In a small cottage studio surrounded by woods next to her home, Michelle Salyers spends a couple of days each week tending the plants in her garden, picking them and finding new dyeing recipes that turn them into colorful yarns.
“When I first moved in I was doing a lot of painting, so I set up a little art studio out here,” Salyers said. “And then when I started weaving, this just turned it into a total fiber studio.”
Salyers is a lifelong knitter, but she took the plunge into fiber arts with her friend Linda Williams during the COVID-19 pandemic.
A garden of marigolds and goldenrod may not look like the start of a textile business, but for Michelle Salyers, those plants are the source of the bright colors that fill her hand-dyed yarn. Alongside friend Linda Williams, Salyers has turned a pandemic-era fascination with natural dyes into a business and a hub for Indiana’s fiber arts community.
“You know, like a lot of things during COVID, you kind of went down this rabbit hole,” Williams said.
For Salyers and Williams, that meant binders filled with meticulous records of dye recipes, revisiting basic chemistry concepts, testing the light sensitivity of different dyes and turning the cabin in Salyers’ yard into a dye studio.
Their exploration of fiber arts became an early-retirement venture for Salyers, who left her job as a psychologist to help grow two local businesses. Salyers and Williams operate a yarn-dyeing business called Color Me Happy, and earlier this year they joined two other founders, Maddie Kellner and Sarah Stuckey to open Flax and Fiber Yarn Collective with a storefront in Fishers.
Getting started with dyeing made sense for Salyers, who was already interested in weaving and decided to take a class on the craft.
“I just loved the idea of creating the yarn that you would want,” Salyers said.
Salyers and Williams met as researchers at the Department of Veterans Affairs. They bonded over their shared love of knitting with Williams suggesting they experiment with natural dyes.
“I like studying health systems. I like ecosystems and health systems as an ecosystem, and I just like nature. I relate to nature in that way,” Williams said. “I think about the systems in nature and what is sustaining an ecosystem. And so if we can do something naturally, I like to try to do it as naturally as possible.”
Williams has a garden filled with vegetables, including tomatoes and asparagus, and she also keeps honeybees. Growing dye plants such as marigolds and goldenrod was a natural next step. While they do not always use dyes from their own gardens, they try to source as much as possible locally. Some of their yarn starts as fibers and wool from Indiana farmers, before being dyed by native plants and then sold in Fishers.
“There’s a concept that is growing called the ‘fibershed,’” Williams said.
Williams describes a fibershed as a system in which locally sourced fibers are transformed into clothing or textiles and sold within the same region. While fibersheds are often centered around mills that process wool and fleece, there must also be ways to connect local products with consumers. Opening the yarn store represents a crucial step in that process by bringing products directly to customers interested in fiber arts.
“So that’s kind of another way that’s similar to an ecological system that people are thinking about fiber. And how you can make textiles more sustainable,” Williams said.
Opening Flax and Fiber has also helped bring the local fiber arts community together. The shop hosts open crafting sessions on Wednesdays and Fridays, inviting people to gather, work on projects and talk with fellow crafters. The crafters who attend range from teenagers to adults in their 80s, teaching one another tricks of the trade and exchanging patterns.
“The very first open craft night we had on a Friday, we didn’t have enough chairs. And so we were like, okay, we were right, the community is really ready for a place to just go and hang out,” Salyers said. “It’s not a bar, it’s not a restaurant — there just aren’t a lot of other places where you can kind of go and spend a few hours with like minded people and see what they’re doing and get inspired and have it be a fun, creative place. So that has been a really important thing for all of us.”
This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: From garden to yarn: Fishers fiber artists build local textile community
Reporting by Cara Penquite, Indianapolis Star / Indianapolis Star
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
By Cara Penquite, Indianapolis Star | USA TODAY Network
