Tucked into Pike Place Market and Pioneer Square, Yarn Dragon is a Seattle institution built on hand-dyed luxury yarn, thoughtfully named colorways, and a community that welcomes everyone from first-time knitters to seasoned fiber enthusiasts. Jonathan, the shop’s founder and owner, started the business after leaving a corporate career behind, guided entirely by a love for the craft and the people who share it.
How did knitting find you, and how did it eventually become a career?
I started knitting in 2008. I had gotten sober relatively recently and was looking for something to do with my hands while I was sitting through all of these meetings. I started knitting and fell in love with the engineering, the history, and that fidget spinner aspect. It is so beautiful to see how a single strand of unbroken thread can be made to travel down a leg, open up and turn 90 degrees, then close around the instep of a foot. I dove deep and plugged into a community really quickly of knitters, especially male knitters, who led me along the path.
Eventually my misery in corporate America got so high and my obsession with knitting grew so large that I started asking how to turn yarn into a career. I asked people in the know. They said dying yarn was the way to go. I sold my first yarn to a yarn shop in January of 2014, and by June of 2014, I left my grown-up job. I’ve been supporting myself with yarn ever since.
What does your customer base look like, and what has the community reception been like?
The world of yarn is so incredibly welcoming and I have been really blessed. I’m conscious of the fact that I am a man who has entered into this world that is mostly women, and I am profoundly grateful that they have welcomed me with such open arms. About 95% of my customer base is female, and I’m very aware that I’ve been welcomed into a space that is sort of sacred for women. I really want to respect and honor that.
I’ve also been blown away at how easy it’s been to keep my social media community positive. Yarny people are just generally good people and with just a little bit of maintenance, my social media following has been just positive, happy, joyful people excited to participate in the world of yarn.
What is the story behind the name Yarn Dragon?
Yarn Dragon is actually a newer name for my business. I was MJ Yarns, Martha and Jonathan. Martha was my knitting bestie at the time. She was going to come on and work with me once I got bigger, but she went and had a kid. Over the years, Yarn Dragon started to assert its own personality as a business, and of course really it was my own personality asserting itself. I started realizing all of my color names lived in this sort of fantasy world, and Yarn Dragon became a much more reasonable reflection of who we were.
The reason I went with Yarn Dragon is that during the time when I was getting sober, a friend of mine knew I was getting into Buddhism and meditation and was also this nerdy dragon kid. He went to Asia and on his trip he got me this little charm. It probably cost him 15 cents, but when you looked through the hole in that charm, there was a picture of the Buddha meditating over a dragon. He gave that to me as a symbol of strength and community. That’s really what I want Yarn Dragon to be, a place of protection and safety for everybody who loves yarn.
What does spending at a small business actually mean to you?
When people spend money at Yarn Dragon, they are supporting not just me as a person who has gotten sober and found a way to make a living doing something that I love, but also my three employees who are local Seattle folk making their living with yarn. It’s a remarkable thing to be able to support true local people here in our community.
What kinds of products does Yarn Dragon carry, and what makes them special?
We create luxury fiber hand-dyed yarns and knitwear. The yarn has all been hand-dyed by us, and it’s blends of things like Peruvian Highland wool, Merino, alpaca and silk, Bactrian camel. We love the fine things in life and we love to make them spectacular with our colors. As a response to covid, we also started turning our yarn into clothing that people could actually wear, so now our audience is so much broader and people are able to purchase artisanal hand-dyed knitwear, something that’s truly special and unique.
My absolute favorite product we sell, we actually have custom spun for us in Peru. It’s this baby alpaca silk. It is super soft, super luxurious, and it is also my biggest money maker. It’s what everybody buys because it is compelling when you touch it. It is the definition of luxury and super fun to knit.
How do you come up with names for your colorways?
I typically design the colorways first and I’ll have a general concept behind the colors. Once I see the color palette in front of me, it evokes some sort of mood, or I’ll choose a general theme. It might be the main characters of Wheel of Time, where there are color conventions that make sense for certain characters. Or I might do something like my black light reactive yarns, which really reflect my experience going out to the gay clubs when I was younger. All of the solid colors are named after gayborhoods across the country, and all of the kettle dyes are named after the gay bars where I cut my teeth.
Who is Yarn Dragon for? Is it welcoming to people who have never picked up needles before?
If you’re coming to Yarn Dragon for the first time and you’re not a knitter, go to my store at Pike Place Market. We have gorgeous knitwear for you to wear, and you can even tell people you made it, and we won’t tell anyone.
And if you’re a knitter or a crocheter at any level, come in. Even if you don’t want our yarn, we want to teach you about yarn. We want you to enjoy this world with us and enjoy your journey learning about it. If you’re a super experienced knitter or crocheter, we have so many different types of yarns appropriate for different projects, whether it’s a summer top or warm winter socks.
Can you walk us through what goes into creating the yarn itself?
All of our yarn at Yarn Dragon is hand-dyed right in Pioneer Square. It’s a five-day process, start to finish, that I have carefully developed over more than a decade to produce really interesting, vibrant colors. I think I bring something unique with my color aesthetic to the yarn world. I’m often called moody or depthy with my colors, and I love that soft, gentle, earthy aesthetic. And of course I bring out my black light neon colors to keep it interesting.
Yarn Dragon, Seattle, Washington. Pike Place Market and Pioneer Square locations.
