Shelley, the daughter of feminist Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley and radical anarchist William Godwin, wrote the tale in 1816, “the year without a summer,” during a summergoth vacation-slash-horror-writing-contest with Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Polidori. 

We looked at Frankenstein during the first ever Ex Libris Fibers monthly yarn club, The Spectral Collection, back in the doomed year of 2020, with color My Hideous Progeny.

I've since wanted to expand on that palette but as with many absolutely beloved, classic, pedestal-situated titles - how do I even start?!

As one NYTimes reader noted in 1992, the novel remains “the first, and still the most powerful, image of the dangers posed by the scientific drive to usurp female procreative power.” (via NYTimes) It's a near-timeless tale, interpreted many times in film and popular culture. With both Guillermo del Toro and Maggie Gyllenhaal interpreting the tale and its offshoots in film in recent history, clearly something is still in the air.

Enter the winter of 2026 and several weeks of frozen temperatures surrounded by ice, gray skies, despair, and feet of snow. Inspiration hit me like a face-busting fall on a patch of frozen fog.

The Frankenstein Collection will be making its formal debut at events this spring, but early batches are available online on SW Sock (Solnit Base) right now. Yak Sock (Ursula Base) and Yak/Silk DK (Brontë Base) will come with me first to the Rose City Yarn Crawl, but I'll also bring plenty to events this April and May.

Five heavily-speckled colors inspired by characters and concepts from the book are the newest additions to the Ex Libris Fibers color library. 

The Frankenstein Collection

Mrs. Frankenstein, "Playful as a summer insect" and inspired by Elizabeth Lavenza in rich purples, royal blues, fox coat, and foreboding shadows. 

Unhallowed Damps, a densely-speckled color works up with eerie aqua hues under dense greenery, lifeless purples, and copper accents. Inspired by the quote  "Who shall conceive the horrors of my secret toil as I dabbled among the unhallowed damps of the grave or tortured the living animal to animate the lifeless clay?" - Dr. Victor Frankenstein

Darkness and Distance, moonlit waves sweeping over shipwrecks on perilous rock and ice. Our tortured soul, The Creature, finds his fate on the last page of Mary Shelley's 1818 novel Frankenstein by disappearing into the darkness and distance of the frigid sea. 

Victor, The Monster, echoes of academic firey impatience among fine wooden bookshelves and weathered leather tomes. 

Victor's Wretch, pastoral greens and melodramatic shadows of gloom. Readers of Mary Shelley's 1818 novel Frankenstein are no stranger to the notorious creature, or "the wretch." 

View available yarns from this collection in the online shop