Many knitters have stories of their mothers or grandmothers teaching them the craft when they were very young. Rather unusually, my knitting obsession didn’t start until I was in my mid-20s and it required a great deal of persistence for me to become a capital-k Knitter.
I would walk into yarn shops and admire the rainbow of colors, fantasizing about wearing fashionable sweaters and scarves made by my own two hands and longing to meet new friends at the Stitch ’n Bitch groups popping up all over New York City. Finally, one day, I got up the nerve to take a private knitting lesson at a since-closed shop in Manhattan’s East Village. I worked diligently for weeks on my first simple scarf before relegating it to the back of the closet after too many mistakes I couldn’t figure out how to fix.
A few years later, a friend who was working as a young adult librarian in the city arranged for someone to teach knitting to the teens — and, subsequently, to her — at her New York Public Library branch. She then began churning out beautiful hats and baby sweaters, and so I begged her to take me under her wing.
My basic scarves became basic hats, and then the website Ravelry launched. This knitting and crochet pattern and project database and social network sent me down the rabbit hole of independent designers of shawls and sweaters, and hand-dyed yarn. Knitting and yarn collecting became a huge part of my life and I formed an online and in-person community of warm, funny, creative and supportive people who spoke the same language of yarn and stitches.
Up until this point, I had found my creativity with words, having worked as a journalist for daily newspapers since graduating from college in 2002. In between telling the stories of the communities I was covering, I was also discovering a growing industry of independent yarn dyers and makers of accessories, such as sewn project bags and beaded stitch markers.
Back then, competition for some dyers’ colorways was fierce, and online “cart-jacking” — when you reached checkout and discovered that the yarn you thought you were buying had already been sold to someone else — was not uncommon. At the same time, other small makers were finding it hard to reach new customers beyond their small groups of friends.
In 2013, I found myself at a crossroads. I had been laid off from my job at the newspaper and, in between freelance writing gigs, had come up with an idea to create an online marketplace for indie yarn dyers.
At first, I thought I’d build an actual marketplace that dyers and makers could use to sell their products. I started asking tech-industry friends for advice, joined a site called CoFoundersLab to find a technical co-founder, and attended business networking Meetup groups.
I stalled as I tried to figure out how to create what I was envisioning with nonexistent coding skills and how I’d find small business owners who were willing to take a chance on a new, unproven e-commerce platform.
Eventually, it was community — and a friend with the same love of hand-dyed yarn and knowledge of internet startups — that pushed me to create what was really needed. I decided to use my storytelling skills and passion for the fiber arts to share what dyers and makers had for sale, and provide a way for my fellow crafters to find out, so we could stalk the shop updates and get the skeins we coveted.
Using a few thousand dollars gifted by a generous family member, I hired a design and development firm, Aeolidia, that had created the website of Cephalopod Yarns, one of the indie dyers I admired. I began reaching out to other dyers whose work I loved and asked them to be part of my new venture.
My business Indie Untangled launched several months later, in 2014, to collect the latest promotions from dyers, as well as accessory makers and knitting and crochet pattern designers. Each Friday, I would send out an email to thousands of my fellow fiber enthusiasts and summarize what’s on offer.
Also in 2014, I organized a small, in-person marketplace the day before the weekend-long New York Sheep and Wool Festival, which takes place in the Hudson Valley each October. That first Indie Untangled event was comprised of a dozen or so dyers and makers who had been using the Indie Untangled platform to advertise their businesses. It harnessed the spirit of the enthusiastic gatherings of friends — and some yarn selling — that happened the Friday before the festival known to many simply as “Rhinebeck.”
The 11th Indie Untangled Rhinebeck event takes place this year at HITS on the Hudson, a large horse show facility in the town of Saugerties, New York. It’s a gathering of more than 40 vendors and 2,000 enthusiastic yarn lovers at its picturesque grounds, which feature the Catskill Mountains as its backdrop.
I’ve also helped move the needle in the B2B sector by proposing and running a successful small business incubator pavilion at h+h americas, the U.S. version of h+h cologne, a large trade fair for the handicrafts industry that takes place in Germany.
