EAST BRIDGEWATER — When artist Sharrel Meeker was diagnosed with cancer, she took to knitting as a form of art therapy.
She got her diagnosis — metastatic cancer — around 2012 or 2013 while she was vital in California, she said. She afterwards packaged adult and changed behind to Massachusetts to go for diagnosis in Boston and be tighten to her family in her hometown of East Bridgewater.
She had schooled knitting from her grandmother as a kid, she said, though hadn’t picked it behind adult until her diagnosis.
“It customarily helped me to come divided from doctor’s appointments and scans and diagnosis and customarily be like, ‘OK, we can take 5 mins and lay and make something beautiful,’” Meeker, 37, said. “It wasn’t always pleasing — we was still training during that point. I’m still learning. It customarily helped me delayed down and confuse myself from all a cancer crap we had to understanding with any singular day.”
And after she was announced in remission, she motionless to take on crafting as a full-time gig. Now vital in Waltham, she also picked adult pottery after holding classes in Cambridge and Brookline and eventually non-stop her possess common pottery space and studio — Village Clay — in Brookline with 5 other women.
“I’m so beholden for people who adore to buy handmade now,” she said. “Handmade has finished such a quip and given of that, and amicable media … it’s unequivocally helped me mortar this pursuit into a full-time business and obviously, afterwards formulating a pottery studio with a other ladies, it’s great.
She combined her qualification business, Mud and Yarn, where she has amassed over 50,000 supporters on Instagram given she finished a comment in 2014. She also finished an online Etsy emporium to start offered her products, that fast sells out when she announces “restock” days where a products are finished accessible for purchase.
“I combined a hum around when my Etsy restock would happen, and we would take some pleasing photos and make all a listings and tell everybody a date and time,” she said. “It consistently sells out within an hour of me posting all my equipment in my Etsy, so it’s been good for me.”
Her business has been a one-woman operation, Meeker pronounced — she manages sales, takes photos for a listings she sets up, creates a products, packages them, ships them and writes appreciate we records for customers.
“You’re this one chairman who’s doing all and it’s a lot, though we adore any second of it,” she said.
She also sells her pottery and crochet equipment during internal events and businesses, such as creation custom-stamped mugs for The Hippie Farmer in Middleboro for “gift baskets” for her goat divert soap products and mugs for Restoration Coffee in East Bridgewater when they initial non-stop final June. Meeker pronounced she’s famous Restoration Coffee owners Matt Wood’s wife, Heather, given they were kids and they reconnected when she came behind to East Bridgewater for treatment.
“Matt and we customarily wish to make all ourselves and we customarily need to be regulating a hands,” Meeker said. “Being a coffee shop, he said, ‘I customarily wish to unequivocally have your mugs in a emporium to use and to sell.’ He also now has beanies that we finished — we finished crochet beanies — and other crochet things we had finished in a summer.”
Meeker pronounced her products are customarily nature-inspired and that she likes to use “super earthy” clay for her pottery.
“I customarily do a speckled brownish clay and we adore it so most given it’s so engaging as distant as hardness and visuals go,” she said. “I also have a really, unequivocally dim brownish-red clay that’s customarily so beautiful.”
For crocheting, she pronounced she has changed divided from regulating chronicle with nap due to not customarily her possess allergies, though customers’ allergies as well. She now uses all acrylic or polyester yarn, she said.
“It’s unequivocally soothing and we can wear it tighten to your skin and not be raw by it,” she said. “It’s that critical to me given we indeed wear a lot of a things we make, so we wish to be gentle and feel good. And that’s kind of what we do with my pottery as well. My mugs, we make certain my handles are gentle to reason so they’re customarily bigger.”
Her idea is to make equipment that are functional, she said, and mugs are her biggest sellers.
“I’m a outrageous gourmet of mugs, and we splash tea and coffee flattering most any day, so to have something handmade that we can splash out of it and feel a adore someone put into creation it and time they put towards creation it is extraordinary to me,” she said. “It creates it so most some-more of an beguiling knowledge than something we customarily got from IKEA or Crate and Barrel that looks like everybody else’s stuff.”
But she also likes to implement amusement with her products, with a few of a sayings on certain mugs not as “family friendly” as a rest of her offerings, she pronounced — such as a mop that reads “F— cancer.”
“I have a unwashed mouth,” she said. “People possibly adore it or hatred it. My mom isn’t a fan, though she knows it’s customarily me and we like to have a lot of fun with my mugs as well.”
Prices for her equipment operation from about $25 to $30 for beanies, $40 to $45 for scarves, about $45 any for mugs and roughly $25 to $28 for valuables she also makes.
Come subsequent year, she pronounced she’s potentially formulation to reason a amateur crochet category or crochet-a-longs during Restoration Coffee.
“Once a Christmas idiocy is over, Matt and we will lay down and indeed make it occur in 2020,” she said. “It could be like a monthly thing, it could customarily be any integrate of months we do something — not unequivocally certain yet, though I’m certain we’ll figure it out. Knitting and knitting has finished such a come behind in a final 10 years. It’s not customarily like your grandma’s thing anymore.”
Staff author Corlyn Voorhees can be reached during cvoorhees@enterprisenews.com