Black Cat Knit Co — The Wandering Knitter Who Built a Home in Yarn

Alanna of Black Cat Knit Co (YouTube: @blackcatknitco, Instagram: @blackcatknitco) is a knitwear designer, yarn store owner, and the warm, unhurried voice behind Thank You For Knitting — a YouTube knitting podcast that has quietly drawn a loyal community of makers since its launch in late 2024. Based in Auckland, New Zealand, a hemisphere away from the small-town Wisconsin where she first picked up a pair of needles, Alanna has spent the better part of her life proving something she often tells her customers and viewers: "You can totally make this."

She means it. Whether it is a first-time knitter standing nervously in her shop, or a seasoned maker hesitating over a colourwork pattern they have never tried before, Alanna's response is always the same — quiet encouragement, practical guidance, and a genuine conviction that the process of creating with your own hands is never beyond anyone's reach.

From a Steiner Classroom to the Other Side of the World

Alanna's relationship with handcraft runs deeper than most. She grew up in Western Wisconsin attending a Steiner (Waldorf) school — a type of education built around the belief that working with your hands is as essential to development as reading or mathematics. From a very young age, she was immersed in an extraordinary breadth of making: knitting, hand sewing, machine sewing, woodwork, metalwork, stained glass, stone carving, felting, painting, sculpture, weaving. It was a curriculum that treated every medium as a form of thinking.

She first picked up knitting needles as a young child, eager to learn alongside her older sister. By the time she was in her teens, knitting had already distinguished itself from the other crafts. She loved the tactile quality of yarn — the endless variety of fibres, textures, and colours — and, perhaps more importantly, she loved the portability of it. A knitting project could go anywhere. It was the one form of making that never had to stop.

What Alanna took from that Steiner classroom was not just a technical foundation, but something more philosophical: the understanding that creating things by hand is not a novelty or a pastime, but a way of engaging with the world. She has spoken about this openly in interviews, expressing deep gratitude for the education she received.

It shaped her into the kind of maker — and the kind of teacher — who sees potential in everyone and dismisses the idea that any creative pursuit is "too difficult" to attempt.

After leaving Wisconsin, Alanna's life took on the restless rhythm of someone still searching for where she belonged. She lived in Upstate New York, then Seattle, then Montana, then Milwaukee — each city a new chapter, none quite permanent. Through every move, knitting went with her. It was her anchor, the one constant that connected all those different lives together.

Eventually, the road led her to New Zealand — specifically, to Auckland, the largest Polynesian city in the world and a place with one of the highest sheep-to-person ratios on the planet. For a lifelong knitter with a love of wool, it was something close to destiny. She settled on the North Island with her husband Carl and two cats, and for the first time, the wandering stopped. New Zealand became home — not just a place to live, but the place where everything she had been building toward finally took shape.

Loopine, Black Cat, and the Art of Bringing People Together Through Yarn

In April of 2019, Alanna opened Loopine Wool Co., a local yarn store on Parnell Road in the heart of Auckland. The shop occupies a space inside a European-style café — a concept that, as Alanna has noted, is something rather unique to New Zealand.

It is not just a place to buy yarn; it is a place to sit down, order a coffee, and knit. Loopine became New Zealand's only source for certain beloved international brands such as Brooklyn Tweed, Knit Circus, and Spincycle Yarns, while simultaneously championing locally hand-dyed New Zealand yarns and indie-designed patterns. Alanna has always seen the shop as a bridge — a way to bring luxury American yarns into the South Pacific, and to introduce some of New Zealand's own remarkable fibres to the rest of the world.

But from the very start, the shop's real heartbeat was its community. Twice-weekly knitting groups — free, open to everyone — have been running consistently for more than five years. Alanna has watched friendships form around those tables, seen people who arrived as strangers leave as close companions. The groups draw a varied crowd: other expats and "wandering souls," as she has described them, alongside local Kiwi makers of all skill levels. For many of the adults who attend, the knitting group fills a social need that is surprisingly hard to meet in modern life. There is something about sitting together with your hands busy, Alanna observes, that removes the pressure of conversation. You can talk as little or as much as you want, and there is always something in common to discuss.

