About

I'm Charity, the owner and operator of Brine Dyeworks. I'm a mom of two, living with my family in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. I love to cook, bake, garden, hike, and read. I am an avid knitter and "yarnie" (like foodie but with yarn) with an affinity for rich, tonal colorways, low contrast variegation, and speckles, and I have a serious thing for mini skeins.

In July of 2019 I took a yarn painting class at my local yarn shop, where I created two skeins of "interesting" (read: kind of ugly) yarn. I came home from that class with ideas for yarn colors in my head and promptly fell down the rabbit hole. I watched all of the videos on YouTube that mentioned dyeing yarn. I checked out all of the yarn dyeing books from my local library, and I ordered myself some bare yarn, some acid dye samples, and a respirator. I had this idea that I would just create a few skeins... you know, for projects I had sitting in my Ravelry queue... Somehow "a few" multiplied, and after a short while I was sitting on a mountain of yarn, with the desire to keep dyeing and exploring this craft. Dyeing yarn feels like magic to me, and the challenge of bringing my ideas to life is absolutely exhilarating!

When it came time to choose a name for this venture, my mind immediately went to pickles. Before having a family, I cooked professionally for over a decade, and have made thousands of quarts of pickles in my life (cucumbers, carrots, beets, beans, asparagus, etc.). In general, a lot of the processes I use for dyeing yarn are reminiscent of pickle-making and brining (use of acid, heat, and salt). I guess you can take the girl out of the kitchen, but you can't take the kitchen out of the girl!