Queen City Yarn

We are two friends, Janis and Christen, brought together in the Queen City of Charlotte by our love for knitting and yarn. Casual wine and dye nights together nurtured our passion for putting color to skein. Now we want to share that passion with you!

Our products start with one of nine great yarn bases, each named for a neighborhood in the Queen City that reflects their personality. Eight of these bases are commercially spun superwash yarns.

Our non-superwash base, Berryhill, is Queen City Yarn’s first locally sourced, small- batch, mill-spun yarn. We worked with Echoview Fiber Mill, located just outside Asheville, NC, to create this beautiful fingering-weight merino and alpaca blend yarn. Berryhill is well suited for color work and has a gorgeous hand and drape. You can be confident you’ll have a soft and cozy finished object, no matter which you choose.

The colors we apply are inspired by the beautiful things we see around us, breathtaking places we have visited, as well as Christen’s two young children. While each color we produce can stand on its own, one of the guiding principles of color development at Queen City Yarn is designing coordinating colorways as well as colors that beautifully contrast one another. We want to make choosing colors for projects easy, whether it be for a gorgeous fade or perfect color pop.

Janis Ficker

After spending Undergrad and Grad School at the Savannah College of Art and Design, Janis found her job wasn’t as creative as she thought it would be. After a few failed attempts to find a creative outlet, knitting became her drug of choice. In 2008 she left her “real job” and started working with a network marketing company. This allowed her a lot of free time which she naturally filled with knitting, then a podcast - the Carolina Fiber Girls, a bit of designing, teaching knitting classes, and most recently co-owning Queen City Yarn. When she’s not busy working, she is typically traveling or at a local brewery enjoying a beer with friends. Janis lives in Charlotte, with her husband Brian and their two black cats, Baxter and Diva.

Christen Clement

Christen is a knitting obsessed, yarn dyeing, podcasting, pattern designing stay at home mom of two. She worked in the field of substance abuse and addiction research until becoming a mother in 2012 and taking on momming full-time. About the same time, she and her new family moved from Philadelphia to Charlotte. Her love of knitting and a local knitting group nurtured new friendships in Charlotte and helped her feel at home and find sanity in a new place with a new baby. Christen lives just south of Charlotte with her husband, Michael, and two kids, Caitlyn and Ryan, and you can find her doing all of the things with knitting (usually a sock) in hand.