Rubies & Emeralds & Onyx Fiber Arts.
Let me start this treat of an interview by saying that Adria of Onyx Fiber Arts is kind of a Super Girl. I reached out to her in early June to see if I could get her and her yarn on the blog. At the time, she was moving her website from Etsy to Shopify and holding a sale I couldn’t miss. Turns out that not only was she moving shop, holding a sale, and answering queries, but she was also getting married! All this, all at once, friends. (And that doesn’t even mention the ongoing new studio project…) It makes me all the more honored that she took time to email back and forth with me while she had so much going on.
Adria is as classy as can be and so is the yarn coming out of Onyx Fiber Arts. She isn’t shy about her love of jewel tones; her preference for colors like garnet, sapphire, and topaz turn a stroll through her online shop or Instagram grid into an experience like walking through the gem and mineral exhibit at the science museum. It’s seductive.
Adria lives and dyes (I love saying that, every single time) in South Jersey, where she finds all sorts of inspiration. She clearly puts a lot of hard work into making Onyx happen. (Hopefully the new studio that’s in the works will help make life a little easier.)
“We have the beach, the Pine Barrens, farmland...there’s so much to draw from for color inspiration. My personal style is very all over the place, and that reflects in my dyeing...
Some days are busy for me, filled with long, hot, 10 hour dye sessions. Some days are less heavy and filled with administrative work, accounting, labeling. It really depends. The new studio will be done so soon! I’m waiting for a major piece of equipment to get delivered, and we’ll be done. I’m so excited to have a dedicated space to work!”
Her signature color scheme has surrounded her all her life, she says. Adria’s childhood home “had a lot of jewel toned furniture with contrasting white walls. There was a garnet colored sofa and lots of emerald green.” And you can bet that the home she shares with her new husband, Andrew, will be similar, once they’re fully settled in!
“Right now there’s a lapis colored sectional. We haven’t been in our new home long and we’re still figuring out color schemes. But believe me... there will be a lot of jewel tones when we’re done! ”
Like many dyers I’ve spoken to, Adria’s attention to color in her life became more insistent after she took up dyeing. It’s like if you buy a certain car, you start seeing that kind of car everywhere, right? The things we see in the world change based on our experiences. Once dyers get going in their craft, they tend to start relating to the colors of everything around them in a more nuanced way.
“I’m even more obsessed with [color] now! I pay more attention to the colors of everything to find inspiration. My home, the gardens in my neighborhood, signs.”
The richness and saturation of jewel tones have always been appealing to me. I move towards a jewel tone before anything else (but also black...I love black, too).
—Adria
When choosing a yarn for a blog feature, sometimes I select one that I feel is particularly representative of the dyer’s style. This one was an easy choice. I wasn’t picking a favorite, exactly, but in this case, I was looking for a colorway that spoke the richness of gems and minerals… and I got one that just had them all: Burst, in a sock set paired with a beautiful teal, Thalisa.
So, maybe I did get my favorite. But we’ll pretend I was being completely logical.
Burst is one of the most eye-catching colorways I’ve ever seen. Ever. When the package arrived, I literally gasped. My son, with all the sweetness only a ten-year-old boy can project, quite sincerely said, “woah…beautiful yarn!” And he came to stand with me while we turned the skein around together, looking at all the colors, examining the details like a jeweler appraising a ring.
This colorway is a perfect match for vanilla socks. Plain stockinette stitch allows the colors to play without inhibition, and the frequency of color changes is just right for perfect variegation without pooling. It was as if Adria had thought all this through on purpose! (Oh wait, she probably did. And she told me she particularly loves seeing her yarns knit up into socks!)
I wanted to create something busy, but beautiful, using the colors of the rainbow.
—Adria
And the accent mini skein, Thalisa, where do I begin? I brought the work-in-progress socks along on a family visit. My sister-in-law loves teal, and she and I agreed that Thalisa is THE most perfect shade of deep, rich teal. We swooned over it for a good long while. (I got just a little worried that it might disappear…) As it turns out, teal is actually Adria’s favorite color, too, and she worked hard in the early days of Onyx Fiber Arts to get this one just right.
“Thalisa is one of the very first colors I mixed when I started dyeing yarn. So, it was created before Burst, but Burst made it to the regular lineup first. It’s only been available through kits, but it’s finally making its debut on its own.”
Burst + Thalisa isn’t a random sock set pairing—Thalisa is actually one of the base colors in Burst, so it makes for a perfect compliment. The process of dyeing Burst sounds complex, and the work that goes into this colorway is evident in the beautiful way it knits up.
“Burst is a labor of love! I add the colors in 3 ‘layers’. The first pass is getting the rainbow colors down and adding a couple of large sections of Thalisa, the second is checking for white spots and adding colors to those areas that differ from the surrounding colors, and the third is topping off some areas with complementing colors, letting them blend and make something up on their own.”
It’s a lot of hard work making all these amazing colors, and Adria doesn’t stop there! She is currently working on swatching all her main colorways, both knitted and crocheted.
“Besides wanting to see for myself how they looked worked up, I hoped it would be helpful to potential customers. It’s not practical for me to work a full on project in every colorway at the moment, so swatches were the most reasonable thing to do. I definitely plan to make swatches for every color in my main lineup. ”
I will attest to this being helpful, Adria! It can be difficult to envision how a colorway will look all stitched up, and the swatches, to my mind, make it easier to buy with confidence—especially when it’s being purchased online. I love how this shows Adria’s commitment to her product.
In the fiber community, “I’ve been able to find people on Instagram, BIPOC people, who share the same passion I have for fiber arts. It’s been hard to find that in my own little corner of the world. So, to see people who look like me, work so hard and are incredibly talented has been an inspiration. It keeps me going. I definitely don't feel alone in my pursuit of this craft.”
—Adria
And she’s not the only one committed to Onyx! Andrew has been involved behind the scenes, handling the plumbing and electrical for the new studio, helping with post office runs, and providing moral support in an endeavor that can be grueling and isolated. I always ask how a dyer knows she got a color “just right.” Funny thing is…I keep hearing the same answer: “I don’t know!” And very often, the dyer’s partner ends up being a sounding board:
“I never really know. I was about to scrap my dusty pink colorway, Sofia, because I thought it was soft and didn’t fit with the rest of the lineup. My husband convinced me to give it a chance, and it’s a top seller. I do love it.”
Let’s hear it for the partners. I’ve noticed a theme arise in my interviews: the dyer says, “I doubted myself” and her partner says, “I believe in you,” and then the thing she doubted turned out to be a hit. I love the story in all its iterations.
And, if it’s not obvious, I think Adria got this one JUST RIGHT.