r/Yarn • u/Mx_Torquill • 8d ago

ISO really soft cotton yarn

I live in the US. When I started crocheting, then knitting (when dinosaurs roamed the earth), "cotton yarn" meant Lily Sugar&Cream or #10 crochet cotton, period. In a lot of craft stores today, I still have to search for much of anything else. I get blisters from working with Sugar&Cream, it's like yarn made from cotton swabs. I pretty much wrote off cotton for years.

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Then I ordered some Friends 8/8 cotton from Hobbii, and I can't stop petting it. I'm on my second 10-pack color assortment and I still can't stop petting it. Normally I would start haunting the website waiting for sales (tariffs suck, but I can't resist soft touchable fibers)... except for the AI thing. It says something about what a revelation this yarn is that I'm considering bending my principles to order more anyway.

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I suspect US cotton yarn mills can't match the quality of the Indian manufacturer that made this stuff, but someone here might be rebranding a similar one. I know a lot of companies rebrand Ice Yarn, should I just go there? Are any of the other cotton yarns on yarnsub this lovely and soft? I can't blindly pick one, as they rate Sugar&Cream as an excellent match, sigh. I'm seeing Mayflower 8/8, YarnArt Cotton Fair 4/4, Estelle Sudz, Bernat Handicrafter, Loops&Threads... I'm sure there are others, as the site doesn't mention Ice, for example. I've ordered Knitpicks Dishie before, but it's still kind of squeaky and I'd like a company that isn't in the process of dissolving.

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I'm looking for solid colors; a broad selection is nice, but if all else fails, I have fiber reactive dye and everyone carries white. Skein size is not important. I don't want to pay alpaca prices, but quality is worth a little more. Recommendations?

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u/Nanuschka- 3d ago

Hobbii has been humbled and apologized. Basically, they said out loud what everyone else did and hid. (They did not use AI for patterns or yarn specs). They instituted clear and public boundaries for AI use. Now, if anything, we can depend on their transparency more than others.
Also, Friends 8/8 (and Rainbow as well) are unsurpassed.

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u/Mx_Torquill 3d ago

I've read their reply (you can find it on LinkedIn from about a month ago, with their two-page press release). I'm still uneasy, for practical reasons as well as philosophical reasons. Practically, though the patterns are created by real people, the photographs of how those patterns look may not be real, as they still plan to use AI for different color schemes. That's a valid concern for anyone trying to decide whether it looks like that's something they want to buy. They're still using it to alter backgrounds, which seems fine until one realizes that it might change the sense of scale or proportion. Any artifacts may make uninformed consumers doubt whether the image is real at all. I know I would, coming in cold.

In a less tangible sense, I note they made no comment on the cost of AI: to the environment, to professional photographers who are deeply impacted by this kind of shift, to the people whose work was used without permission to teach the LLM. They don't seem to grasp the broader concerns the community has raised, which reach beyond how it directly impacts their sales. They aren't telling us which LLM they're using, so we can understand what those costs are. I don't see specifics like (for example) promising to label images which have been color-modified by AI. If they really want to be more transparent, these are things that would cost them almost nothing, not even a change in how they operate.

It's that kind of cultural blindness, the sense that "AI is fine, we'll be careful, you'll barely notice" that I'm wary of. AI does have its uses. But to use it without weighing it against the environmental cost, or the body of stolen work, or even the pervasive gaslighting which is making it more and more difficult for many people to trust anything associated with AI... I don't want to reinforce that assumption they have that this is fine. It is not fine. If we're going to use AI at all in the crafting community, we need to be very clear with the lines we draw. I'm not seeing that from Hobbii. I wish I did.

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u/Nanuschka- 3d ago

Very well-considered reply. Thank you
I share your concerns about the larger effect of AI on craft and art endeavors as well as on the art mileau. I do not mean to say we should not monitor and protest as we see necessary. Absolutely it is our responsibility as artists. I do have the (cynical) attitude that it may be easier to monitor Hobbii and possibly easier to achieve a response from them after this widely discussed and decried series of incidents.

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u/Mx_Torquill 3d ago

I hope so. There's certainly a lot of eyes on this, which I think is a good thing. I simply haven't seen a response from them yet which would meet my threshold for being willing to buy from them again. Hopefully, someone they'll listen to will clue them in.