Evan Zarowny, a young entrepreneur from Cochrane, is quickly introducing the art of crocheting to local children.

At the age of 12, he creates adorable stuffed animals through crocheting and offers them for sale in historic downtown Cochrane.

He says it all started when he saw a video of someone crocheting and he thought he would give it a try. 

"When I initially started it was pretty rough, it did not go well. I kind of quit for awhile but my mom's birthday was coming up and she loves turtles, and she was gone for the weekend so I thought it would be awesome if I could learn behind her back and make her one. She had no idea, I made her one and it was awesome."    

It started to grow from there. 

"I showed them to people on my bus and they were pretty interested and they wanted to buy them. I would sell them to kids on the bus and eventually our family friend Julia, who owns Found Book Shop reached out to us."

Zarowny makes turtles, chickens, pumpkins, octopus, dinosaurs, bears, bees elephants and he plans to make stockings and Christmas trees for the holidays.  

He says for a medium sized creature it takes about an hour to 1.5 hours of time to make and two or more hours for a larger animal. 

It hasn't just been kids on the bus who have been interested, he says he's had some friends at school jump on board and learn the craft too.

"Recently at my school our librarian opened a crochet program and a few of my friends joined that, so we're doing that together and it's pretty fun. I'm happy she did that and there's a lot of people doing it and I also get to teach with them." 

The middle schooler is using the money he's been earning to buy crocheting supplies but says "I've been really into books right now so I might buy a few books with my money." 

The best way to purchase Zarowny's stuffies, or make a custom order, is to go to Found Book Shop.

EvanEvan popped by 91.5 FM to chat with Lauren Meister & Eric Ruttle 

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