Sarah EvansSalem is home to some talented people who are transforming what it means to be crafty.
What once looked like a quiet, solitary pursuit, often done at home out of necessity, now looks like an Instagram account with more than 121,000 followers, a basement lab filled with dyes and vinegar bottles, and a nine-city, cross-country book tour.
My, how knitting and crocheting have changed.
It’s not uncommon to see people of all ages, genders, ethnicities, and cultural identities sitting in public spaces around Salem with yarn and needles or hooks in their laps. The parallel spread of the internet and DIY crafting over the past 15 to 20 years gave many crafts, including fiber arts, a boost in popularity.
But while several generations ago, people often knit or crocheted their own socks, hats, and scarves because they needed a relatively inexpensive way to stay warm, many of today’s fiber artists are turning their talents into quite different pursuits — creating businesses, publishing books, and forging communities of like-minded people worldwide.
Several of the artists making a name for themselves in that broader community have their roots right here in Salem. Meet some of Salem’s modern fiber artists.
The Designer
Name: Marie Greene
Age: 44
First thing she knitted: Baby booties, at age 11
Business: Olive Knits
Marie Greene hasn’t spent much time in Salem proper lately. She’s been traveling to California, Michigan, Virginia, Illinois, Montana, and more as part of a nine-city tour to promote her new book, Seamless Knit Sweaters in Two Weeks.
For the past five years, she has turned her fiber hobby into a business, but that doesn’t mean she sits around knitting all day. “I don’t have as much time to knit now,” she said. “I’m always on the computer, doing marketing, traveling, running my business.”
Marie learned to knit at age 11 from her grandmother. After moving to Salem about six years ago, she worked part-time at a yarn shop, where customers kept asking about her custom-designed sweaters. She started writing patterns, and her business grew from there.
Under the name “Olive Knits,” Marie specializes in seamless sweaters. “I try to create clean, crisp, minimalist designs that can translate to a variety of fashion styles,” she said. “I like to combine classic elements with modern features.”
Through social media, Marie has built a following of like-minded knitters who share ideas about techniques and patterns and provide each other with emotional support.
“I think that’s one of my superpowers — bringing people together,” she said. “It’s about more than just stitching and making things. It’s about fostering friendships and confidence and empowerment.”
The Dyer
Name: Stephania Fregosi
Age: 45
First thing she knitted: A generic flat knitted piece, at age 8
Business: Three Fates Yarns
Stephania Fregosi’s basement feels like a science lab, with bottles, pots, and steamers populating the space and the buzzing of machines filling the air. But a peek into the steamers reveals skeins of yarn soaking in vivid colored liquid, revealing the true nature of Stephania’s project: yarn dying.
The daughter of a graphic designer and a children’s book illustrator, Stephania grew up paying more attention to color than most.
Her mother, the illustrator, taught her to knit when she was eight. Through her teens and 20s, Stephania knitted sweaters regularly, drawn to the idea of making custom items that fit her better than what she could find in stores.
After she moved to Oregon in 2007, Stephania met yarn dyers at fiber shows and discovered a new passion that combined her loves for science, color, and knitting.
Through her business, Three Fates Yarns, Stephania has perfected her method of transforming light gray yarn into a rainbow of colors, using crock pots, cooking steamers, vinegars, and her own ratios of dyes.
As for knitting itself, Stephania is drawn to its soothing, meditative, yet tactile nature.
“People tend to think of knitting as something you do with your free time,” she said, “but after you do it for a while, you learn that mostly you do it in dead time — the time that you often use to look at your phone, like when you’re waiting in line at the post office.”
The Instagram Queen
Name: Jessica Carey
Age: 29
First thing she crocheted: A baby beanie, at age 21
Business: The Hook Nook
It’s fitting that Jessica Carey learned to crochet from YouTube.
Just eight years after she first picked up crochet hooks, Jessica has a popular personal blog, she’s an official blogger for Joann craft stores, she signed her first book deal, and more than 121,000 people follow her on Instagram.
Social media — particularly Instagram — has been a boon for fiber artists seeking to make connections and share their work. In Carey’s case, her pink hair, tattoos, piercings, and personal story defy many people’s stereotypes about crochet.
She decided to try crochet when she was home with her baby and needed “something that was only for myself,” she said. She sold her creations through an Etsy shop for a time, before transitioning to writing designs.
“I didn’t have a childhood where my parents told me they were proud of me. With crochet, I liked the feeling of being proud of something I did by myself,” she said. “While I sit there crocheting, it frees up my brain to think. I can process things that were terrible in my life and turn them into happy things.”
Jessica has given talks at trade shows about how she uses fiber art as a form of meditation, healing and self-therapy.
“While you’re making a specific project, you can heal,” she said, “and you’ll have this final product that you can give to someone as a reminder of what you were processing while you made it.”
This story originally ran in Press Play Salem issue 6 (Apr/May 2019)
The Instigator
Carlee Wright
