Who are we?

You may already know us as Alpenglow Yarn, a small hand-dyed yarn company specializing in yarn bases completely made in the USA, dyed in brilliant saturated colors with natural dyes.  The dyer and founder, Carrie Sundra, also has over 12 years experience designing and building custom electronics, using entirely USA manufacturing.  We're thrilled to be able to combine electronics and yarn, to create useful technical tools that make hand-dyeing yarn more efficient.

The SkeinMinder Story

Winding was probably Carrie's least favorite task.  While preparing for Stitches West in 2014, she was really resenting being chained to her winder.  She has one with a rotation counter, but still had to watch the count and stop it manually when it reached the proper number of rotations.  More often that not, her mind would wander, and she'd come back to reality only to find that she had wound many times past her target.  She'd then have to un-wind the skein, and do it without creating tangley yarn spaghetti in the process.  She thought, "There HAS to be a better way.  Big industrial winders at textile mills have nice programmable controllers, why don't I just build one that works with a table-top winder?  Maybe if I do that, my brain won't feel like jello because I can do other things while I wind."  With inspiration born of desperation and fingers itching to solder and write embedded code, she started to develop the SkeinMinder. 
Carrie approached the SkeinMinder's development with professionalism born of 12+ years experience with electronics design and production.  She built a working prototype in May of 2014, which she immediately gave to her friend, Sincere Sheep, to use.  This early feedback helped guide the design tremendously, but experience taught her to build one small run "like you mean it" to iron out the last few wrinkles.   She designed a production model over the summer of 2014, and built a small run of 10 units in early fall.  
The beta units were sold to a select group of dyers, who have been using them quite happily for the past several months.  Read what our beta customers have to say about the SkeinMinder.
Carrie launched a Kickstarter campaign to gather enough orders to build 100 SkeinMinders, and with the help of almost 400 wonderful backers, it successfully funded in April 2015.  Production ramped up during the summer, and the SkeinMinders were delivered in August and September.  Now production is continuing on a steady small-batch basis of roughly 25 per quarter.  

Carrie is thrilled to be able to help small and medium-sized dyers by bringing them industrial-level automation.  Efficiency can make or break a business - don't waste your time watching a rotation counter, get a SkeinMinder!