Wednesday, Dec. 26, 2007
by Melissa A. Chadwick | Staff Writer
Go ahead, toss that well-worn cashmere or wool sweater into the wash. Make sure the water is hot. Once they’re good and clean, toss them in the dryer with a couple tennis balls, too.
So says North Potomac mom Betz White, 42, who has been crafting cozy creations by ‘‘felting” cashmere and wool sweaters, scarves and other items for more than 10 years.
Among her most popular items are pincushions.
Her creativity has landed her two book deals. ‘‘Warm Fuzzies” was published by North Light Books this month, and a second book, ‘‘Sew Green,” about environmentally-friendly crafting, is due to be published by Stewart, Tabori & Chang in spring 2009.
She appeared on ‘‘The Martha Stewart Show” in February and taught the domestic diva how to create a ‘‘Cup O’ Joe” pincushion, shaped like a cup of coffee complete with a dollop of whipped cream, out of discarded fabrics. She sells the books and a kit for the ‘‘Cup O’ Joe” from her Web site, www.betzwhite.com.
White, who moved to North Potomac with her husband David and two sons, Sean, 5, and Conner, 8, from Wisconsin in August, spends a few hours every day with the soft fabrics.
White has always had a pension for working with fabric. She majored in fashion design at the University of Cincinnati, where she experimented with knitting on a knitting machine and started to sell rugs and pillows in galleries.
She spent 17 years designing children’s clothes for Carter’s and Land’s End.
In 2005, White left the fashion world to spend more time with her sons. Late that year she signed up for an art fair in Minneapolis and made rugs and pillows.
On a whim, she whipped up a cupcake pincushion, using the cuffs of old sweaters.
‘‘There was kind of a cupcake-thing going on anyway,” White said, sitting in her in-home studio recently. ‘‘It was crazy.”
The cupcake pincushions, with colorful pins as sprinkles, have become her biggest seller.
‘‘I think it’s just the color,” she said of the cupcakes. ‘‘It’s been good and it’s opened a lot of opportunities.”
She scours thrift stores for sweaters. Each sweater can produce three to four cupcakes. Once the fabric is felted, which White describes on her Web site as ‘‘shrinking a knitted fabric to become soft and dense,” it can be ‘‘cut, sewn, steamed and shaped into a variety of forms.”
In addition to the cupcakes, ‘‘Warm Fuzzies” includes step-by-step instructions for children’s clothing, mittens, bags, dog sweaters and blankets.
She has bins of washed, cut and prepped wool and cashmere in the closet in her studio. White has become more environmentally conscious since leaving fashion.
‘‘Just going into the thrift store and thinking that this is all waste,” White said. ‘‘Now I’m glad I’m not in the fashion industry because of the waste.”
snuggle up
For more information about Betz White and her crafts, visit www.betzwhite.com⁄index.html
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