Today we’d like to introduce you to Johanna Miller.
Hi Johanna, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.
I’ve always loved color and been fascinated with the way color creates moods and stories. After more than a decade as a hairstylist, I decided to learn how to dye yarns in order to achieve very specific effects I was envisioning but couldn’t find anywhere for purchase. With a little trial and error, I quickly translated my hair coloring skills into yarn dyeing and within six months of my first experiments, I built a website and began to sell online. I used social media and online networking combined with in person yarn events and pop up shows to build my brand and keep honing my skills. Now, after a decade in this industry, it’s fun to look back and see how my art has evolved and my artistic voice has grown stronger and more clear with experience.
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Absolutely not! There have been many blessings along the way, and what sometimes felt like miracles; but there have been a lot of challenges as well. At first the challenge was learning my craft: there really is no technical school or college program to learn to dye yarn, it’s just something you have to learn from others and trial and error. The internet was a huge help, but it was still mostly a self taught process with a lot of mistakes along the way! After 5 years in business, I moved from downtown Kansas City, where I was working out of my home, to a bigger home in Ottawa, KS where I was able to move my dyeing to a dedicated studio space in my basement: but it’s still not a big glamorous studio or office! The move was more challenging than I expected: cities vary widely in their water treatment and when I first moved to Ottawa, I found that many of my trusted dye recipes and experience I had gained in KC suddenly were not turning out as expected at all! For the first time, I was having trouble with bleeding (when the dyed yarn releases color into clear water at the rinsing stage) and some colors just turning out dramatically different than previously. I was in a panic and had to pull a bunch of yarn from my online shop. I dove into research and started learning more details about how the water is treated here in Ottawa compared to KC, and ended up teaching myself more chemistry than I would have ever thought I needed to learn to anticipate dye results and treat my water myself to compensate for the different chemicals present in the water. It was a hard few months, but I was able to adjust my water and dye recipes and techniques and now have a solid understanding of how to test, hypothesize dye results, and adjust if necessary. I’m so much more confident now in my skills than I was before all that so it ended up a great learning experience!
Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
I’m an indie yarn dyer, which means I work for myself and I dye yarns and spinning fiber by hand in small batches to create artisanal, luxury fibers for crafters. Most of my customers are knitters, crocheters, and spinners, but I also sell to weavers, felters, and mixed media artists. I have always specialized in highly saturated colors, often dyeing deep, rich, moody colors that are so saturated they intimidate most other dyers. They can be quite tricky to dye correctly, time consuming to set and rinse properly; but they are very popular and really stand apart from other hand dyed yarns on the market. I am very careful to record my recipes so I can create repeatable colors; but the beauty of hand dyed yarn is that every skein, even within the same batch, will have slight variations that make them unique works of art. My yarns are high quality, and meant to give you the most luxurious and satisfying experience. I absolutely love selling my yarn creations to other artists: it’s like getting to collaborate with visionary artists all over the world to see them take my work and make something unique and beautiful! I don’t just learn how to dye yarn: I’m truly in love with color and am always learning, growing, experimenting, and playing, allowing my creative muse to really shine through my work.
Can you talk to us a bit about the role of luck?
I tend to think of it more as divine guidance than luck; surely, it was with me when I first started! I went from knowing nothing and just messing around in my kitchen with thrifted pots and pans, some dye powders, and cheap yarn and some YouTube videos to deep diving into this fascinating world and for the first four years it did sorta feel like I had the Midas touch. My business took off pretty quickly, even though I was still working at the hair salon. While I do credit my hard work and persistence, I definitely felt like I was being gifted with good sales, exposure online, and a genuine motivation and excitement to keep going that really helped me get started. I had just quit the hair salon to stay home with my first child and focus on my business in addition to being home with him, when COVID struck. I was again amazed at how I was protected from so much chaos and angst in the workplace; since I was largely working from home on my own schedule, I was able to be largely unaffected by the changes. I had in person events cancelled for awhile, but I was already so limited on that with a newborn, that it didn’t really change much for me. In the last few years, with another kid at home and changing family priorities, navigating the online world has been so much more difficult, and not just for me. I see the theme repeated from all small businesses and handmade industries: times are really hard and it’s getting harder and harder for online marketing to pay off or even make sense. I’ve seen so many of my colleagues in this industry going out of business, and while the reasons vary, a consistent theme for many is that it just isn’t making enough money to offset the investment of time when you make your product and then also have to market it and handle all the online pressure of business. I feel blessed and grateful to have a spouse to help support our family so I’m able to keep my business open, even in slower seasons. I definitely feel lucky and blessed to still be going after a decade: this industry is tough.
Pricing:
- $29-$36 per skein of yarn
- $16-$27 per braid of fiber
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.potionyarns.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/potionyarns/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/PotionYarns/
