As an EU resident who likes to buy yarn from my home country of Great Britain, I was quite concerned about continuing to order yarn from there after Brexit.

I had heard about added import taxes and indeed about parcels not even being able to leave Brexit Island.

Obviously this is a great shame, as many wonderful yarns are only available from Britain.

Anyway, after reading around a little and indeed ordering some yarn despite being a tad worried, I thought it might be useful to post a little update about how it went here.

It is possible that more of you wish to continue to buy yarn from little old England and its neighbouring countries but have been too worried to do so.

Please read on to find out what happened when I ordered some yarn from Great Britain after Brexit.

Yarn is still shipping from the UK

I have ordered two lots of yarn from the UK since Brexit came into force at the end of December 2020.

The destination was mainland Europe.

One was a huge packet of yarn, valued at over 100 pounds..

The other parcel was for just two balls of handspun yarn from a seller on Etsy.

Both packages arrived as they always did, in around a week. There were no extra shipping costs and neither parcel was stopped at customs.

Now, at the same that I ordered this yarn, I also placed an order for some cake and dessert mixtures at another UK store. After 6 weeks I received a refund. The parcel had been stopped at customs and then sent back to the retailer.

This was of great sadness to me as now I will have to make sticky toffee pudding from scratch. Such is the catastrophe that is Brexit.

Anyway, I of course do not want to generalise about not receiving customs fees on UK packages. Maybe it is random to receive them. I’ve bought a fair bit of handspun yarn from the USA over the years and have sometimes had to pay customs fees, and sometimes not. It has been the same with Ice Yarns in Turkey. Actually I don’t shop with them any more as a bizarre new shipping fee, on top of the regular postage fees, has been added which annoyed me a bit.

However, from my own experience and from what I have read, yarn shipments are indeed sending and being received from Britain without an issues since Brexit.

I think that one may however have to be prepared from possible customs fees. Just because I didn’t get any doesn’t mean that other people won’t.

There seems to definitely be an issue with food exports from the UK since Brexit (at time of writing at least). One would hope this is temporary and will resolve when everything settles down.

I guess many ex pat/immigrant/emmigrant type people will simply have to learn to live without instant gravy and custard powder.

I am sure we will manage somehow. And at least we can still get our hands on lovely British wool.

Have you ordered anything from Britain since Brexit? Please do let us know in the comments how it went.