I Kicked the Yarn Into the CREEK

68 handspun skeins,
nine months of work,
given away for free at Gateway Open Studio
on May 9th, 2026.

The original plan was to sell the yarn.

In the spring of 2025, during a very broke time of my life, I purchased eight pounds of merino wool roving and began the work of turning it into skeins I could sell for a profit. My art practice had outgrown my basement apartment and I needed to rent a dedicated art space.

To raise the funds I needed for a studio, I combined the merino wool with years of accumulated fiber: roving gifted by my family, secondhand mystery yarn from eBay lots, acrylic scraps, alpaca, wool, unlabeled thrift-store balls, whatever. Some of it was beautiful, some of it was ugly, most of it could not be identified (by me).

For nine months, I carded, blended, spun, plied, washed, skeined, measured and labeled 68 two-ply one-of-a-kind skeins. Each one got a hand-stamped tag labeled with its yardage, WPI and my best guess at what it was made of.

By February 2026, I landed great new job and no longer needed to sell the yarn to afford my studio. This was really ideal for me because I did, and still do, hate selling my work for a “profit”. I hate capitalism, I hate shipping, I hate going to the post office, and I do not want to run a small business. It simply is not for me.

So I made a decision: I brought the yarn to my studio, created a yarn display on the wall, and wrote a message above it with sharpie. A brief explanation of how the yarn came to exist, its original purpose, and one simple request: please take a skein for free if you will use it.

This decision proved decisive among my peers - wasn’t I devaluing my labor? Wasn’t I also, in turn, devaluing the labor of other fiber artists? What kind of message did this send to the viewer/participant? Why didn’t I feel entitled to make a profit off my skills?

To me, the giveaway only worked because the yarn was valuable. If it were junk, giving it away would mean nothing. The controversy revealed a new question that turned the yarn and the giving away of it into a kind of performance art piece, with the central : does refusing money mean refusing to assign value?

I gave away the yarn, as opposed to selling it, simply because good yarn is expensive, I had more than I needed, and I wanted it to end up in the hands of people who would actually make things with high-quality handspun normally outside of their price range.

All 68 skeins were gone by the end I put them out - Gateway Open Studios Day on May 9, 2026.

The spirit of the project, part giveaway and part performance art, lies in necessity. When it is not necessary to make a profit, it is necessary to give back.

Thank you for reading. :)