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Title
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Newspaper Clipping: Dianne Lutz, January 29, 2009
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Accession Number
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2026.38.1.26
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Accession Date
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16 June 2026
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Accession Creator
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Meadow Knapp
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Description
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The Greer Citizen newspaper clipping of an interview with Dianne Lutz of Yarns Forever
Two photographs: yarn in store, Dianne Lutz
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Contributor
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Krista Gibson [writer]
Mandy Ferguson [photographer]
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Date
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January 29, 2009
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Storage Location
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Box 33, Folder #2
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Text
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The Greer Citizen
THURSDAY, JANUARY 29, 2009 LIVING HERE THE GREER CITIZEN A9
Home-spun creativity
Lutz runs successful yarn business
BY KRISTA GIBSON
STAFF REPORTER
Nestled in an opening at the end of a long and winding road in northern Greer is a house where creative and colorful dyes are fused with handspun yarn. The relatively normal appearance of the house belies the beauty of what lies inside the garage and basement.
Dianne Lutz spends her week-days spinning and dying yarn and her weekends traveling the U.S. presenting it to a worldwide audi-ence.
In two weeks, Lutz will pack up her truck and trailer and head to Pittsburgh, Pa., to attend the Pitts-burgh Knit and Crochet Festival.
This is her second show this year and is one of 17 she will travel to this year in 11 states. Since closing Yarns Forever in downtown Greer a year-and-a-half-ago, the shows are her main marketplace.
Sitting in Lutz' living room are kits that she puts together with yarn, pattern, information and a coupon for her Web site, www.creativelydyed.com.
"When I do shows, I do two to three thousand kits up to fifteen thousand," Lutz said.
She fills rolling racks that her husband has made with the kits and keeps plenty of reserves in the trailer when she travels to the shows.
"When you have that amount of people coming, you can't just go with your racks preloaded, you have to have replenishments," Lutz said.
Lutz buys two to three thou-sand pounds of yarn and uses her industrial-sized skein to make her own skeins of yarn. She finds that her skeins have up to 520 yards of yarn on them whereas commercial skeins are usually only 100 yards or less.
'I don't stay with the norm.'
"I have my skeiner and put on what I want," she said. "That helps the customer not have to buy a whole bunch. It comes in white and I apply my own dye."
The unique combinations Lutz uses to dye her wool are her trademarks. She has exclusive blends made for her that use not only wool but also silk, seaweed and milk protein. "My best selling one is seaweed from the ocean and wool," she said. "I can't keep that one in stock no matter how much I buy."
The materials are unique, but her dying technique is like no other.
"I don't stay with the norm," Lutz said. "A lot of people just dye wool and cotton. I tend to go and do just anything that's different. I make up my own techniques. I don't have my yarns looking like everyone else's."
In her basement, Lutz has one room for her skein machine and in another she creates the colorful schemes that make up her beauti-ful yarn.
On a cool day earlier this month, Lutz had balls of plastic-wrapped silk sitting on a table outside her basement. They were still warm to the touch having recently been dyed.
"You have to steam it to allow the dyes to set," she said. "You have to put it in the heat. Manmade cotton or rayon will set in cold, but wool and silk need heat to make sure it doesn't come off on your hands."
'I don’t have my yarns look-ing like everyone else.'
She uses hundred quart pots over heat to dye as many as 50 skeins at a time. Her husband Jerry, "super-man" to readers of her online blog, has added a fireplace, a gas line and big tanks to the basement to allow her the means to do this. He also made PVC racks to allow her yarn to spread out to dry.
It also helps that Lutz is from Greer. The weather doesn't keep her from doing her job.
She and her husband and daugh-ter have lived in the Greer and Lyman area for 13 years.
"It's a great place to dye yarn," she said. "My friends up in Michigan can't get their yarn to dry in the winter."
Due to the unique way she dyes her yarn, she cautions her custom-ers with a disclaimer on her Web site that each skein is hand painted individually, so skeins may not al-ways match, even within the same dye session.
She uses 15 to 20 colors when she dyes.
"When they look at it online, they know it's me dying this, because they know I do some crazy things to get what I want. But it works well. People like it being different."
Proof of that are the e-mails and photos she receives from her customers on Web sites like www.ravelry.com and www.flikr.com.
One lady wrote that when she knitted her socks one was com-pletely different than the other one from the same skein of yarn. The lady's friend immediately wanted the same kit so that she could also knit the socks.
"They don't care that it doesn't
'tend to go and do just anything that's different. I make up my own tech-niques.'
Dianne Lutz ARTIST'S TOUCH: Dianne Lutz applies custom mixed colors to a skein or yarn in her basement studio.
Owner of Creatively Dyed
Look alike," Lutz said. "So many people are already out there doing what looks alike, why buy the same thing?"
Lutz loves that she can see her yarn on her customers through the Web sites. The Ravelry site, an online knitting community with over 275,000 users, has asked Lutz to create clubs for them. The clubs range from a Sock Club to a Spin-ning Club.
For a former computer program-mer. Lutz made the transition into the creative world rather seam-lessly.
"When I first started dying, my work looked just as structured as a computer programmer," Lutz said. "But people bought it anyway, especially my friends."
She had hoped at one time to combine her computer program-ming with her yarn shop and her travel to shows. When the time traveling to shows took over, she gave herself over to the creative process completely.
"I go to museums, aquariums, anything that has a lot of color," she said. "I am from Trinidad and Tobago, so I take a lot of my stuff from the carnival that we have there."
The names of her products defi-nitely carry island themes: Calypso, beaches, Noni and Jute.
"It's just a palette. I start with one color and figure out the next color from there."
Her neighbors, some of whom knit, always want to come over and "play" at her house. The problem is, Litz is rarely home.
After the Pittsburgh show Feb. 14-15, Lutz will load her truck and trailer and travel to Santa Clara, Calif., in late February. She will show her unique yarn every month a shows through October.
Hopefully, a greater visibility throughout the nation will eventu-ally help her sell in her home state.
"I think I've sold one thing in South Carolina. A lot of my busi-ness is from overseas."
Though she travels in her truck and throughout the world through online communities, Lutz plans to stay in Greer. She loves that she can take her daughter Diana back and forth to school and be there for her during the week.
"That's why I love what I do."
Creatively Dyed
Find her online at www.creativelydyed.com