Wild Hand is a place for fiber folk! Nestled in Philadelphia’s Mt. Airy neighborhood, we offer materials, education, and community to encourage curiosity for fiber craft: weaving, crochet, knitting, felting, spinning, dyeing, knotting, stitching, fleece processing, and more! We believe that the wellbeing of our fiber community — including the people, land, and animals that create the supplies we sell — is more important than anything else. With that in mind, we carefully select the supplies we carry and promote. Read more about our Community Commitment below. Inspired by comforting design, the wonder and utility of natural materials, and always being on a learning curve, Wild Hand is a place where folks of all ages and abilities are in good company. Our community explores, plans, learns, and makes in different ways. We believe that the care and intention our hands put into creating something happily lingers in the materials, connecting us to each other and generations of fiber traditions before us.

Opened in 2019 by Liz Sytsma, a Mt. Airy resident and fiber tinkerer, Wild Hand was created out of a love for craft, community engagement, and business design. Before creating Wild Hand, Liz co-created and was the Executive Director of Philadelphia nonprofit Cultureworks Greater Philadelphia; a Model A Fiscal Sponsor and (one of Philadelphia's first) coworking spaces for the fine and performing arts, historic preservation, media, and design. Liz had never worked in a yarn shop (most of our team had not until Wild Hand was created!) but spent much of her career writing and teaching business planning, creating programming and community engagement strategies, managing finances, building teams, and becoming a generalist when it comes to running a small business. Out of a love for this community of makers and the desire to bring something warm, happy, and welcoming to the neighborhood Wild Hand was born! Liz is a knitter, spinner, weaver, sewist, and crocheter. She lives a quick three block walk from the shop with her husband, daughters, cat, dog, gecko, and three fish.

Wild Hand is a community that believes in the magic of fiber craft: to bring together people who share a vision of an imaginative and just world. We believe that the wellbeing of our fiber community — including the people, land, and animals that create the supplies we sell — is more important thananythingelse. We recognize the power, privilege and responsibility of owning a business. We commit to challenging systems of oppression by regularly examining our own policies and practices: calling-in folks for conversation, listening to others, and reading, while graciously giving, receiving, and responding to the feedback we receive. Most importantly, we commit to using our privilege to benefit the lives of others. Below are some of the ways we are committed to doing this work:

We share physical and digital space with regard for our collective wellbeing — taking care of each other and creating spaces that are safe and inclusive for the beautiful Wild Hand community.

We’re on a learning curve and mistakes happen. We take responsibility for the harm our words or actions may cause.

Black Lives Matter. The fiber community, like all communities, has a history of systemic oppression and appropriation. We want to be a part of the repair, not the damage. We prioritize directing resources to BIPoC/PoC and LGBTQ+ folks in the fiber community, and to allies for whom social justice is central to their work. This includes our staff, teaching artists, designers, contractors, customers, and suppliers.

We welcome a range of cultural standards and expectations — being flexible, equitable, and open to the many different ways people talk, move, shop, and express themselves in the world.

Gender is self-determined. We don’t make assumptions about a person’s gender or pronouns based on cultural norms.

We listen to, believe in, and learn from the LYS [local yarn store] experiences of folks from marginalized communities.

Smaller able-bodies are not better bodies. We maintain our physical space in a way that is accessible and comfortable for all bodies and abilities. We promote and create samples from patterns that are size-inclusive.

We welcome all crafts, skill levels, and materials in our space — regardless of where they were purchased.

We do not support products and content that commodifies and/or appropriates the practices, ideas, expressions, and histories of other cultures. We will identify, acknowledge, and call-in for conversation our current and future working partners if cultural appropriation is part of the dynamic.

Access to economic resources is different for everyone, so we create opportunities for economic justice through free and sliding scale resources. We donate products and skills to local community organizations, and we adjust our margins with suppliers that have just started out and/or have traditionally been overlooked by the industry.

We grow our team’s compensation and benefits as our business grows — together we share in the success of Wild Hand. 

The Wild Hand commitments are based on many things: our collective experiences in the nonprofit sector, our work with cooperatives, our time in yarn shops, as folks from marginalized communities, and as folks with privilege. Our commitments are created by the hopes and dreams for what a work and community spacecanandshouldbe. They are (and will always be) a work in progress. Your feedback is encouraged in this space (and necessary for our collective growth). It is our mutual responsibility to ensure that our commitments are upheld and improved-upon regularly. These Community Commitments were developed in 2020 and have been updated along the way. If you experience a break in these commitments or find language to be out of sync with current thinking please reach out to the shop at liz@wild-hand.comor anonymously through the mail or our suggestion box in the shop entryway; we would greatly appreciate it!