A story behind every skein...

I grew up in a small Pennsylvanian town with a needle in my hand. In my family, crafting and creating was just a way of life. After graduating college with a Bachelor of Science in Social Science, I decided to start traveling. I had always had a love of camping and backpacking so I tried to visit as many national forests as possible. During my travels, I had developed an acute appreciation for being self-sustainable and making things by hand. So when I found myself 43 states later in Arcata, California, I adopted Rarity, the rabbit I would eventually name my company after. Together we learned how to spin yarn, felt wool and to create beautiful things from scratch. 

Working with angorra gave me such peace. It is perhaps on of the most amazing fibers in the world, and the process of spinning made me feel close to my ancestors in a powerful and profound way. Creating a garment from scratch takes a tremendous amount of work, and doing so gives you a unique appriecation for the many unnamed hands in history whose work has kept us warm and clothed us through the centuries. For me, there was a certain "rightness" to spinning, and it was as if my hands had a muscle memory even though I'd never done anything like it before. I wanted to share that experience with others and that's where the idea of a company started to blossom. 

I wanted Rarity Fibers to provide people with the ability to become self-sustainable. I believe that instead of taking advantage of resources in a detrimental way, we can work in symbiosis with our environment and Angora gives us this ability. Too much of the cloth that we used is produced with synthetic chemicals in factories that poison our ecosystem.  Whereas angora is anatural material that is produced by animals that have a much smaller carbon footprint than sheep. My purpose in selling angora is not just to create a sustainable fiber source that can fit into our new urban landscapes, but I also to help individuals learn to spin and create their own apartment-sized fiber herd so that they can become more self-sufficient and less reliant on foreign factories and big box stores.