Our Mission

Why a fiber shop in Spokane cares about sheep, farmers, rescue dogs, and a woodshop in the basement.

Most yarn shops sell yarn. We have never been able to leave it at that.

Fiber does not start on a shelf. It starts on an animal, on a farm, in the hands of somebody who got up at five in the morning to check on a ewe. It passes through a shearer, a mill, a dyer, a shop, and finally a spinner or a knitter or a weaver who turns it into a thing that will outlast all of us. Every one of those steps is somebody's livelihood, and every one of them is fragile.

We have been at this since 1997. In that time we have watched mills close, farms sell off flocks, and craft skills come within one generation of being lost. So our mission is not a slogan about quality yarn. It is a commitment to keep the whole chain working, and to put our money, our building, and our labor behind each piece of it.

Here is what that means in practice.

One

We Serve Fiber Artists, Not Just Customers

The fiber arts survive by being taught. Nobody is born knowing how to draft a single, dress a loom, or fix a wheel that has started clunking. Somebody shows you, and then one day you show somebody else.

That is why we run classes every month for beginners through advanced makers, host knit night, and keep people on the floor who actually spin, knit, weave, and felt. It is why the chat bubble on this site is answered by a human who can talk you through a problem instead of quoting a return policy at you. It is why we carry the largest in-stock selection of fiber arts equipment on the West Coast, including the odd, unglamorous parts that keep older tools running.

It is also why we keep a large meeting space in this building and hand the keys to the fiber community. Guilds, spinning groups, knitting circles, weaving study groups, and clubs of every description meet here. We are not renting out a banquet hall. We are keeping a room warm for people who need somewhere to gather and work, because a craft with nowhere to meet is a craft that quietly disappears.

That work is not only local. Our resource guides, wheel comparisons, ratio charts, and how-tos are read by spinners and weavers all over the country who will never set foot in Spokane, and our Fiber of the Month Club puts new fiber and patterns into the hands of makers nationwide every month. If we can move somebody one step further into this craft, it does not much matter to us whether they do it in our classroom or in their living room two thousand miles away.

We would rather sell you the right thing once and see you again in ten years than sell you the wrong thing today.

Two

We Support the Animals at the Start of It All

Wool, mohair, alpaca, cashmere, angora: every fiber we love grew on something with a heartbeat. We have never been able to forget that, and we would not want to.

Closest to home, that means Freddie B's Furry Friends Rescue out of Elk, Washington. Their motto is "Whenever, Wherever, However," and they mean it. Freddie takes the cases most people give up on: elusive strays nobody can catch, and dogs so fearful or behaviorally damaged that other rescues pass on them. He is a certified positive reinforcement trainer, and he does the slow, patient, unglamorous work of turning a dog nobody could get near into a dog somebody can take home.

Freddie B. This is the part of the job that does not fit into a mission statement.

Travis and Sara have fostered through Freddie. And last October we turned the shop into a Halloween portrait studio for pets, tiny dogs in spider costumes and all, and gave ten percent of that day's store sales to the rescue. We are doing it again this year.

Halloween pet portraits at the shop, October 2025. Some of our customers commit harder than others. (Photo: Freddie B Photography)

If you ever want to know what our values look like when they leave the page and hit the floor, that is it: a guy with an enormous heart doing hard work, and a yarn store handing over a slice of the register to help him pay for it.

Further upstream, we are ongoing donors to Heifer International. Not a one-time check when we have a good quarter, but consistently, as a standing part of how this business operates. Heifer is the clearest example of what we believe in: give a family a goat, a sheep, or an alpaca, teach them husbandry, and you have not handed out charity. You have handed them fiber, milk, offspring, and an income that compounds for generations. That is the same chain we live in, just a few thousand miles upstream.

Every good thing in this shop started out growing on an animal. We would like those animals to be better off for it.

Husbandry matters in what we buy, too: healthy flocks, humane handling, and shearers who know what they are doing. Good fiber and well kept animals are the same conversation.

Three

We Back Local Farms and Local Fleece

Paradise Fibers started as a mail order business run off the family farm. We have not forgotten it.

Small farms across the Inland Northwest raise beautiful fiber and then hit the same wall every year: there is nowhere to take it. The clip comes off in spring, the mills are booked out, the shows are far away, and a lot of gorgeous fleece ends up sitting in a barn or getting composted. That is a waste of an animal's entire year.

We work to be the place that wall does not exist. We buy local when we can, we point spinners toward regional farms, and we act as a hub for area fleece so a shepherd with twenty sheep has somewhere real to send a clip and somebody to talk to about it. When a customer walks in asking for local wool, we want an answer with a farm name attached to it.

Four

We Build the Tools Ourselves

There are not many fiber arts shops in the world with a working woodshop in the building. We have one, down in the basement, and Chad Repp runs it.

Chad came up through Berea College with a degree in Technology and Applied Design, where he won a technology award for designing a sound-dampening loom. So he was solving fiber arts problems before he ever met us. Since then he has built high-end custom work as a fabricator, run the wood and metal shops at Parsons School of Design in Manhattan, and taught a lot of people how to use a shop without losing a finger.

Spinning wheels, swifts, combs, hackles: they get designed and built here at 225 W. Indiana rather than sourced from a catalog and rebadged. Several of those designs, the REVOLUTION spinning wheel among them, are Bill Romine's. When a tool does not exist, or exists but is badly made, we would rather build it than complain about it.

A gouge shaping a maple spindle on the lathe downstairs. Wheel parts, swifts, combs, and hackles all start here.

The other half of that shop is repair. We service and restore spinning wheels, including old ones other people have written off, because a wheel that gets fixed is a wheel that stays in the craft instead of ending up in a landfill or hung on a wall as decoration. Tools should outlive the person who bought them.

See our spinning wheel repair and restoration services

What We Hold Ourselves To

In February 2024, a fire on our loading dock cost us our entire inventory and closed the store for six months. What brought us back was not a business plan. It was the fiber community, the farms, the makers, and the customers who marked our reopening date on their calendars and showed up.

That is the whole argument for this mission, honestly. Take care of every link in the chain, and when your own link breaks, the chain holds you up.

Come see it. We are at 225 W. Indiana Avenue in Spokane, Washington, open Monday through Saturday, 10am to 5pm. Ask for a tour and we will show you the woodshop, the classroom, and the old bakery oven still standing in the middle of it all.