About Us
Welcome to KnitzAndPearls Fiberworks! KnitzAndPearls is owned by Meredith Muncy, neon dyeing expert from Madison Wisconsin, and is the product of making lemonade from life’s lemons that it always seems so quick to throw at us!
When Meredith was 17 years old and just starting to make plans to attend college to become a nurse, she woke up one day with a headache while recovering from the flu.
That headache was going to stick around for 4 long years. 24/7, her head would hurt. Sometimes a dull throb, most of the time a debilitating, crushing migraine.
If you’ve ever had a migraine, you know that attending college with one would be hard. Meredith was diagnosed with New Daily Peristent Headache, and when, unlike 84% of others with the condition, her headache didn’t go away by the 2 year mark, college plans were ditched.
That’s okay. Because she stayed in her hometown, she met Preston! Through his encouragement and support, and her own darned persistence, she determined to find something she could do with a headache that would provide an income.
Answer? Knitting!
Meredith had been knitting and crocheting since she was 12, and in recent years people had paid her to make baby gifts.
An Etsy shop was born in October 2016 under the name KnitzAndPearls Handmade Knitwear and Jewelry.
She made crappy jewelry, listed 4 earring sets that never sold, and took them down about a month later. The knitwear however, did.
In 2017, Preston proposed. Headaches and all, income or no, he was head over heels in love with Meredith, and she loved him right back!
A week later, Meredith received her first Botox treatment, which, after 4 long years of searching for anything to help, would begin clear up her perpetual headache in a matter of days.
Meredith still wanted to keep at the Etsy shop though. In 2018, she started sewing project bags for knitters, and rebranded as KnitzAndPearls Handmade Knitwear and Gifts.
She attended her first fiber festivals.
Enter Covid.
Enter deciding to buy a set of 3 primary color dyes from jacquard, and some bare yarn!
Long story short, the “yarn thing” was Meredith’s thing. It EXPLODED!! Her first eight skeins went to be sold on consignment at Blueberry Cottage Yarns and Wool in Plymouth Indiana.
In June of 2021, she debuted her yarn at Hoosier Hills Fiber Festival in Indiana, right after moving from Indiana to Madison Wisconsin. It was debuted under the name “Arlington Yarns” by KnitzAndPearls.
The next natural step was to start dyeing roving. Through the wisdom and support of Susan McFarland of Susan’s Fiber Shop, Meredith started dyeing and processing roving.
People LOVED it, and Madison was an amazing place for a budding fiber artist to grow. Meredith began to find her niche, neons, and began to develop her techniques for creating some of the easiest drafting roving in the industry.
In 2022, KnitzAndPearls would be rebranded a final time as KnitzAndPearls Fiberworks.
Meredith and Preston still live in Madison, and now have two children (2 under 2 at the time of writing this) Maureen and Oliver, who Meredith affectionately refers to as her “mini skeins”.
Dyeing is still in full swing, and she has embraced neon and blacklight reactive dyes as her area of expertise. It’s truly her passion! Bold colors just inspire happiness. We aspire to give our yarn and fiber a WOW factor, not only by color and “glow under UV lights”-ability, but in your experience working with it as well. We carefully select our yarn and fiber bases so that working with a KnitzAndPearls product is always a luxury.
Find us in person at trade shows across the East, Southern, and Midwest United States, and in select yarn stores across the country. Make wholesale inquiries at knitzandpearls@gmail.com.
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