Featured Artist : Leah Chapman and Ailee JohnMyth of the West

We are Leah Chapman and Ailee John, and we rely on your awesome products for everything that we do. We are co-owners, designers, and makers for Myth of the West, an Oakland, California based women's clothing and accessories company.

In 2014 we decided to combine our complementary passions for designing, knitting, and dyeing, and founded Myth of the West. With Leah's love for garment design and construction, and Ailee's eye for color and pattern, we aim to create flattering, beautifully constructed, and visually striking garments. Together, we hope to encourage handmade American craftsmanship to carry on.

Leah is the Knitwear Designer for Myth of the West. She designs each unique garment and accessory and produces it on a hand-operated knitting machine. She also designs and sews all of our cut-and-sew fabric garments. Each garment is produced one at a time with great care from beginning to end.

After production, each item goes to Ailee for the hand-dyeing process. Ailee creates our color palette for each season, which we use to tie every collection together. She hand paints, shibori dyes, or dip dyes every piece individually.

Myth of the West is created for women who love color, appreciate the feel and drape of luxury fibers, and express their style and taste with uncommon artisanal wardrobe items. Each garment and accessory is designed, knit, dyed & finished by hand using natural fibers and natural and non-toxic Dharma acid dyes.

Our color palettes have been inspired by nature, sunsets and various geological formations in the landscapes around us. We are always looking around for new sources of beauty in the natural world to inspire us.

We use Dharma Acid Dyes and citric acid to dye all of our wool, alpaca, silk and nylon blend yarns and fabric. These dyes allow us to dye a large selection of beautiful natural fibers, and give us consistent saturated color from one item to the next. We have also recently experimented with the Dharma Natural Sandalwood dye in order to create some all natural pieces for our latest collection. We are currently working on our Spring 2016 collection and are very excited to introduce some new skirts made from Dharma Trading Co's 100% Cotton Jersey, and dyed with Dharma Fiber Reactive dyes. We are loving Shibori dyeing at the moment, and can't wait to try out more of it on our new pieces.

Thanks so much for being our go-to source for everything dye related! We especially love being close by, as you guys ship so fast that we usually get our order in 2 days. It's also great to support a local business.