I had seen small businesses struggle to reach wholesale customers, or take on more wholesale business than they could handle, and sought to find a way for them to make that investment in a more accessible way. This past May, two dozen businesses, most run solely by one person, participated in a show that drew thousands of craft retailers and influencers.
Indie Untangled mainly makes money by collaborating with yarn dyers and pattern designers on special yarns and subscription boxes that I sell on my website. This includes a series called Knitting Our National Parks, in which dyers create colors inspired by photos of U.S. public lands.
People often write about the dangers of monetizing your creative pursuits. While there are plenty of challenges — talking honestly about money with people you consider friends, processing feelings about imitators in a small industry, having to tackle boring but crucial tasks like paying sales tax — running a business in the fiber industry has forged a deeper connection with my beloved craft and helps me engage with it in a more creative way.
Since I live in a small New York City apartment, my office and my craft room — essentially where I store my yarn stash — are one and the same. While ideally, I’d have more space, especially when it comes to shipping out large orders, this intermingling of my hobby and my business seems appropriate.
When I first started knitting with hand-dyed yarn, I became more passionate about working for hours on a knitting project when I knew that someone else had labored over the colors in a skein. I have even more love and enthusiasm when I’m working with a yarn created in collaboration with a dyer, like my Knitting Our National Parks series, or a farmer, like my Heritage Wool Collective subscription of small-batch milled and hand-dyed farm yarn.
I’ve learned to love and appreciate colors that I never would have considered wearing, like bright oranges and greens, because the nuances of hand dyeing add a deeper dimension to them.
Working with others to organize events has deepened my friendships with them. It’s also allowed me to recognize my own strengths and weaknesses, learn how to accept criticism, and figure out when it’s best to delegate tasks.
I’m not entirely sure where Indie Untangled will be in another 10 years. So many of my best ideas have come from my latest obsessions — or formed like a cartoon light bulb going off over my head.
What I can be sure of is that my business will go wherever my passion, purpose and my beloved community, or “flock,” leads me.
Many knitters have stories of their mothers or grandmothers teaching them the craft when they were very young. Rather unusually, my knitting obsession didn’t start until I was in my mid-20s and it required a great deal of persistence for me to become a capital-k Knitter.
I would walk into yarn shops and admire the rainbow of colors, fantasizing about wearing fashionable sweaters and scarves made by my own two hands and longing to meet new friends at the Stitch ’n Bitch groups popping up all over New York City. Finally, one day, I got up the nerve to take a private knitting lesson at a since-closed shop in Manhattan’s East Village. I worked diligently for weeks on my first simple scarf before relegating it to the back of the closet after too many mistakes I couldn’t figure out how to fix.
A few years later, a friend who was working as a young adult librarian in the city arranged for someone to teach knitting to the teens — and, subsequently, to her — at her New York Public Library branch. She then began churning out beautiful hats and baby sweaters, and so I begged her to take me under her wing.
My basic scarves became basic hats, and then the website Ravelry launched. This knitting and crochet pattern and project database and social network sent me down the rabbit hole of independent designers of shawls and sweaters, and hand-dyed yarn. Knitting and yarn collecting became a huge part of my life and I formed an online and in-person community of warm, funny, creative and supportive people who spoke the same language of yarn and stitches.
Up until this point, I had found my creativity with words, having worked as a journalist for daily newspapers since graduating from college in 2002. In between telling the stories of the communities I was covering, I was also discovering a growing industry of independent yarn dyers and makers of accessories, such as sewn project bags and beaded stitch markers.
Back then, competition for some dyers’ colorways was fierce, and online “cart-jacking” — when you reached checkout and discovered that the yarn you thought you were buying had already been sold to someone else — was not uncommon. At the same time, other small makers were finding it hard to reach new customers beyond their small groups of friends.
In 2013, I found myself at a crossroads. I had been laid off from my job at the newspaper and, in between freelance writing gigs, had come up with an idea to create an online marketplace for indie yarn dyers.
