About Us!

Hello there! My name is Caitlin and I am the owner and dyer behind the Botanic Fiber Shoppe. 

I can’t actually tell you my knitting origin story. I mostly just remember being able to do it? I know I taught myself, back before YouTube had a tutorial for everything (but my does it help nowadays when it comes to a tricky or new stitch I want to try!). I’ve also always loved yarn. I constantly find myself wandering into yarn shops, if only just to touch and swoon all the pretty things. This is also me inside of bookstores, in case you were wondering. But I love creating, and knitting was always a wonderful outlet for me to do it through. During the pandemic shutdown, I stumbled upon test knitting for designers online. I have worked with quite a few designers since then, and I always love being a part of the process with them. I truly love everything to do with knitting, it makes my heart calm (mostly) and happy. 

While my time of being a knitter is long, my time of being a dyer is a little shorter. I’ve followed so many wonderful indie dyers on Instagram over the last few years, and with every one my desire to also get creative in a world of dyes has grown. At the beginning of 2022 I started checking out books from my library on natural dyeing. While acid dye is the most common way to work when dyeing yarn, I was more intrigued by the route of natural dyes. I love nature and feel inspired by it constantly, and I loved the idea of pulling in the outdoors and putting it into a skein of yarn. 

Slowly over the course of the year, I have been researching, note taking, and experimenting with the process involved with natural dyeing (and as my husband likes to say, “the difference between screwing around and science is writing it down.” I’ve been doing a lot of science this year). I love foraging for dyestuff and finding new things to bring to life in yarn, and I am beyond excited to see where this journey takes me. I want this yarn to be loved as much as I love creating it, and I hope as time goes on, I can bring natural dyed yarn to life in all the fun ways we see acid dyed yarn. Honestly, I will be over the moon once I figure out a good way to speckle yarn with natural dyes! 

Thank you for your support on this journey through nature in Yarnland.