Running the shop through the pandemic was a trial. Loopine had only been open eleven months when New Zealand's first lockdown hit, and the business was still in an early growth phase — they had tripled their stock levels and moved into a larger space, but never established a "normal cruising altitude."

The cruise ships full of international tourists that used to dock in Auckland during summer months and send passengers straight to Parnell for New Zealand wool vanished entirely. Alanna has been candid about how difficult those years were, but she and Carl — who manages marketing, supplier relationships, and the broader business strategy behind the scenes — weathered it together. The shop survived. The community held.

Alongside Loopine, Alanna designs and self-publishes knitting patterns under the Black Cat Knit Co label. Her catalogue, available on Ravelry, Etsy, LoveCrafts, and her own website, now spans more than a decade of work and hundreds of pattern sales. What distinguishes her designs is the deeply personal way each one is rooted in the places she has lived and the things she has seen. Her "Driftless" hat and mitts collection is named after the rolling hills of the Driftless Region in Western Wisconsin — the unglaciated landscape of her childhood home. The pattern is deliberately approachable, designed as an ideal first colourwork project, much like the landscape that inspired it: inviting, warm, and unintimidating.

Driftless Hat

 Her "Wildfire Hat," by contrast, was born from a more unsettling memory — her own experience of witnessing a wildfire in the Rocky Mountains, and her attempt to pay respectful tribute to the eerie beauty and awe that nature can inspire. The "Ombeline Cowl" draws on her time in Europe, taking its visual cues from the stained glass windows in the cathedrals of Paris. And the "Sweet Manuka Shawl" is a nod to her adopted homeland, named after the native New Zealand mānuka plant.

Even the ethereal "Moonstone" cowl and hat, designed around low-contrast colourwork reminiscent of moonlight and shadow, or the "Fiordland Hat" named after the dramatic fjords of the South Island — every design in Alanna's catalogue carries a geographic or emotional fingerprint. It is a body of work that reads, in its own quiet way, like a map of her life.

Ombeline Cowl

 Her design philosophy matches her personality. By her own account, Alanna grew up never following patterns — she preferred to improvise and make things her own. That spirit carries into how she writes for others. Her patterns are built to inspire confidence, not dependence. A well-written pattern, she believes, should not just produce a finished object, but should help a knitter develop trust in their own abilities — to "branch into new territory" and tackle projects that might once have seemed too daunting.

Crafting with Babylon Leather

For a maker like Alanna — someone who has spent a lifetime crossing creative boundaries, from knitting to spinning, from shop-keeping to pattern design — the ethos behind Babylon Leather resonates on a fundamental level. Our collaboration with Black Cat Knit Co is a natural meeting of two maker communities who share a deep respect for process, materials, and the quiet satisfaction of finishing something you built yourself.

Get the same kit

When Alanna picked up a Babylon Leather DIY bag kit, it was not a departure from her craft — it was an extension of it. She shared her leather bag-making progress with her audience, weaving the experience naturally into the same podcast where she discusses her latest sweater WIPs and sock projects. For Alanna, working with leather by hand sits comfortably in the same creative space as working with fibre: the tactile pleasure of quality materials, the meditative rhythm of hand stitching, and the deep satisfaction of watching something take shape under your own fingers.

It is precisely this kind of maker — someone who sees no rigid boundary between one craft and another, who appreciates the feel of a good material and the value of a slow process — that Babylon Leather was created for. 

The Thread That Holds It All Together

Alanna's story is, at its centre, a story about following a single thread wherever it leads — across states and oceans, through a pandemic, into the risky business of opening a small shop, into the vulnerability of putting your patterns and your personality on camera for the world to see. She learned to knit before she could read. She has lived in more places than most people visit. And through all of it, the needles have never stopped.

What she has built in Auckland — a yarn store that doubles as a community gathering place, a pattern catalogue that maps the landscapes of her life, a podcast that invites strangers into the warm, unhurried rhythm of her making — is the work of someone who turned what she once called "an obsessive hobby" into a creative life. For the knitters, spinners, and makers who follow her, Alanna offers something that is increasingly rare in the digital age: a genuine invitation to slow down, pick up something with your hands, and make it your own.