anderson’s passion for knitting came out of the blue. No one in her family knit and she didn’t know anyone who did: “I just had this strong interest in it. I really wanted to learn how to knit.”

It was the early 1980s and Anderson was in her late teens. There were no knitting blogs, no YouTube instructional videos or Craftsy, no Ravelry online community. If there were local knitting classes, Anderson didn’t know about them. One day she went to a fabric store — “I feel like it might have been at Westgate,” she says — and bought yarn, needles and a how-to pamphlet. She then taught herself how to knit in the 15-minute breaks during her summer job lifeguarding at the Ridgewood Pool.

If you’ve ever tried knitting, you know it’s a lot easier to have someone show you how than to try to grasp its motions from two-dimensional diagrams.

“I struggled,” says Anderson. “But I persevered.”

She had a fortuitous bit of instruction one day at the pool, from a woman originally from Germany — a local mom whom Anderson knew only vaguely.

“I was holding the yarn this awkward way,” says Anderson. “She came up behind me, reached over, grabbed my hands and said, ‘You should do it like this.’ She put the yarn in my left hand and guided my hands for a few stitches. It was really abrupt and kind of startling, and then she just walked away. That was my knitting lesson.”

But, Anderson says, “I loved it! I thought, ‘My gosh, I never would have thought of that in a million years.’” The style, called continental knitting and common in Europe, is one that Anderson uses to this day. “Once I started that summer, I never stopped knitting.”

Why knitting? “I don’t know why. I do think about that,” says Anderson. “It would have been logical for me to go into sewing, where my mom was so fantastic. But I’m not good at it — maybe I was trying to find my own thing.”

Anderson describes a piece of knitting as “this living, breathing creation that you make and wear and that has a purpose.” This appealed to her, as opposed to art that’s hung on a wall or sits on a table. But she’s dabbled in almost every craft there is, from mosaics to spinning her own yarn.

She graduated from Memorial High School and then UW-Madison with a degree in education, certified to teach grades K-8, quickly following that up with a master’s degree in curriculum and instruction. She married her high school sweetheart, Brian Anderson, now a Madison lawyer, and started teaching grades 6-8 at Sennett Middle School. She continued to teach during the years when she had her first three children — and knit through all of it: “I was knitting like crazy, at night, any chance I could get,” says Anderson. After her third child, Anderson realized something had to go. She gave up teaching, had a fourth child, and... started designing baby hats.

“My kids went to the Meeting House Nursery School in Shorewood Hills and they held a silent auction every year,” says Anderson. “I started coming up with these funny little baby hats and everybody just loved them. I’d think, ‘How would I make an acorn hat? Or maybe I’ll add some stripes here or texture there.”

Briefly she worked at Alphabet Soup, a children’s boutique in Hilldale, after the owner — a friend — decided to make one corner of the store into a knitting shop. Anderson sold her baby hats and gave knitting lessons. “That was the first time I had ever been around other knitters and I loved it,” says Anderson. “It was just a super creative time for me. I started writing up the patterns for the hats.” About a year later, though, the store closed.

Dejected, Anderson went home from her last day at the shop and thought, “I think I could write a book.”

She’d been haunting the knitting shelf at the local Borders for years, and one of her favorites was Knitting in America. Anderson copied down the address of the publisher, Artisan Books.

“I wrote, ‘To whom it may concern, I live in Madison and I’m a knitter. I knit these baby hats and they’ve gotten a great response locally and I’d like to do a book of baby hats.’ I was just so naive,” she remembers. “I put the letter and a baby hat and a couple sample patterns in a box.”

Then she mailed it and forgot about it. “Probably about 12 days later, they wrote me back. I got a book deal. I mean, how crazy is that?” says Anderson with a laugh.

That first book took two years to put together. She had to come up with about 30 additional hat patterns, an instructional section and knit all the hats — “and I had four little kids at home,” says Anderson. “It was hugely overwhelming.” She even had to vie for time on the family’s one computer.

The publisher at Artisan Books, Ann Bramson, started calling Anderson’s samples “itty-bitty hats” around the office “and it stuck!” says Anderson. Artisan sent her on a national book tour, setting up bookstore and yarn store visits, television and radio appearances. Itty Bitty Hats was a hit. Her blog was born out of the experience, as the knitters she met on the tour asked — in a pre-Facebook world — “How can we keep up with what you’re up to?”

Her social media presence grew organically as social media itself grew, and her down-to-earth, talking-to-a-friend style dovetailed with the knitting community. These days, her keen sense of style is a perfect fit for Instagram.

