How Felicia Lo Built an Online School with 115 Courses Starting from Her Dining Room Table

Felicia Lo built an online teaching business from her dining room table to 115+ courses, sharing lessons on validation, pricing, platforms, community.

What would you do if people were begging you to teach, but every time you traveled to a workshop you had to bring your whole family, your in-laws, and your mom just to make it work?

That's exactly where Felicia Lo found herself. And the solution she built over the next decade changed everything.

Felicia is the founder and creative director of SweetGeorgia Yarns and the School of SweetGeorgia. She started dyeing yarn at her dining room table in 2005, selling a few skeins on Etsy. Twenty years later, she runs an online learning community with more than 115 courses spanning knitting, crochet, spinning, weaving, dyeing, tapestry, punch needle, and more.

But the path from dining room table to thriving online school was anything but smooth. In this episode of Creatives on Camera, Felicia shares the real story behind her business, including the moments of fear, the platform mistakes, the pricing experiments, and the hard lesson of learning to let go of the things she built with her own hands.

From Pharmacy to Fiber Arts (and Why It All Makes Sense Now)

Felicia's journey didn't start in the fiber arts world. She studied pharmaceutical sciences at the University of British Columbia, where she also took over a ballroom dance club website and worked with a professor on one of the earliest e-learning projects, creating videos to teach pharmacy students how to use lab equipment.

After graduation, she rediscovered knitting, started a blog, began dyeing yarn, and documented her learning along the way. At the time, it all felt disconnected. Pharmacy, web design, fiber arts. But looking back, Felicia sees the thread clearly: a love of sharing knowledge and the instinct to use technology to do it.

The Breaking Point That Changed Everything

When Felicia's book "Dyeing to Spin and Knit" came out with Interweave Press, the teaching invitations flooded in. Yarn shops and festivals wanted her. But she had a newborn and a two-and-a-half-year-old.

She tried to make it work. She traveled with both kids, her husband, her in-laws, and her mom. She remembers setting up handouts at eight in the morning while her family managed the kids in a hotel room down the hall. "What am I doing?" she thought. "This is unsustainable."

That was the moment she knew she had to find a different way.

Testing the Waters with Patreon

Instead of spending months building an online school in silence, Felicia did something smart. She started a Patreon. Not to deliver a finished product. Just to ask: is anyone interested in this?

People signed up. And as part of the Patreon, she offered a regular vlog showing her progress. Her supporters watched her learn how to make video, how to talk to a camera, how to edit. They gave her feedback. They told her what they wanted to learn.

"They were really foundational," Felicia says, "because they watched me learn."

This is a model that every aspiring online teacher should pay attention to. You don't need to have everything figured out before you start. You need people who are willing to walk with you while you figure it out.

Platform After Platform (and Why She Kept Moving)

Felicia's platform journey is a case study in finding the right fit. She started on Patreon, moved to Teachable for course delivery, discovered Teachable lacked community features, built a custom WordPress site with plugins and an external forum, ran that for about eight years, and recently migrated to Circle.

Each platform served her for a season. And each move taught her something about what mattered most. For Felicia, that answer has always been the same: community.

"It cannot just be content delivered," she says. "It also has to be this community engagement part of it."

The University Model for Membership

One of the most interesting ideas Felicia shared is how she thinks about the relationship between her community and her school. She models it after the university experience.

You go to school for a period of time. You take courses. Then you're done. But you don't disappear. You're still part of an alumni community. You still connect with people you learned alongside.

Felicia's broader community, SweetGeorgia Co., costs just five dollars a month. It's the always-open door. The School of SweetGeorgia sits inside that community at twenty-four dollars a month for all-access. She also offers craft-specific memberships at ninety-nine dollars per year for people who want to focus on spinning, weaving, or knitting and crochet.

This structure lets members come in and out of learning mode without ever leaving the community entirely. It reduces churn, deepens connection, and gives people multiple entry points at different price levels.

Letting Go of the Things You Built

One of the hardest lessons Felicia has learned, more than once, is letting go.

She spent years dyeing every skein of yarn herself, terrified that customers wouldn't like it if someone else did it. She built her school website by hand and felt like letting a platform handle it meant she wasn't good enough.

"I have to spend a lot of time thinking about what can I do and what can I contribute to the team that nobody else can do," she says. "And so that way we can make sure that work is distributed in the best way possible. But it's so hard."

If you're a creative business owner who is doing everything yourself, that sentence should hit home. The work only you can do is the high-value work. Strategy. Content. Connection. Teaching. Everything else can, and eventually must, be handed off.

You're Not the Hero. You're the Yoda.

Near the end of our conversation, Felicia shared advice from a weaving teacher that changed how she thinks about being on camera: "People are not looking at you. They're focused on the thing. Just be excited about the thing."

That reframe is everything. You're not performing. You're guiding. You're the tour guide pointing at something amazing and saying, "Look at this. Let's do this together."

Or as Felicia put it: "We're the Yoda."

If you've been waiting until you feel ready, until you're polished enough, until you've conquered your camera fear completely, this episode is your permission slip to start anyway.

Find Felicia Online

Find Felicia Lo and the School of SweetGeorgia:
School of SweetGeorgia
SweetGeorgia Community
SweetGeorgia Yarns Blog
Instagram
YouTube

Resources Mentioned in This Episode
Felicia's book: "Dyeing to Spin and Knit" (Interweave Press)
Patreon
Circle
Knit City Calgary (September 2026)

If you're thinking about building your first online course or teaching business, start with this free resource: 12 Questions to Ask Before You Build Your Course.

Never stop creating,
Lyric

Categories: : Podcast