On today’s episode of the Craft Industry Alliance podcast, we’re talking about building a fiber business with my guest Felicia Lo.
Felicia is a designer and entrepreneur, born and raised in Vancouver, Canada. Her lifelong passion for knitting, color, and design led her to start the sweetgeorgia blog in 2004. A year later, SweetGeorgia was founded at her dining room table with nothing more than three skeins of sock yarn for sale on Etsy. Since then, SweetGeorgia has become a way of life where work and play are inseparable.
In 2017, she published her first book “Dyeing to Spin & Knit” with Interweave Press and currently, she is developing the School of SweetGeorgia to offer online fiber arts education to color-obsessed crafters. When she’s not playing with yarn or hunting tacos and ramen, she’s chasing her two young children around with her orange-loving husband.
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We begin our conversation talking about Felicia’s highly creative household growing up with a father who was a painter and a mother who was a writer. Felicia studied to become a pharmicist in college, and during her studies discovered that what she really loved was the mixing of compounds together to create various creams. Later, this passion would come into play when mixing dyes for yarn.
Felicia at the loom.
In 2004, Felicia discovered the world of knitting blogs while doing a search for a Rowan sweater she was knitting. She immediately got involved, starting her own blog and opening an Etsy shop in 2005. SweetGeorgia now has over a dozen employees who run a production dye studio and we talk about the responsibility of having a team and Felicia’s quality priorities for her products. SweetGeorgia is a family friendly work environment and Felicia talks about how she instills that value in her company.
The School of SweetGeorgia is Felicia’s new initiative to teach fiber fans how to use their handmade yarns. We talk about what motivated Felicia to open an online teaching platform and what she’s hoping to achieve with it.
Felicia’s book, Dyeing to Spin and Knit
And, of course, I ask Felicia to recommend what she’s loving rigth now. Felicia recommends:
- the Ashford E-spinner
- Creative Calling by Chase Jarvis
- Breakfast Lunch and Dinner on Netflix
Catch up with Felicia at SweetGeorgia Yarns and join the School of Sweet Georgia to get a comprehensive fiber arts education online within a supportive community.