travel made cozy with zady.

This post is sponsored by Zady, standard-bearers for ethical fashion.

Tomorrow we pack our bags, shuffle our way to Penn Station, and board a train that’s going to have us choo-choo-chooing all the way across the state of New York to visit James’s family. 

The best thing about train travel is that barring unexpected delays or frozen tracks, you just keep going. Even if there’s a toddler who gets hungry. Or a parent who needs to take a breather with a cup of terrible hot chocolate in the dining car. Or a fifth diaper change. The train keeps moving, ever forward. 

Then there’s the romance. As happens before any cold-weather train ride that I take, I’ve got visions of sugar plums dancing in my head. As far as I’m concerned, Rochester is kind of like the North Pole, and the Empire Service might as well be called the Polar Express. No matter that we’re not even in December yet. I’ve got high hopes that we might see a snowflake or two.
The train ride from the city is fairly long one: seven hours give or take. It’s a ride that necessitates a bit of settling in. A loosening of the shoelaces, a tying up of the ponytail, a fluffing of the jacket to serve as de facto pillow. It means toting books and games and various things for munching. Maybe most of all, and certainly for me, it’s a ride that demands the passengers to wear something cozy. So while I can’t bring myself to go full-on PDOP (public display of pajamas), I did plan on bringing along something I could snuggle into. 

And when Zady asked me to try their Chunky Knit sweater on for size, I knew just what that snuggly something would be. More of a cocoon than a sweater, the chunky knit exudes cozy in every oversized stitch. It seems made for snuggling up with in front of the fire, but it’s more than lovely enough to wear in public. Like everything in the Zady Essentials Collection, the chunky knit sweater takes transparency in manufacturing to a new level.I might be planning to take the Chunky Knit on a journey across New York, but Zady’s already sent the raw materials criss-crossing the country in search of the best folks in the business.

The brief biography of the Chunky Knit goes something like this: It was born of a collaboration between Zady and rancher, Jeanne Carver of Imperial Stock Ranch in Shaniko, Oregon. Shorn from sheep on the Carters’ sustainably managed ranch, the wool makes its way to Chargeurs Wool in Jamestown, South Carolina, where it is cleaned, carded, and combed. In the words of Zady, by working with Chargeurs, “they’re making sure that the wool isn’t getting clean by making everything else filthy.” Next stop, G.J. Littlewood & Sons in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. There, the fifth-generation dye house uses reactive dyes that stay with the fiber instead of getting flushed into the water system. Once dyed, the wool heads to Kraemer Mills in Nazareth, Pennsylvania to get turned into yarn. Finally, all of that yarn goes to Commerce, California where the folks at Ball of Cotton turn it into the sweater you see here.

If it sounds labor-intensive, that’s because it is. Zady’s been working tirelessly to make sure that the clothes they produce pass their own rigorous tests and exceed industry standards as related to the environment, labor, and quality of goods. To learn more about Zady’s New Standard, head here. If you’ve got other sweaterly needs this winter, the Essential Collection that Zady announced this fall has you covered there, too. There’s the classic .01 The Sweater which they released last year, the new .06 Lightweight Alpaca Sweater, complete with pocket and beautiful crew neck, and the ever practical (and still stylish) .07 Alpaca Cardigan.Best of all, you’re in luck: This week only, Zady is offering RTML readers a 20% discount with the code simple. The offer expires Sunday, November 29 at 11:59 pm EST.

This post was sponsored by Zady. Thanks so much for supporting the brands that support Reading My Tea Leaves.