About Knotty in Nanoose

Knotty in Nanoose began the way most things worth making do.

Quietly, in a specific place, paying attention.

That place is Nanoose Bay, on the eastern shore of Vancouver Island, where the light off the water changes hour by hour and the treeline holds its colour long after the sun has moved on. It is the kind of place that gets into you. The names here — Arbutus, Cedar, Fern, Driftwood — are not chosen for effect. They are the landscape, rendered in fibre.

Each colourway begins with a moment or a mood: the particular green of old growth forest after rain, the way a shoreline looks when the tide is neither in nor out, the bruised violet of an evening sky just before the stars appear. Colour here is not decorative. It is a record of something seen and felt in a particular light, at a particular time, in this particular place.

The fibres are chosen the same way, for how they hold light and how they feel in the hand. Yak and silk, baby camel and mulberry silk: rare, sensory, uncommon in the handcraft world. Not because rarity is the point, but because these fibres hold colour and light differently than anything else, and because the thing you make from them will feel unlike anything you have made before.

Knotty in Nanoose is one person, one studio, one place. Every skein is individually hand-dyed in Nanoose Bay, British Columbia. The inventory is limited by design. When a colourway is gone, it is gone. Which is fitting, because the moments that inspire them don’t repeat either.