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 of our yarns — 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 certain light, at a certain 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, silk, camel and 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.

Behind Knotty in Nanoose is one maker: me. I learned to knit young, and somewhere along the way, dyeing became the thing I couldn’t stop thinking about, the chemistry of it, the unpredictability, the way a colour in my mind never quite matches what comes out of the pot, and is usually better for it. I dye every skein myself, by hand, in small batches, often while working through the rest of a very full life. This isn’t a factory or a team. It’s one person, paying close attention, trying to get it right.

Every skein starts as undyed fibre, chosen for its rarity, its softness, the way it takes colour. I mix dye by eye and instinct as much as by formula, working in small batches so each batch can be watched closely. Because every skein is hand-dyed individually, no two are ever quite identical, slight variations in tone and saturation are part of what makes each one genuinely one of a kind. Once dyed, skeins are rinsed, set, and hung to dry before they’re wound, labelled, and ready to find their way to you.

The photographs throughout this site are almost entirely my own, taken on Vancouver Island, often in the same light and places that inspire the colours themselves. A small handful of fibre images (yak and camel) are AI-generated placeholders, used only because I don’t yet have my own photographs of these animals in their natural habitat. Everything else, the yarns, the landscapes, the moments, is mine.