About Us

Tebbys is a women’s knitwear shop that operates online at https://tebbys.com and ships from Tolland, Connecticut to addresses across the United States. What we hold is pullovers and cardigans, all of it ready-made stock, kept in weights that suit indoor hours and the short walk on either side of them.

Everything Happens at the Edges

Pick up a sweater that has stopped working and the body of it is usually fine. The trouble sits at the cuff that no longer closes around the wrist, the hem that has gone wavy and creeps up over a waistband, the neckline that has widened by half an inch and now slides toward one shoulder.

Those three places are the only structural parts of a knit. The body is a field of loops with nothing in it that insists on a shape; it settles into whatever outline the ribbing at the edges gives it. Ribbing is simply a denser knit with a spring built into the way the stitches fold, and its whole job is to come back to its own measurement after being pulled over a hand, a hip, or a head.

So the edges are the first thing we look at. How deep the ribbed cuff runs, how many rounds of rib finish the hem, whether the neckband is knitted in as part of the garment or sewn on at the end, and how fast the rib snaps back when it is stretched and released. A knit with shallow, slack edges hangs beautifully on a hanger and still has nothing to hold a line with once it is on a body.

It is also the part of a garment that photographs worst. A camera flattens two inches of rib into a stripe, so the edges get described in words and in inches instead of being left to an image.

Color Behaves Differently on a Knit

A woven fabric shows color on something close to a flat plane. A knit does not. The surface is built from loops sitting at slightly different depths, each one throwing a small shadow onto the one beneath it, so a single dyed yarn can read as two or three tones at once depending on where the light lands.

That is why a knit in a strong shade rarely looks the way the same shade looks in a shirt. Deep colors gain weight and swallow their own stitch definition. Pale colors push the texture forward, so cables and ribs read clearly and a plain surface can look underdressed. Heathered yarn, spun from fibers dyed separately before they are twisted together, softens both effects, which is a large part of why so much knitwear lives in gray, oatmeal, and marled blue.

Color and stitch pattern therefore get decided together here rather than one after the other. A cable needs a shade that lets you see it. A flat, quiet color needs a surface with enough going on to hold the eye on its own.

Buying a Knit You Cannot Touch

Knitwear is the hardest thing in a wardrobe to buy at a distance, because most of what a person decides about a sweater in a shop gets decided by hand: the weight of it hanging off the fingers, the feel against the inside of the wrist, how much the fabric springs back when it is squeezed. None of that survives a screen, and pretending otherwise would be silly.

What does travel is numbers and plain description. Flat measurements taken from the garment itself instead of a body chart, the depth of the cuff and hem ribbing in inches, the weight of the piece, the fiber content, and an account of how the fabric moves when someone is wearing it. Those details get written out in full, including the ones that are inconvenient.

The other half of the answer is the return. If a piece arrives and the hand of it is wrong for you, that is a real reason and it does not have to be argued to us. Sending it back costs nothing: we email a prepaid label, and the conditions are set out on our Return & Refund Policy page.

Trying something on indoors, over whatever you would normally wear underneath it, is exactly what that window is for.

Operational Commitments

Get in Touch

Sizing questions before an order, and anything at all after one, come to the same address. The form on our Contact Us page reaches it too.

Thank you for shopping with us, and for keeping good knitwear in the rotation.