Meet Your Hosts: Alicia Coulombe

 

Crochet Designer Extraordinaire

Alicia began her yarn journey when she was just a kid, watching her mom crochet exquisite doilies with thread and a tiny hook.  Alicia had a bigger hook and some chunky yarn and, in retrospect she certainly made a mess of things, but at the time she thought she was doing an amazing job!

Fast forward to when she was a pre-teen.  Her best friend had one of those circular knitting machines and together they would make dresses for their Barbie dolls.  They thought they were high class, and rightly so.  Who else's Barbies were decked out in haute couture?

Now, really fast forward to married life.  One of Alicia's friends was crocheting a baby blanket for her future child.  Alicia thought that was a fabulous idea, and started crocheting baby blankets of her own.  This time she had learned how to properly create stitches and how to accurately count which, of course, made a HUGE difference.  After that, she occasionally crocheted afghans and hot pads and cute little toys.  This is about the time her husband, Ron, learned to crochet; amazing man that he is, he offered to help her finish the lapghans that, in a stroke of brilliance, decided everyone in their family needed that year.  After that, his interest in the fiber arts really took off and he learned to knit and began knitting everything under the sun.  He taught Alicia how to knit, and while she can do both crafts, she never excelled in knitting like he did.  She fell back to her first love: crochet, and began creating shawls and other garments.

Later, Ron got into yarn dyeing and started his own hand-dyed yarn business, Beach Bunny Yarns.  It was all his own thing for a bit, and then he recruited Alicia to do the, um...let's call it the "fun" stuff (aka skeining from cones, washing, twisting and tagging, website development and maintenance, formula sheets, storage, etc.)

In her spare time, Alicia would crochet up swatches of his colorways.  It was her tendency to play with different combinations of stitches and has designed a few motifs.  This eventually let to Alicia writing up some simple patterns, mainly for herself, using her own brand of shorthand that must have made gobs of sense at the time, (but later had no clue what it meant.)  When her local yarn store asked for a copy of one of her designs, Alicia had to redo her work because she couldn't for the life of her remember what her coded notes meant.  Since then she has learned to keep better notes.

Alicia loves translating textures she sees into crochet stitches.  They don't always work out the way she intended but sometimes she gets exactly what she envisioned.  Making knot after knot after knot is meditative to her and she will continue to play with thread and hook.  And maybe, just maybe, help to create a zen for other crocheters too.

Besides being the other half of the Beach Bunny team, Alicia is also our crochet designer for Stitch the Magic, and we can't wait to see what she has in store for us!

Keep your eyes on Beach Bunny Yarns Patterns site for more designs from this up-and-coming designer!