“Finarina” ? What’s that?

Finarina is a combination of my daughters’ two names, Josefina, and Catarina. They were excited to know that I made their names the name of my business. I love them and having them in my business name shows what benefits my work – an awesome life for them!

I embrace the philosophy of slow fashion, translating it into the meticulous approach I take in developing high-quality, sustainable fashion wearables. Another cool tidbit about the name “Finarina” is that in Portuguese, fina translates to “thin”, but as someone coming from a Portuguese family as a first-generation American, I’ve seen it most used to describe things that are delicate or detailed, like a lace tablecloth, for example. I do have dual citizenship and grew up with a lot of my family speaking Portuguese since they all immigrated from Portugal, but I am incredibly embarrassed to speak. I get incredibly nervous because I know my accent is weird, and I immediately forget words and basic grammar. I’m working with a tutor to work on my Portuguese speaking, reading, and writing.

How did you start knitting?

My friend Meg had an impromptu “how to knit” session at her apartment back in college, I started knitting a scarf, and finished it on December 30th, 2008. I want to say we got together in the Fall of 2008.

From there, I knit off and on, but not too much into it for several years until I moved to North Carolina. I had picked my interest of knitting back up and used it as an avenue of meeting people with similar interests. Once I moved back up to CT, I was really involved. The rest, as they say, is history.

How did you get into the Pardon My Stash podcast?

I moved from North Carolina back to Connecticut in 2021. When I began weekly meeting up with my friends again, we casually mentioned the idea of if we recorded our knit nights and could hear them back, wouldn’t that be cool? The next time we got together, I had podcasting equipment! The four of us have been through profoundly serious situations regarding our health, families, and other major life impacts, and the best thing about that podcast is that we get to listen back to these episodes in case anything happens to any of us. Pardon My Stash Podcast’s theme is a casual knit night, and sometimes we get silly and sometimes we talk about more serious topics. My role is handling the equipment and editing the episodes! I’m a bit of a tech nerd.

Do you work for Finarina Knitwear full-time?

I don’t work “full-time”, but outside of knitting, I work as a consultant under FKW Digital. I don’t have a set schedule, so I am fully self-employed. My health comes first, and working full-time is not in the cards for me. Part of my work must take place in caring for my health. While I have a disability, I also live a full life with minimal symptoms if I maintain self-care, so I can’t complain!

All sales go to support my knitwear design journey, as well as my family. I’m about as small a business as they get, so any support helps!

How did the Instagram account for @finarinaknitwear happen?

I had a personal Instagram account (I eventually branched that off, made it private, and created the finarinaknitwear account), and reels became more of a thing to compete with TikTok. I am not a fan of TikTok, but I was willing to try Instagram. My first few reels, I tried a couple of things, and then when I started designing my first pattern, the Seed Dot Beanie, my account got a little bump in views with my Seed Dot Beanie test knitting reel using a Bo Burham song. I just went with it. I didn’t have a social media strategy, or anything planned, it just happened.

Now there’s a website called Yarn Saver – what’s that?

My own personal yarn collection was getting a touch too large. I really wanted to downsize the entirety of the collection by about half, because my totals were past some yarn stores at a point. I thought the easiest way to deal with it would be to put the yarn on a separate website so folks interested could select what they wanted, and it would also calculate the correct shipping for them without needing to contact me.

That’s when my friends asked if they could try to sell their yarn on the website as well. I thought, wouldn’t it be great if we had a space to sell yarn, tools, bags, etc. without needing to rely on social media websites or platforms not built to sell things online. I investigated the idea of selling secondhand yarn in general, and I found something interesting. While there are places that do it, they work off donations of yarn rather than offering to buy the yarn outright. I thought the idea might take off, so I made Yarn Saver! (I’m shocked that domain was up for sale for a reasonable amount :D)

My latest completed knitting projects on Ravelry