When she was 9 years old, Dusty Mills discovered her grandmother’s crochet basket in the television room. Asking her grandmother to teach her to crochet, she agreed, Dusty said, because “that’s what grandmothers do.” Dusty remembers sitting side by side while her grandmother explained how to use a crochet needle to loop strands of yarn together.
“She gave me room to make mistakes and gave me the patience I needed,” Dusty said.
She wasn’t very good at it, Dusty said, but picked up crocheting again as an adult, along with a variety of other fiber arts. In 2023, she took her passion for fiber and started a home business, Muddy Crow, at her house south of Warsaw where she lives with family.
“It’s an online, small batch, indie-dyed yarn shop,” Dusty explained.
She chose the name because the crow has always been her favorite animal, she said. A living history historian she knows through Pioneer Heritage Days, Grizzly Adams, gave her the first part of the name when he asked her if she gets muddy when it rains, a play on her first name.
“It struck me as so hilarious that I laughed for weeks about it,” Dusty said. “I thought then that I was able to open a yarn shop, “Muddy Crow” sounded like the perfect name for it.”
Dusty, who was living in Arizona when she was 9, describes herself as a “MoZona Girl,” with dual hometowns of Warsaw and Phoenix. She graduated from Warsaw High School, where she met her husband in 6th period. They lived in Kansas City for 12 years, where she worked at a university.
In 2009, a colleague, Lynn Schuchman, taught her to knit during their lunch times. Also that year she started collecting spinning wheels and learned to spin the next year.
The Mills moved back to the Warsaw area 11 years ago, wanting a slower lifestyle that focuses on family. Dusty took a hiatus from fiber arts to care of her mother in the final years of her life. After her mother died in 2022, Dusty decided it was time to sort out her life goals.
“Giving more time to fiber arts was a no-brainer,” she said. “I knew that I needed something flexible during this life stage of full-time employment and parenthood.”
She also was looking ahead to retirement, she said, and wanted to build a business that will help sustain her and her husband.
Dusty went about starting a business methodically —she researched markets, made a list of materials she would need, set goals and plotted the steps that would enable her to reach them. She decided to focus on creating hand-dyed sock yarn, and also makes stitch markers and other small accessories for knitters.
She buys lots of undyed superwash sock yarn, which can be put through the washer and dryer, and uses a method called acid dying —animal fibers, like wool, require an acid mordant to set the color.
Dusty learned to weave on rigid heddles, she said, and recently bought a floor loom. She doesn’t normally give lessons, but as a favor to neighbors who are considering raising wool sheep, is giving them lessons in weaving.
After wool is cleaned and carded — basically “brushed” to line up the fibers in parallel strands — the fibers can be twisted (spun) into yarn or thread. Then it can be turned into a garment or blanket two ways— by knitting it, to create a sweater or sock that is stretchy, and by weaving, which creates a flat fabric. Woven fabric was originally draped around the body to provide warmth, like a cloak, or gathered and held with a belt, like a kilt, the excess fabric thrown over the shoulder. Kilts served as clothing during the day and a blanket to wrap up in at night.
Dusty also learned to use a drop spindle, a portable wooden hand tool used since ancient times to spin wool into yarn. Wanting to learn to improve her skill with it, Dusty took on a challenge to drop spindle wool into yarn for 100 days in a row for 15 minutes or more.
“I sometimes miss a day or so, and that’s okay,” she said. “It’s meant to bring you joy.”
So far, she has spun five grams of Alpaca roving, as carded wool is called, she said.
Sundials count only the sunny hours, but people who like to quilt, knit or crochet look forward to the gray days of winter, which are perfect for sitting inside and making something warm.
Dusty is a member of the Clinton, Mo., Fiber Arts group, which Melissa Batusic, director of Clinton Technical School, formed last November. Another member of the group has seized the day by starting a “Temperature Blanket,” in which a different color yarn, usually blue or purple for cold days and warmer colors, orange or yellow, for warm days, is chosen to crochet a row of the blanket depending on the high temperature of the day. By the end of the year, the fiber artist has a unique creation that is a record of the year’s weather.
For more information about Muddy Crow, go to the Muddy Crow Facebook.
Clinton, Mo., Fiber Arts meets at the Clinton Technical School. For information about the next meeting, go to the group’s facebook.
