Irving Park studio gets visitors to 'slow down' by spinning wool into yarn

Since opening in November, a 600-square-foot space in Irving Park has been home to people looking to slow down thanks to wooden tools used to spin raw wool into yarn.

Inclement Craft, 3436 W. Irving Park Road, is a fine fiber retailer and studio space that has created its own community for people, from experienced spinners and fiber artists to those curious about working with yarn. The studio frequently hosts classes such as Handspinning 101 and events like indigo dye parties.

The fiber arts have gained more popularity, particularly after the pandemic, as the trend of an analog life — less phones and more human experiences — gains traction this year.

For those looking to unplug, spinning and the fiber arts are a welcoming hobby, Inclement Craft owners Aaron Storm and Nathaniel Millard said.

“There’s not a numerical element. You’re not counting," Storm said. "It gets to be a little more mindful."

Most yarn studios and shops in the Chicago area are focused on knitting and crocheting. But at Inclement Craft, the emphasis is on spinning and hand-dyeing high-quality wool and mulberry silk.

Spinning is the process of turning loose fiber — like raw wool — into yarn by drafting it out and twisting with a wheel or hand-held spindle. Unlike knitting or crocheting, which uses finished yarn, spinning starts closer to the source. “[It's] the difference between getting your tomato at the grocery store or going to a farmer’s market,” Storm said.

While not as popular as knitting, spinning doesn’t require much talent or skill.

“It [doesn’t] take a huge amount of time to learn,” Storm said. “I think it’s kind of a radical thing to intentionally move so slowly … to be producing cloth and yarn and clothing at the scale of the hand.”

The founders originally sold finished products on Instagram, where it has more than 14,000 followers, but the operation expanded into a brick-and-mortar store at the end of last year. Millard said the platform is “inextricably linked” to their success.

“I knew going into this that social media was going to be kind of a necessary evil,” Millard said. “But it's truly been like everything social media was promised to be like.”

“There's a ton of irony and tension there because I am out here advocating for and teaching these sort of hyper-analog processes; these pre-industrial processes. And in order to drive interest, I'm on social media more than ever,” Storm said. “The boom [of] knitting and crocheting is feeding into a second wave of spinning because people are getting their hands on these materials, learning more about them and then wanting to go a little deeper and take a little bit more control over their own process.”

Storm, 30, and Millard, 29, started the business after working years in corporate jobs. Storm grew up in rural Indiana, where he got to see wool plucked from sheep then spun into yarn.

“I remember wanting a place like this,” Storm said of Inclement Craft. “[Life is] rough out there. Knitting took off in the U.S. after 9/11, and that's when it became the cultural thing it is now. There's the urge to hold something soft; there's the urge to move more slowly; and there's the urge to do something that involves other people.”

The return to analog trend has played a part in the early success of the studio, they said. And a focus on mental health and self-care activities has also helped.

“It's very of-the-moment,” Storm said. “I think people tend to be tuned into that, where they come in and expressly are like, ‘I saw you on Instagram, and I'm so excited to be in here and put my phone down.’ I had a student last night for an indigo resist dyeing class … and we were joking, ‘This is the most mentally healthy thing we'll do all week.’”

Spinning also brings people to a more “farm-to-yarn” way of consuming, Storm said.

“Yarn is an agricultural product,” he said.

Sold out

To open the store, the duo spent around $7,000 — most of their materials were already on hand. So far, they’ve opened the store debt-free. Revenue from their classes have been able to cover rent.

Visitors can buy yarn, products that were made in-house and batts, or the carded fiber used for spinning. Batts are priced on a sliding scale, starting at $20.

“We want people to be able to access that really high-value, really high-quality product,” Storm said. “We want people to be able to get their hands on it and learn how much they love it without that barrier to access.”

Revenue is split with 65% from retail sales and 35% from classes, Storm said.

Handspinning 101 is Inclement’s best-selling class, with tickets costing between $70 and $145. About 100 people have learned to make yarn on a drop spindle, since the space opened.

“You get to microdose personal growth. … You get to go through the steps of failing at something you want to be doing, and then there is that payoff,” Storm said.

Many participants are beginners, but Storm and Millard have been pleasantly surprised at the number of experts that show up to events.

In December, the founders started planning to bring in a factory-scale fiber mill, which they said would be Chicago's first in a century. They started a Kickstarter that month, with a goal of raising $95,000 for the down payment on the equipment. Inclement said the fiber mill would allow it to produce “gorgeous high quality blanks for folks who dye finished yarn,” stock its retail section and wholesale its goods to other businesses, according to the campaign.

“We went into the Kickstarter expecting a lot of momentum from business-to-business interactions … and it was totally the opposite. There was a lot of grassroots traction with end consumers who just wanted to purchase the product,” Storm said.

The campaign missed its goal, but raised over $20,000, which Storm said was a “very encouraging temperature check.” If a campaign doesn't meet its goal within the maximum time of 60 days, Kickstarter returns donors' money.

Plans for the mill are still in play, and they're gearing up “for a very exciting spring,” Storm said. Opening their own mill would allow them to be involved in every stage of yarn production.

“We get a lot of convenience [in today’s world],” Millard said. “But we don’t have as many excuses to do something tedious and frustrating with people you like.”