Back in 2015 I was pregnant with my first child and making all kinds of things for the baby - sewing, crocheting, general crafting. When I went on an early maternity leave, my husband suggested I write about what I was making on a blog to help pass the time. I knew there were people out there making a living blogging while being stay-at-home parents so I decided to give it a try.

After about 3 months of publishing consistently on my blog, I was contacted by big commercial yarn companies to design for them! The month the baby was born I made enough money on my blog to pay a bill or two and buy groceries. I decided to stay home with the baby and keep going on this project until it fizzled out... spoiler: it still hasn't fizzled!!

After a couple of years designing crochet and knitting patterns for some of the biggest craft stores and yarn brands, I missed my hobby. Crocheting and knitting had become my job, something with deadlines, performance metrics, and pressure. I loved it, but I needed a hobby again. Something just for me. I still loved fiber arts, so I decided to learn to dye yarn at home.

In our apartment kitchen around the holidays, I started with a Walmart stock pot, some bare yarn, and a handful of acid dyes. I was quickly humbled by those dyes, much the same as we are when we first learn to knit or crochet. The colorways looked so different than I wanted them to. I documented my new hobby on social media to my audience of fiber arts enthusiasts, thinking it would make for interesting content.

What I didn't expect was the dozens of messages asking if they could buy this yarn! I was shocked. I was just piddling around in my kitchen! As I continued experimenting, I saved everything I made and started writing down recipes. Maybe I could recreate the colorways I was creating to sell to people? That proved to be an even harder task because the dye really had a mind of its own.

I took pages and pages of notes, describing every step in detail: how much acid, how much water, how much dye, when to put the yarn in, when to heat, how much to stir, and so on. Every test created wildly different results and it took months of daily testing to figure out my system. By the time I had a handle on hand dyeing (rather than it handling me!) I had hundreds of One of a Kind skeins crowding a spare closet. I decided to create a website and sell them, along with the handful of colorways I could recreate predictably.

Sewrella Yarn opened originally under the name Handmade Home Fibers in April of 2018. In those days we carried 4 or 5 base yarns and dyed everything for "Shop Updates" (anyone remember those?!) so it was all ready to ship. I could never predict what colorway or base would be in demand. Some items would sell out as soon as we posted them and others would languish, alone on the website for weeks. Considering the labor intensive nature of hand dyeing yarn, especially before we had anyone to help us, every skein that went without a home was occupying space that the in-demand colorways required.

At the time, in early 2019, I noticed the status quo in the industry was to release a string of colorways in a Shop Update and then re-release the popular colorways as a preorder. I wondered... why not release all of them as a preorder from the beginning? And why not give the colorways a bit more purpose and cohesion? Rather than a group of random recent creations, give the release one story and create the colorways to fit into that narrative... make it a Collection.

This was an ambitious approach for me at the time, still working from home with a toddler, still learning everyday about dyeing, inventing new methods for variegated colorways, and still running my design blog. However, I knew that the hand dyed yarn business could be run more efficiently and with more connection. So I embarked on creating my first cohesive collection - inspired by Disneyland. With a young child at home and a name like Sewrella, it fit kind of perfectly.

The response to that first full collection was off the charts. We did more sales during that preorder than any other release and we didn't have to invest nearly the time or materials prior to launching it. This was absolutely, without a doubt, the best way for us to move forward.

After that, we released collection after collection, riding the wave of Covid era industry swells and began looking for a studio in the summer of 2020. My sister Brooke joined me full time and learned everything I knew about dyeing. After 2.5 years dyeing thousands of skeins alone, we were able to move into our 1,300 square foot studio and hire our first employees.

With every collection, our business grew and added more equipment, more team members, more products, and more excitement. I left pattern designing behind to focus all my attention on the yarn business. By November of 2020 I was pregnant with twins and we were outgrowing our studio space (talk about excitement!!). The unit next to us was vacant and our landlord let us rip up our old lease, sign a new one on both units, and cut a hole in the wall to connect them. We re-imagined the layout of our space, installed extra sinks and heating cabinets, plus tons of bookshelves to hold crazy amounts of yarn.

It was a world away from that little apartment kitchen but I was the same old me - always working to improve the business and stretch my creativity to the limit. We created our own line of tool sets with Knitters Pride, formulated a (now bestselling) hand cream with lanolin that sinks into the skin instantly, made wool wash in luxe fragrances like santal and yuzu, all while creating hundreds of colorways per year. It's been an absolute joy and a privilege.

Now we work toward launching our very first commercial yarn line with a local North Carolina mill. This project was a dream of mine since the very beginning, since I worked with those big yarn companies all those years ago. I toured their offices and thought about all the ways I would do it differently. All the places my dreams could take me. Now that moment is waiting for me in the studio and I can't wait to see what happens when it finally becomes reality.

Thank you to everyone who has helped this dream of mine succeed - from every studio staff member who has come along to help to every customer who has shown us support in the kindest, most generous ways.