Elizabeth Yarborough had a path—or so she thought. She earned a masters degree in writing and, following that, was lucky/talented enough to land a coveted job in book publishing. “I thought I was doing my dream, and then I realized that the corporate world was just so stifling to me,” she explains. “I had a sort of creative job, but it didn’t satisfy me at all. I was so starved creatively.”

What could have been a quarter life crisis led her, instead, to fall into her new career almost immediately. “I spent a month wondering and wondering what to do. Then one day I woke up and took myself to the jewelry district in New York and bought all these supplies. I already knew on that very first day that I was going to turn it into a business. I couldn’t sleep for three full nights. It was the weirdest experience of my life,” Elizabeth recalls.

The evolution of her line, which launched in 2006, happened just as naturally. Orders from Opening Ceremony and Colette came quickly, and, though she started out drawing heavily from upholstery materials—having visited many trimming stores in North Carolina with her mom, an antiques collector, when she was growing up—her bold, fuzzy yarn-wrapped bangles just took. “I kept coming back to them. I knew I had to use yarn in some way—I had been knitting since I was a little girl and have always been absolutely dazzled at the variety of colors and textures of yarn,” she explains. Running out of concepts and combinations is a non-issue, she says. There’s only one hold-up: She can only wear so many at once.

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