Welcome

Welcome to the website of Naantje Knit. Here you will find knitting patterns, special yarns, knitting needles and other paraphernalia.

Nature is both my muse and my supplier. I paint with plants, flowers, gall balls, lichens and whatever else nature has to offer as dyes.

Yarns are offered both loose and kit with the patterns. Every skein and every kit is unique in color. Putting together the color combinations for the kits is a creative process in itself.

Mission and Vision

Who is Naantje?

Naantje is a pet name of Nana Seijlhouwer. When I started knitting and I had to come up with a name, Naantje Knit was an obvious choice.

I am the child of a very artistic mother. We were already doing tinkering with leftover materials when I was very little. I can still remember a dachshund, made of milk and other packaging. Painted brown you could almost let him out. Such a shame I don't have a picture of that.

There was also sewing, drawing, painting, claying and much more. I have such fond memories of sifting through the Burdas with my mom in search of that one model that I could shine with at a party.

I really get my sense of color from her. I will never forget the painting lesson she gave me with a friend, when we were bored teenagers complaining that we had nothing to do. She put a green apple on the table. Gave us a canvas, brushes and paint and the assignment to see which colors were visible. I can tell you that there were a lot of them. We spent the rest of the afternoon with it.

Later, when I lived on my own, I tried many more things. Color often turned out to be central. Stained glass has kept me busy for a while, because the colors of glass are so intriguing. I also made glass beads.

All those techniques are fun and fascinated me for a while, but I hadn't found my passion yet.

I learned to knit at an early age, but I never really found it very attractive, partly due to terrible needlework teachers.

When my daughter was born I made and knitted a lot of clothes. I myself am very allergic to lanolin, the fat in sheep's wool. So I thought I was condemned to cotton and synthetic fibers and I have absolutely nothing to do with either material.

Until a holiday in England. At a local fair there was a shed with wool. Just feel and ohhhh how soft. The gentleman behind the stall started his sales pitch enthusiastically and I told him I couldn't stand wool. He started laughing and contradicted that. It turned out to be alpaca from his own farm. Each ball had the name of the animal that had supplied the wool and the person who had spun the yarn. Very special. Of course some of that went home. I wanted to knit with this kind of beauty and one thing led to another. I came into contact with silk, angora, mohair, yak, bamboo, camel and many more beautiful things. The fence was off the dam and an addiction to knitting all this beauty was born.

My creativity is not easy to capture, so patterns were quickly adapted. From adapting to designing was then a logical step. Creativity and enthusiasm go hand in hand for me, so explaining how I did things came naturally and teaching followed naturally.

The next phase in the creative game is the materials used to knit. The search for special yarns and the dyeing of all that beauty with dyes from nature. Colors from nature are fascinatingly different. Livelier, more surprising, never the same and continuously evolving. Exciting enough to keep me off the street for the time being.

I think it's super nice that you walk along on my creative path. I would like to take you into the wonderful world of threads, colours, stitches and patterns.