About Me

October (Toby) Anderson is a hand dyer specializing in breed-specific wool in vibrant unique blends and colourways, dyed with professional acid dyes, with whimsical and witty colourway names. He stocks a large variety of hand dyed unspun wool products for handspinners and felters, in braids of combed top, hand carded batts and rolags. He also offers a full range of hand dyed yarns with a specific focus on Bluefaced Leicester wool, available in both superwash and untreated. His (not so secret) mission is to convince people that nylon is unnecessary in sock yarn, and that you don't have to sacrifice luxury for utility when expanding your tastes beyond merino. As a BFL evangelist, Toby will happily regale you about the lustre, softness and strength of this strange-looking sheep's wool. 

If you are looking for matched gradient BFL sock sets, October Knits has you covered! Toby meticulously knits double-stranded sock blanks on his vintage flatbed knitting machine and dyes each blank individually in a long color changing gradient for a perfect pair of matching socks (or mitts, or cuffs, or anything else you want two of!) Available on 3 different superwash BFL bases. Single strand gradients on non-superwash sport weight BFL are also a special treat, designed to combine with 50g skeins of a beautiful array of solid colours and 100g skeins of sweater-perfect base colours. 

His current unspun fibre offerings include brecknock hill cheviot, shetland, BFL, polwarth, rambouillet, corriedale, dorset horn, jacob, merino, silk, alpaca, mohair and flax, with more variety always being added. Undyed rare breed wools are also available for the brave spinners and their breed studies, including manx loaghtan, hebridean, and as many different natural colors of jacob and shetland he can find. Small quantities of gently hand process local fleeces are available as dyed locks, batts and rolags. If you have any questions about spinning or wool breeds, Toby is more than happy to talk your ear off about it!

Toby is proudly and openly a queer transgender man, and include these identities in his branding for positive visibility in the fibre arts community. Social justice is at the heart of his core values and that shines throughout all of his work. Everyone is welcome at October Knits and marginalized voices are especially welcome and uplifted. He takes pride in being low-impact with his production methods, reducing plastic waste and water usage whenever possible. Toby even finds ways to reuse the single-use plastic bags that wool from the mill arrives in and asks mills for their waste products. Look for the Dumpster Diver batts made of mill waste and recycled dye bath, or the recycled wool/nylon combed top. All of the labels are made of post-consumer recycled paper, and shopping bags are donated by generous friends and customers like you. The October Knits dye studio is located in Perth Ontario and acknowledges that this land is the traditional and unceded territory of the Omàmìwininì Algonquin Peoples.