Craft News 30th August 2026 – Denby Lives On, Cricut Expands, Creative Memories Change Direction and More …

Every couple of weeks, I’m going to take a look beyond my own immediate crafting world and see what has been happening across the wider hobbycraft industry.

The idea is not simply to repeat product launches or company announcements, but to pick out developments that might inform, educate or inspire — whether they come from papercraft, textiles, pottery, digital crafting or somewhere entirely unexpected.

And this fortnight there is a particularly interesting mixture…

The Denby name survives — but an era comes to an end

Perhaps the biggest UK craft story of the past fortnight comes from Denby.

Following the company’s entry into administration earlier this year, Denby has confirmed that all of its remaining stores are closing by the end of the week ending 30th August. Its historic Pottery Village in Derbyshire is also sadly reaching the end of its life as part of the former business.

What makes this story more complicated than a straightforward company closure is that the Denby brand itself is expected to continue under new ownership.

That distinction matters.

For more than two centuries, Denby has represented more than a name on a piece of pottery. It has also represented a particular place, workforce, set of manufacturing skills and connection with Derbyshire.

A brand can be bought and continue to exist. A living manufacturing tradition is rather harder to transfer.

At the time of writing, the identity and future plans of the new owner have not been publicly established, so it would be premature to speculate about what Denby will become next.

But the closure still feels significant because it highlights something we perhaps do not always think about when buying craft or handmade products: creative heritage often survives because somebody is still commercially making it.

When the business disappears, preserving the name and preserving the skill are not necessarily the same thing.

That makes Denby a story worth watching into the future.

Creative Memories moves into manual die cutting

Over in papercraft, Creative Memories has made a rather interesting move.

The company has launched its own Die-Cutting & Embossing System, built around a manual machine with both 12.5-inch and 6.5-inch cutting and embossing plates. The wider range already includes dies, embossing products and accessories designed around the system.

At first glance, this might simply look like another manual die-cutting machine arriving in an already established market but I think the timing makes it more interesting than that.

Electronic cutting machines can now create extraordinary things, yet Creative Memories has chosen to invest in a system that requires no computer, software, connection or electronic setup at all.

You put together your plates, paper and die, wind them through the machine and make your cut – you’ve seen this before and there is something very immediate about that.

The inclusion of 12.5-inch plates is particularly logical for Creative Memories because of its scrapbooking heritage, giving the machine the ability to work with longer borders as well as smaller embellishments.

What interests me most is not necessarily whether this particular machine will become a major competitor. It is that an established papercraft company believes manual die cutting still has enough value to justify building an ecosystem around it in 2026.

Perhaps manual and electronic cutting were never really competitors in the first place – they simply offer different types of convenience.

I’ll be interested to see how extensively Creative Memories develops the range from here.

What do you think about this?

Could the craft shop of the future be somewhere you actually craft?

Two much smaller UK stories became far more interesting when placed next to one another.

A new Sheffield Yarn Shop is preparing to open in Sharrow. Owner Petra Schwarczova, who established the hand-dyed yarn business Black Elephant ten years ago, describes plans for somewhere that can function as a community hub for knitters and crocheters rather than simply a place to buy yarn.

Meanwhile, Yarnwick Nook is opening in Gloucester on 12 September.

Again, this isn’t simply a shop.

The business describes itself as a creative studio centred around community and relaxed crafting, with pottery painting, drop-in crafts and workshops including linocut, mosaics and wax-melt making.

Two shop openings obviously do not prove that the entire UK craft-retail industry is changing but they do raise a quizzical eyebrow and get one wondering.

Online retailers are extraordinarily good at supplying craft materials. They can offer enormous ranges, deliver them to the door and often compete aggressively on price. What they cannot easily provide is somewhere to sit and make things with other people.

That may increasingly be one of the things that allows an independent craft shop to offer something genuinely different.

Instead of simply:

shop → buy → leave

the model becomes something closer to:

discover → learn → make → meet → (buy)

And I rather like that. It reminds me of the old days before shopping telly and internet retail.

If we begin seeing more openings built around the same idea, this may turn out to be more than coincidence but for now, it is simply a trend worth watching and I wish all at both creative spaces the best of luck.

Cricut gives AI-generated imagery its own filter

Cricut has made a small Design Space change that feels rather more significant than its size suggests.

The beta release of Design Space for Desktop 9.84, dated 26 August, introduces an AI Generated filter inside the Images panel.

The filter allows users to find images they have previously created using Cricut’s Create AI feature.

Functionally, that is a fairly modest change. Conceptually, it is rather interesting.

AI-generated artwork is becoming sufficiently integrated into ordinary crafting workflow that Cricut now needs a way of categorising and retrieving it.

A few years ago, artificial intelligence and cutting-machine software would probably have felt like completely separate subjects.

Now generated artwork sits inside the same environment as fonts, uploaded graphics and ordinary design assets.

There are obviously much larger conversations surrounding AI and creativity — including originality, copyright and the role of generated imagery — and one Design Space filter does not resolve any of them but sometimes technological change becomes visible through very ordinary things.

AI has not merely arrived in the craft room, it is beginning to need filing.

It is worth noting that version 9.84 is currently listed as a beta release rather than a full production version so I wouldn’t be rushing to download it yet.

In other news…

British yarn and crochet company TOFT is celebrating its twentieth anniversary this weekend.

The anniversary programme includes new crochet designs, a limited micro-batch of yarn produced from the company’s own alpacas, hand-dyed yarn and even a collaboration with Little Wren Pottery on handmade stoneware yarn bowls.

That’s all from me…

Perhaps the most interesting thing about this first roundup is that in just two weeks, the craft world has taken us from more than two centuries of British pottery history to AI-generated imagery inside cutting-machine software — with yarn shops, manual die cutting, endangered skills and alpaca yarn somewhere in between.

There is an enormous amount happening beyond whichever particular corner of crafting any of us happen to occupy.

I’m looking forward to seeing where the next couple of weeks takes us!

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