Dumpster Diver to Yarn Dyer
Originally published in Making Stories Magazine Issue 7
As a small child, I could often be found picking up litter in the school yard at recess, digging through the trash for craft supplies, or saving recyclables from the neighbours’ garbage. To no one’s surprise, I grew up to study sustainable development at university, and spent my early twenties as an environmental activist.
After graduating, I dove into the anti-globalization and climate change movements of the 2000s, staying with squatters in abandoned buildings across Europe, and learning to dumpster dive food from the bins of grocery stores. I was both disgusted by the extreme waste of modern consumerism, and inspired by the counter culture that was experimenting with alternative ways of living.
When I returned home to Canada, I found a job in a used bookstore, spending my days salvaging books from piles of junk, and helping people find out-of-print titles. I didn’t see the pattern at the time, but turning trash into treasure has clearly been a lifelong source of joy for me. I find there’s something truly magical about saving things from going to waste, about creating something out of nothing.
Meanwhile, through all this garbage saving, I was knitting. I learned to knit in childhood after coming home from my adventures of litter and trash picking, and continued through university and young adulthood. It was another way to create something out of nothing, another kind of magic. But as a staunch environmentalist committed to local food, I started questioning where my yarn was coming from. I gardened, I shopped at farmers’ markets, I joined a co-op that sourced ethical meat from local farms, but where was the yarn? Although I live in the city, I’m located in Alberta, an agricultural hub of Canada. Surely, I thought, there must be sheep around here.
I found some friends in the city who were also hungry for local yarn, and we embarked on a mission to find it, calling ourselves the Alberta Yarn Project. We went to local yarn stores, and found the same yarns that were being sold all around the world. We talked to indie dyers and hand spinners, and found they were mostly using fibres sourced from overseas. Finally, we found a community of hand spinners and weavers in rural Alberta with connections to small scale sheep farms, but the situation was fairly bleak. Other than the handful of fleeces farmers could sell to hand spinners, they couldn’t find a viable market for their wool, and would often burn it in the field or throw it away. The occasional farmer would send the wool to a mill to be spun into yarn, but without a way to sell the yarn to crafters, it would sit in a barn to languish. I didn’t know how I was going to do it, but I knew this was a problem I had to fix.
At the same time, my environmentalist crafting journey was also leading me down the path of natural dyes. The deep history of traditional dyes was fascinating, but it was dye materials that I could save from the garbage that got me really excited. I took a workshop on dyeing with kitchen scraps from a local rug hooker, and started tinkering at home with onion skins, avocado peels, carrot tops, and rhubarb leaves. A couple years later, I learned to dye with invasive weeds from a weaver teaching a course at a nearby provincial park, and all the pieces started clicking into place.
Through the community my friends and I built with the Alberta Yarn Project, I had found a vast network of fibre artists and textile makers to learn from. I learned all the steps of making yarn, from skirting raw fleeces fresh off the sheep on shearing day, to pulling finished skeins out of my dye pots - all from materials that would have otherwise gone to waste. Not only had I found a way to combine a joyful craft practice with my strange love of using garbage, but I could envision a way to make it my career.
When the pandemic hit, and the first wave of lockdowns ended my job at the bookstore, I launched my own brand of yarn. I now purchase raw fleeces directly from farmers in my local area, send the wool to local fibre mills to be spun, and dye the yarns in my home dye studio with plant materials I save, grow, and gather myself. My brand, Luddite Yarn, pays homage to past generations of textile workers who fought to preserve artisanal fibre skills, and is made for the next generation of makers crafting a more sustainable future. I hope it brings you joy.