“I’ve spent a lot of the last 20 years not quite in the world,” Kirsten says. “I worked. I raised kids. I made things. But I was always the flexible one. The backup plan.”
She’s a fibre artist now. That means she works directly with fleece—spinning it herself, dyeing it, and making one-of-a-kind wearables and textile pieces. Her work is tactile, precise, and deeply rooted in process. She’s passionate about sourcing sustainably, and also takes custom yarn requests.
None of this is new. She ran a small handcraft business for years—selling at markets, stocking yarn shops. After her family moved from Canada to Sweden with two small children, her work shifted again — reshaping itself around what the moment asked for.
Just before they left Canada, she got an unusual offer. A television production required someone to teach an actor how to use a spinning wheel convincingly for a scene. Not pretend—actually spin. The kind of request that requires genuine fluency and muscle memory. They found her because of her popularity in the yarn community. She turned it down.
“I had a one-year-old and a four-year-old,” she says. “It would’ve meant scrambling childcare for a few long days. I told myself it wasn’t worth the hassle. And maybe it wasn’t. But I also think I just didn’t want it enough to solve the problem.”
She doesn’t frame it as a missed opportunity. Just a choice that made sense then.
Throughout her life, she’s toggled between making and editing, untangling academic texts when she wanted something structured. “Editing satisfies my brain in a way that art doesn’t,” she says. “But art pulls me back in.”
Now, with more space in her life, she’s shifting her focus again — saying yes to the kinds of things she used to defer. Not out of urgency, but because she can. Because she wants to.
“The world will absolutely let you define yourself by how much you give to others,” she says. “And that’s not a bad thing. But I want to look back and know I was brave in how I chose. Not loud—just brave.”
It’s not framed as a reinvention. There’s no pivot or new identity to promote. Just a deepening of the same instincts she’s always trusted — the kind that ask what’s worth the effort, and what can be left alone.
“I’m asking myself now: what do I actually want to do enough to bother with the boring parts?”
If you meet her at a market, she might be spinning yarn behind the table, or stitching something small. She won’t pitch you. She won’t say her work is ethical or intentional. But it is, you can feel it.
This spring, Kirsten began experimenting with natural dyeing in Sweden — sourcing dandelions and local plants to tint her handspun yarn and wool textiles. You’ll find a few of her naturally dyed pieces in the Craftly shop, alongside other sustainable, small-batch makers.