“The knitters are crazy over social media,” says Anderson. “It’s such a visual group of people. They share projects and things that have gone wrong and fixes and tools and yarn and it’s just a frenzy. I’m serious, there’s a whole world out there that people don’t know about unless you’re in it. But it’s a really fun, supportive group.”

Social media has only fueled the resurgence of knitting, which started making a comeback in the late 1990s as a take-control, DIY antidote to mass-produced, third-world-made clothing. More recently the Ravelry site has made it easier for knitters to self-publish, putting a PDF pattern up for sale on the site at $4 or $5 a copy. They don’t need to get a book contract or sell a design to Vogue Knitting. “They’re not reliant on anyone else’s approval,” says Anderson.

The B is for Barrett

Now, much of Anderson’s days are occupied with the business of her own yarn company, Barrett Wool Co. The brand stems from her middle initial and maiden name.

Barrett Wool Co. sells two different kinds of 100 percent American wool yarns created by Anderson: the U.S.-sourced-and-made “Home” line in two weights and 26 colors; and the “Wisconsin Woolen Spun” line, made from wool from Midwest farms and spun at a mill in Wisconsin. This more rustic yarn is also available in two weights and in 18 colors.

It all started five years ago when Anderson was clearing out her surplus yarn, or “stash” in knitter-ese: “It was beautiful, untouched yarn that I didn’t need, in perfect condition.” Her son Evan, a business major at home on break from college, suggested she put it up for sale on eBay. Anderson announced on her blog that she was selling some yarn “and it flew out the door.”

Evan had a keen interest in small business startups; he’d begun mulling over collaborating on some sort business with his mother when he was just a sophomore.

At the same time, a small but growing number of companies were beginning to source wool in the U.S. and make yarn at U.S. mills again. Much of the wool for yarn still comes from outside of the United States, but such companies as Brooklyn Tweed and Quince and Co. paved the way, both as knitter-run companies and in creating a 100 percent U.S.-made product. Still, knitter-run yarn companies are rare, and more apt to produce small-batch or hand-spun yarns that can be quite expensive. Barrett Wool Co., like Brooklyn Tweed and Quince and Co., is aiming for something more widely affordable while keeping the ecological footprint smaller and bringing business back to U.S. mills.

Anderson and her son began by working with a project manager to help source wool and start spinning up yarn samples. “There was a lot of back and forth,” says Anderson, as they requested samples spun from different wools in different weights and plys. “It cost a lot of money and you couldn’t get just one sample skein, you had to get a big box of yarn.” However, creating her own yarn — refining it to get it softer or squishier or with a tighter twist — was clearly a vision.

Once settled on the wool and weights and twists and plys — “once everything looked really nice and I loved it,” says Anderson — “then we started working on colors” with a dye house in Maine. Anderson’s goal was to offer a palette where any given color would look good in combination with any of the other colors.

They run the business out of the lower-level family room in Anderson’s house. In addition to continuing to design and knit, Anderson packs orders, creates kits, and works on the website and newsletter. Evan takes care of the business end, shipping, inventory, ordering and working with mills as well as the photography and graphic design. “I’m never going to complain, but we do work long days, past dinnertime most nights,” says Anderson.

In November, Barrett Wool Co. celebrated its first anniversary. It’s online only, no advertising, generating sales through the large following that Anderson has built up.

In addition to yarn, Barrett Wool Co. sells kits for a number of projects, toys, hats, sweaters, socks, mittens: the right kind of yarn in the correct colors, along with the pattern. These are handy for knitters in that they also have the just the right amount of yarn to complete the project.

“We’re moving through yarn like crazy,” says Anderson, “but the kits are the thing. I knew they would be popular, but we literally will put something up on the site and they will be gone in a matter of hours.” Almost every week they put new kits in the shop, and they immediately sell out. The best way to nab one is to sign up for newsletter updates.

Next steps for the business: “As we grow we are probably going to have to find a new space,” says Anderson. Selling wholesale to select yarn shops may be in the future. “We’re not at that point yet, though we have had lots of requests,” says Anderson. “I don’t want to get a lot of shops lined up and not be able to meet demand.”

“We’ve sold yarn all over the world,” says Anderson. “Singapore, Japan, New Zealand, Australia, Sweden, the Netherlands, oh my gosh a lot in the U.K. That’s what’s so amazing about this world we live in. That a two-person company in Madison, Wisconsin, can do all that.”

Demand is likely to continue. As Anderson observes, gesturing to the gray, cold Madison outside the window: “We’re moving into high knitting season.”