CONTENT WARNING: This post mentions mental health and illness. It is a lengthy post, and we have provided a short summary at the start.

Summary

It is with great sadness that we must close Arnall-Culliford Techniques for quite some time. While the business is not closing down entirely, it will shrink to a shell for many months to come, entering an extended hibernation. This has come about as a consequence of Jen becoming very ill and being unable to work for quite some time. We will be having a clearance sale, which will happen in stages to keep the workload manageable and will then close down our office.

Our Business

Six years ago, we set out to help knitters gain more confidence. We brought together talented designers from around the world and asked them to dream up innovative patterns. We shot photo tutorials and recorded videos to give you the know-how and courage to try something new in your knitting. Both former teachers and lifelong lovers of learning, we knew just how good it could feel when you mastered something new and difficult, and our mission was to help knitters reach outside their comfort zone a little more often.

The result has been three “Big Books” — A Year of Techniques, Boost Your Knitting and Confident Knitting — designed as year-long programmes that allowed you to add new skills to your knitting tool box. Between those flagship books, we brought out five smaller books — three in our Something New To Learn About … series (Cables, Lace and Helical Knitting) as well as our lockdown-produced Something To Knit Together and Something To Knit Together Winter Edition. We’re enormously proud not just of the publications, but of the community we’ve created around learning, trying, giving it a go. It has been a joy to see countless knitters over the years surprise themselves with what they can achieve.

A love of learning has been one of the primary pillars of our business.

The second has been a commitment to compensating everyone – designers, graphic designer, sample knitters, yarn producers, staff, freelancers – fairly for their work.

The third has been the importance of maintaining a healthy and flexible balance between our work and our family, which requires significant additional care.

We’ve created beautiful books, books that people have loved not just for the patterns, but as references to be returned to time and again. We have a thriving YouTube channel with our videos and a vibrant online community. And yet…

The Challenges

The last nearly two years have thrown up challenge after challenge. We’ve tried to overcome each of them as they have arrived. We’ve worked hard, we’ve added staff, we’ve streamlined processes, we’ve made redundancies. But over the past few weeks, it has become painfully clear that we can no longer continue the business in a way that allows us to attend to those second two pillars — paying people fairly for their labour and taking care of our families and ourselves.

Shortly before Christmas, Jen had a serious breakdown. The pressure of running a business, with extra issues post-Brexit and pandemic-related, coupled with providing for the considerable needs of our family, reached an intolerable level. Jen has bounced back to a degree, but her recovery, even with the treatment she has, is going to be a long time in coming.

We have leaned heavily on family and friends to spread the caring responsibilities for our family over the last month. This is not a long-term solution and we have (hopefully) professional support on the way. But without Jen’s continual creative output, in particular on a new book we had intended to launch in February, the business is not a sustainable prospect.

We have to go into indefinite hibernation in the hope that at some point in the future Jen will be able to return to the hand knitting industry in some capacity.

So, it is with a heavy heart that we share Arnall-Culilford Techniques will be closing its doors for the foreseeable future.

Here’s what you can expect going forward.

What’s Happening Now

Jim is back in the office for a few hours a week to keep things running, and Kat is still doing a great job covering blogs, social media and background tasks on a part-time basis. Orders are still being posted twice a week. We appreciate your patience if response times are slightly slower than usual.

You will be able to purchase our print books from Purlescence (UK), Modern Daily Knitting (USA) and Strickmich (EU).

New Products In the Online Shop

Today you’ll find a raft of new products in the online shop. These include some new-to-us yarn lines that had been bought in in anticipation of our next book, as well as hand-dyed yarns for Confident Knitting that are being put on sale individually for the first time, including Old Maiden Aunt kits, Fab Funky Fibres and Third Vault Yarns Caroline DK.

Confident Knitting and The Knitalong Hub

We are committed to finishing out Confident Knitting as we begun it, with our final monthly knitalong featuring the remaining technique. Confident Knitting purchasers, have, of course already received the full print and/or digital copy of their book, so have full access to all patterns and photo tutorials. The YouTube videos for the February pattern will be made public on schedule, and the February knitalong will take place as scheduled. The Knitalong Hub (which we pay a fee to host) will stay open through the end of February. We will share more details about The Hub as they become clear.

Online Shop + Clearance Sale

In the coming days, we will be launching a site-wide clearance sale which will include all yarn, books and accessories. We will share details of the sale as we can. Right now our priority is managing the closing in a way that’s sustainable for us as our capacity is currently limited. To be the first to know when the sale is launched, please subscribe to our newsletter. We will also be selling off our office furniture and our display equipment. Please use our contact form with the subject line office furniture/display equipment if you would like us to provide information about what is available and when that will happen.

On completion of the sale, we are going to close down our office and put the business into hibernation. We will hold open an email address for customer service, but the online shop will have nothing for sale and the blog will not be updated. We will stop sending out newsletters.

Digital Single Patterns and Ebooks

Our individual patterns and eBook only versions of all of our publications will remain available to purchase on Ravelry. Purlescence will also be retailing our eBooks in the very near future.

Our Commitments

We would like to stress that all our contributors for both Confident Knitting and the new book project we had been working on have been compensated for their work according to our agreements with them. We will not be closing our doors while owing money to our valued collaborators.

The same though cannot be said for Jen and Jim. Throughout their time running Arnall-Culliford Techniques, they have never paid themselves above the minimum wage and have, at various points, foregone wages as a loan to the business. As a result, the business still owes Jen and Jim a substantial amount. We are hoping that the sales between now and the end of the clearance will enable this loan to be repaid.

Thank You For Your Support

We appreciate any support, big or small, you can offer during this challenging time, whether that’s helping us to clear stock, encouraging friends and fellow knitters to check out what we have on offer, or simply sending your good thoughts. If you would like to send well wishes or share happy memories of your time in the Arnall-Culliford community, we encourage you to do that either in the comments of this blog post or in the topic we have set up in The Knitalong Hub. We look forward to reading them, though we do ask that you keep your comments focused on the positive as the team are going through a difficult time. While we fully support open discussions of mental health issues, we ask that you refrain from them in these spaces, as Jen and Jim are already coping with significant levels of trauma. Comments that don’t adhere to these guidelines will be deleted.

This has been an incredibly challenging time, and we ask for your patience as we process orders and provide customer service. We will continue to share details of our closing roadmap as we can, as well as updates on shipping in the event that order levels are high.

We hope that one day, under different circumstances, we will be able to get back to what we love — sharing our love of knitting and learning with others. But until that day, the time is approaching for us to say, if not goodbye, then so long for now. It’s been an honour and a privilege; thank you for all your support.

Jen, Jim and Kat