Have you noticed how your yarn skills align with other areas of your life?
Knitter, designer, indie dyer, and upcoming Masterclass Season 8 Star Dawn Barker found that her previous careers set her up for her current career incarnation where she hand-dyes yarn at home.
This is especially true for the type of yarn that Dawn loves to dye – skeins for her signature technique called Assigned Pooling, where a change in stitch and texture is assigned to changes in color within a skein of variegated yarn.
Dawn started out her professional life as an X-ray technician in a hospital, then went back to school to become a radiation therapist where she worked with cancer patients. (It’s also where she met her husband, who was also a radiation therapist.)
“There were a lot of wonderful aspects of that job,” said Dawn.
Dawn would work with radiation patients for 2-8 weeks, building relationships. Some she could help cure, some she couldn’t. But whether patients were fighting for their lives or she was giving them as much comfort and dignity at the end of their lives as possible, Dawn found the process beautiful.
“You have to be extremely accurate and be able to replicate what you did the day before. That’s also what you have to do as a professional dyer. You have to be able to reproduce a technique so that it knits up the same way,” says Dawn.
A lot of people think that being a dyer is freeform and fun, but Dawn notes that it’s also hard work. Not only is it physically demanding, it takes a lot of effort to make things reproducible on a large scale so that the skein you see on the website is similar to what arrives in your mailbox – without looking like it’s mass-produced.
Although Dawn has garnered a lot of recognition for her signature Assigned Pooling technique, it all started out as a lesson in what not to do. She taught a workshop on preventing pooling, and afterward had the thought, “What if we made it a feature?”
