I learned to do many crafts as a kid. My mom always had a craft room and loves to stock it with endless used and new supplies, some relating to crafts we’ve done before, some just in-case.

So although I learned to crochet as a kid and knitted a bit in high school, I started really getting into knitting only about ten years ago. That’s when I truly discovered the curious world of fiber arts—discovered that there was this secret world that most people don’t know about. I have been making my way merrily down its many rabbit holes and fairy paths since then, one of which has led me to become an indie dyer, opening my tiny hand-dyed yarn business Fiction Fiber in September of 2023. But I should have become a dyer much sooner.

For so many years of my childhood and pre-teen years, I had no idea that I was only a few blocks from Dharma Trading Co. I grew up in a small town in Sonoma County, California, and spending weekends in the small city of San Rafael, in the north SF bay area where my dad lived. We spent a lot of time biking and walking around the downtown area, usually to make a trip to the local game store so my brother could get Magic (the Gathering) cards and dad could look at comic books and I could take a month-long vested interest in pogs, pretend not to look at the ungainly boobs on the heroines on covers of comic books, pick out a cool twenty-sided die that looks like candy, or oggle displays of painted Warhammer figures and daydream about Legolas from Lord of the Rings. The game shop was on Fourth Street in the busier downtown area, which was the nexus of our weekend shopping spots. This sort of thing went on for years and years before my dad eventually started buying guitar strings at Bananas at Large, and his bread at the Italian bakery Bordenaves, which were further down third street, in a sunnier, quieter spot which was also much closer to Dharma Trading Co. 

Upon first visiting the shop, I hadn’t had much experience dyeing. As a small child, at a renaissance faire, I had done some silk painting, or at least directed the execution of it. Around that time I loved to ask my mom to draw girls and to direct her sketches, saying where the massive bows should go and where more frills would be necessary. I didn’t have the skill for lines and proportions yet but I had the taste; I remember that most of the resulting dresses featured a huge rose on the chest, and they were always long, sort of prairie style, a bit seventies I guess, with puffed sleeves. But at the renaissance faire, I’d acquired some rainbow wings, and she drew a fairy, so I chose colors for this fairy’s dress. Seeing the color spread on the silk and the colors bleed into each other was pure magic. The silk fabric with the fairy on it was stretched over a small wooden embroidery hoop and put up on the wall in my bedroom for years. 

Another experience with dyeing is much closer to my current work than I ever could have guessed. In middle school, apropos of exactly none of my day-to-day interests at the time, I chose vegetable dyeing as a science fair project. I think it was my mom’s idea and I was running out of time so I had to commit to it. I thought it would be too easy, that it wouldn’t really be a science experiment, but it was much harder than I thought. I think my mom did all the real planning, it was a bit more technical than I liked at the time.

We chose six or seven vegetables to try using as a dye. My stated hypothesis was that beets would give a rich, vivid hue, as they initially stained the yarn fuchsia on contact. But when the dye had all gone into the wool, the yarn became a dull brown color that was completely dispiriting. The next surprise was the onions. The onion skins were dark maroon, but I expected nothing from their frail, papery layers. They gave a lovely purplish red—the hue I had expected from the beets. After that, I had to respect the mystery of dyeing.

I don’t remember the moment of walking into Dharma, but I remember the feeling of it every time I go back. First, I felt that it was not possible that this store was really here, and had always been here all along–only a few blocks from that game store we’d gone to all those years. Even though I had no idea what to do with the products I saw there, it felt strange that this place had been here without my knowing. Have you ever stepped into a place and thought, is this a real place?  It’s hard to say why, but I’m sure I felt entranced by the endless possibilities of the raw materials there, particularly as they were so unknown. Unlike other crafts, I did not know how to interact with them–dyeing is a craft that required math; it seemed impossible. I saw packages of dye, skeins of yarn, and racks of silk and cotton garments–all white because they were not yet in their final form.

 

Although I had spent hundreds of hours with my mom in fabric and craft stores seeing raw materials, this shop was small, and felt lived in. Products didn’t have a great deal of splashy packaging, they just were what they were, and maybe that added to the magic, because it felt like going to the source of something. Many years later when I started dyeing and selling yarn, I asked indie dyers where they bought their dye, and to my surprise, most of them said Dharma. So in a way, I actually was close to the source. I just didn’t know what world it was the source of at the time.

No one in my family lives in San Rafael any longer, and I order my dye online from Dharma. But recently I stopped into the store while passing through. I wanted to feel the particular sensation of being in the space. I kept trying to bring it back, trying to find something new, but now all the yarn and dyes just looked like the things I see in my home all the time. They’re familiar things. I tried to look for a new yarn base, but struck out, and went to check out with just a couple of mordants. As I got to talking to Karen at the register, I mentioned I was a dyer, and she mentioned she needed a teacher for Bay Area Yarn Crawl. She asked if I wanted to see the studio space they had in the back for classes, where students could dye and learn other fiber skills together. I had been in the store countless times without knowing there was a back room! I was so excited.