At first, I thought I’d build an actual marketplace that dyers and makers could use to sell their products. I started asking tech-industry friends for advice, joined a site called CoFoundersLab to find a technical co-founder, and attended business networking Meetup groups.
I stalled as I tried to figure out how to create what I was envisioning with nonexistent coding skills and how I’d find small business owners who were willing to take a chance on a new, unproven e-commerce platform.
Eventually, it was community — and a friend with the same love of hand-dyed yarn and knowledge of internet startups — that pushed me to create what was really needed. I decided to use my storytelling skills and passion for the fiber arts to share what dyers and makers had for sale, and provide a way for my fellow crafters to find out, so we could stalk the shop updates and get the skeins we coveted.
Using a few thousand dollars gifted by a generous family member, I hired a design and development firm, Aeolidia, that had created the website of Cephalopod Yarns, one of the indie dyers I admired. I began reaching out to other dyers whose work I loved and asked them to be part of my new venture.
My business Indie Untangled launched several months later, in 2014, to collect the latest promotions from dyers, as well as accessory makers and knitting and crochet pattern designers. Each Friday, I would send out an email to thousands of my fellow fiber enthusiasts and summarize what’s on offer.
Also in 2014, I organized a small, in-person marketplace the day before the weekend-long New York Sheep and Wool Festival, which takes place in the Hudson Valley each October. That first Indie Untangled event was comprised of a dozen or so dyers and makers who had been using the Indie Untangled platform to advertise their businesses. It harnessed the spirit of the enthusiastic gatherings of friends — and some yarn selling — that happened the Friday before the festival known to many simply as “Rhinebeck.”
The 11th Indie Untangled Rhinebeck event takes place this year at HITS on the Hudson, a large horse show facility in the town of Saugerties, New York. It’s a gathering of more than 40 vendors and 2,000 enthusiastic yarn lovers at its picturesque grounds, which feature the Catskill Mountains as its backdrop.
I’ve also helped move the needle in the B2B sector by proposing and running a successful small business incubator pavilion at h+h americas, the U.S. version of h+h cologne, a large trade fair for the handicrafts industry that takes place in Germany.
I had seen small businesses struggle to reach wholesale customers, or take on more wholesale business than they could handle, and sought to find a way for them to make that investment in a more accessible way. This past May, two dozen businesses, most run solely by one person, participated in a show that drew thousands of craft retailers and influencers.
Indie Untangled mainly makes money by collaborating with yarn dyers and pattern designers on special yarns and subscription boxes that I sell on my website. This includes a series called Knitting Our National Parks, in which dyers create colors inspired by photos of U.S. public lands.
People often write about the dangers of monetizing your creative pursuits. While there are plenty of challenges — talking honestly about money with people you consider friends, processing feelings about imitators in a small industry, having to tackle boring but crucial tasks like paying sales tax — running a business in the fiber industry has forged a deeper connection with my beloved craft and helps me engage with it in a more creative way.
Since I live in a small New York City apartment, my office and my craft room — essentially where I store my yarn stash — are one and the same. While ideally, I’d have more space, especially when it comes to shipping out large orders, this intermingling of my hobby and my business seems appropriate.
When I first started knitting with hand-dyed yarn, I became more passionate about working for hours on a knitting project when I knew that someone else had labored over the colors in a skein. I have even more love and enthusiasm when I’m working with a yarn created in collaboration with a dyer, like my Knitting Our National Parks series, or a farmer, like my Heritage Wool Collective subscription of small-batch milled and hand-dyed farm yarn.
I’ve learned to love and appreciate colors that I never would have considered wearing, like bright oranges and greens, because the nuances of hand dyeing add a deeper dimension to them.
Working with others to organize events has deepened my friendships with them. It’s also allowed me to recognize my own strengths and weaknesses, learn how to accept criticism, and figure out when it’s best to delegate tasks.
I’m not entirely sure where Indie Untangled will be in another 10 years. So many of my best ideas have come from my latest obsessions — or formed like a cartoon light bulb going off over my head.
What I can be sure of is that my business will go wherever my passion, purpose and my beloved community, or “flock,” leads me.
