Welcome to EcoCrafter.  My name is Jean Miller, and I am an aspiring knitting designer with a strong desire to use as much natural fiber as possible .  You may ask yourself, “Aren’t animal and plant fibers as natural as you can get?”  Not exactly.  When I started looking into it, I learned that wool goes through a lot of manufacturing steps to become yarn.  Cotton is very hard to grow without a lot of chemical fertilizers.  My favorite yarn is made in China and who knows where the raw materials come from.  In the process of trying out more “natural” yarns, I thought it might be a good idea to share with others in a blog.

I have also been dabbling in design and pattern writing. The engineer in me likes the process of design, getting a product to market, and all the steps in between. I have a portfolio of ideas scratched out in a notebook, but lack the funds to pay for all the yarn. I write patterns for the simple knits I design (hats, scarves), and like many knitters, I like to modify patterns to my own liking.  I have yet to put this all together into designing and completing my first sweater.   Maybe my blog will also track the progress of designing my first sweater.

I can be found on Flickr and Ravelry under the username ecocrafter.