One thing about Baaad Anna’s? We love local, hand-dyed yarn. So, of course, we are so excited to welcome Wild Woollys to the shop! As this beautiful yarn is new to us, let’s introduce the local BC dyers that are behind these lovelies. I had the chance to interview Alyse Jackson and Curtis Duggan on how they came to starting Wild Woollys.

Alyse: I came to dyeing through my own love of working with yarn. Fibre arts were a hobby for me before Wild Woollys, and I became curious about making the yarn itself part of the creative process: choosing the base, experimenting with colour, and seeing how it all worked up into a finished piece.

I’d been thinking about learning to dye for a while before I brought it up with Curtis. His encouragement helped me take the next steps. From there, it became a lot of self-teaching, experimenting, and figuring out how to turn something I enjoyed into a business. There are dozens of colourway experiments that didn’t make the cut from the early days!

One of the most rewarding parts now is seeing what other people make with our yarn. I get to know it as a skein, but someone else sees a sweater, a shawl, or a combination of colours I might never have put together. It’s really lovely to be part of that.

Curtis: I had a background as a software entrepreneur. I spent four years building a software company selling into the US health care market – which brought me to New York during the late 2010s. I met Alyse back at home (Victoria, BC) as the pandemic was waning. We moved in together in 2022 and she was obviously a talented fibre artist as a hobbyist.

I was working as a remote tech worker and indie entrepreneur. During a long walk along Victoria’s beautiful seaside route “Dallas Rd.” Alyse asked me if I thought hand-dyed yarn as a business was a good idea. I thought about it for about ten seconds and said, yes! We have had many amazing ups and downs since the day she decided to get started and take her first dyeing course.

My background has always been in technology and innovation, so it’s been fascinating to build a business around such an ancient craft. There are dyed cotton textiles from Peru dating back 6,000 years, indigo-dyed textiles from Anatolia around 3,800 years ago, and Babylonian wool-dyeing recipes written on clay tablets 2,500 years ago. I love thinking that people were experimenting with fibre and colour back then, and here we are in Victoria still doing it today.

Check out Wild Woollys Worsted Here!

Where does your colour inspiration come from? 

Alyse: For me, colour inspiration often starts in the studio. I actually find that the typical answer of pulling inspiration from nature and architecture is not where I usually begin. I like pairing colours together “in the lab” and seeing how they interact: what brings out a different side of a colour, what feels balanced, or what unexpected combination just works. I don’t always start with a particular image or place in mind. Often, the colourway takes shape through experimenting, and that’s one of my favourite parts of dyeing.

Curtis: My colour inspiration comes from Alyse, I defer to her! I get to choose about half of the colourway names, so I try to pour all my inspiration into the naming process.

Check out Wild Woollys Bulky here!

What’s important to you when choosing bases for your yarn? There’s so many options out there!

Curtis: The most important thing for us when choosing bases is quality: softness, consistency in the spin, durability, and how the yarn holds up in a finished piece. We sell directly to customers around the world, in addition to wholesaling to great retailers like Baaad Annas. At this scale, consistency and quality is crucial to building trust in our product.

Some of our yarn is milled in Canada, while other bases are spun in the UK and Peru. Everything is dyed by us here in Victoria. There is a bit of a gap in high-throughput milling capacity in Canada, and in North America more generally.

Alyse: For me, it’s also about what you’ll want to make with it. I look at stitch definition, drape, how it feels against your skin, and, of course, how it takes colour. We literally source dozens of samples from all around the world and discard many, many options before we choose what our base will be for a given weight. From time to time, we will also adjust our bases if we find something that is higher quality at a reasonable price. We want to give people good options, and choosing the yarn base is as much a part of developing our products as choosing the colours.

Do you have any favourite colourways? 

Alyse: Jungle Juice is one of my favourites! I also gravitate toward earthy fall tones. I love those warm, grounded colours, the kind that make you want to cast on a sweater as soon as the weather starts to turn. Pairing Fiddlehead Fern and Carnation Street is my favourite combination with Wild Woollys yarn at the moment.

Curtis: Undersea Garden and Cerulean Rhapsody are my favourites. I’m drawn to colours that remind me of tropical places I love, especially Costa Rica and Roatán, Honduras.

Check out Wild Woollys Fingering Here!

Who are your favourite dyers? How about pattern designers?

Alyse: Puzzle Tree Yarns in Vancouver makes really bright yarns in a variety of sizes and in kits. I really love what Becca has done and I think I have even seen on Ravelry where someone did a project with both Puzzle Tree and Wild Woollys, which made me smile!

I also want to give Andrea Rangel a shout-out! Her colourwork is so creative and she has done a great job writing and publishing books that feature a variety of colourwork motifs. It’s lovely having that kind of talent here in Victoria and seeing what she brings to the fibre community.

Curtis: We have a short video on social media showing a Spring Sorrel sweater by Wool & Pine in progress, knit in our Undersea Garden colourway.. Almost every day someone is commenting on it or asking us “What’s the pattern?”. So this is my favourite one simply because it has started literally hundreds of conversations with fibre artists over the last year.

What kind of impact are you hoping to have in our community? What’s next for Wild Woollys?

Alyse: We’ve got some exciting things coming for our product lines, and I’m really looking forward to this holiday season and our run of advent calendars. We’re also planning to do more with mohair. I love what it brings to a yarn – the softness, the texture, and the way it takes colour.

We’re also seeing more interest in non-superwash wool, something that is not part of our product line but continues to interest us. People are getting curious about wool in its more natural form and more willing to accept the care and washing trade-offs. I’m looking forward to building on that interest and giving people more options to work with.

Curtis: The bigger picture for me continues to come into focus as we bring wonderful yarn to Canadians and export our yarn to customers around the world. We need to build more resilience into how we (in Western Canada) make sustainable textiles and support the fibre arts. Tariffs and trade wars are another reason to look closely at what we can do here. I’d like to see even more production in Western Canada. We have wool here. I want us to be able to do more with it, closer to where it’s grown.

We’re so excited to be carrying Wild Woollys! Check them out online or in store!