If you want a preview of the new yarns that will be in retail shops and websites when sweater season comes around, H+H Americas is the place to be. With more than 600 booths from all over the world filling 100,000 square feet of exhibit hall the first week of May, this annual tradeshow can be a little overwhelming.
As I browsed the booths and spoke with manufacturers, distributors, and yarn store owners, a few trends emerged. From fiber to texture to color, there is much to be excited about as we head into the 2026 summer knitting season and beyond.
H+H Americas is an annual industry trade show near Chicago that features fiber arts, sewing, and handicrafts.
Naturally Gorgeous Wool
I love seeing all the ways yarn companies are using a range of natural wool colors and also embracing natural dyeing. Creating a market for natural color wool encourages farmers to preserve these genetic traits in their flocks. As a bonus, over-dyeing yarns spun from a blend of white and natural color wool produces rich, moody colors for our knitting.
New from Rowan is Mohair Tweed, which blends dark brown and white Merino wool with mohair to produce a heathered palette of eight curated colors.
For dyed beauties, Senior and Seniorita from Schoppel are perfect for colorwork. Gray wool and white wool base yarns are dyed using the same twenty colors in a semi-solid, tonal style, producing subtle gradations of color.
Click to open in full-screen mode and to reveal caption information.
Lightweight Yarns for Chunky Knits
The look of fine mohair yarn held together with a fingering weight yarn has been popular for close to a decade. But not everyone is comfortable wearing mohair. And not everyone enjoys knitting with two strands held together.
New this year from Berroco, Nuvola is a chunky-weight chainette yarn made with 90% Falkland wool and 10% nylon. The sample garments knitted with Nuvola that were on display had a chunky look but were nearly weightless.
Berroco’s new Nuvola up close.
Baa Ram Ewe, based in England, is introducing Mowool, a fingering-weight 100% British wool yarn that is brushed to mimic the look of mohair. While the small Peruvian company Alpalove is devoted to alpaca yarn. For their new Super Air yarn, baby alpaca fiber is blown into a recycled polyamide tube for a warm, soft, lofty yarn.
Timeless Inspiration in New Yarn Releases
While much of the conversation at the show began with the question “What’s new?,” I was happy to see classic, traditional yarns well represented. West Yorkshire Spinners is going one step further with their release of Morris. A collaboration with the William Morris Society, this British wool yarn is dyed in colors lifted from the iconic designs of the nineteenth-century English textile designer who said, “Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.”
Some of the William Morris inspired colors from West Yorkshire Spinners.
Some of these yarns are already available; others will be released in time for autumn. Ask about them at your local yarn store and cast on your summer knit, or start planning for sweater weather now!